Jeff Jarvis: Do we still need editors?

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One of the few media academics that seem to have a grasp and feeling for how digital is changing the traditional media world is Jeff Jarvis.

Jarvis is journalism professor at the City University of New York and blogs at buzzmachine.com. (I could not help notice that he uses Wordpress as platform.)

It’s Jeff that was the first person to spot and define Facebook’s secret sauce. He wrote of Facebook’s Personal Newsfeed:

Next, Facebook introduced what it calls a newsfeed, filled with simple updates about what your friends have done on the service: one posted a photo, another a video, two more befriended the same person, four others started using a feature.

…it is not news as we know it, but it has news value: if four friends I respect start using a program, that’s good enough reason for me to look at it. As one blogger said, this isn’t the wisdom of crowds but the wisdom of my crowd.

Now Jeff has waded in to the debate on whether editors still have a future in the digital world in an article he wrote for the UK Guardian. A bit risky he says, because its a bit “like insulting the surgeon moments before going under the knife.”

He makes some telling points none the less.

“The readers are the editors”
Looking at his blog as a newsroom, he asks what if he had to make some cutbacks. Who would get the chop?

“In my hypothetical newsroom, reporting is the highest priority. The more original journalism that is done, the higher the value of the paper and its web service, the better the opportunity to stand out in links and search. Breaking news is worthwhile, but I come down heavily on the side of beat reporting: journalists who are devoted to watchdogging an area.

When these reporters blog their beats - involving the community in suggesting and requesting stories, sometimes even in reporting, and certainly in correcting mistakes - then the community acts as the assignment desk, and the idea of editing every comma seems futile. My blog readers are my editors.”

“Reporting becomes a process not a product”
Jarvis says that online we tend to publish first, edit later.

Blogging journalists put up “half-baked posts” - which, as Gawker Media’s Nick Denton explains, is our way of saying: “Here’s what I know, here’s what I don’t know - what do you know?”

“There is no shortage of space, only of attention”
Online an editor does not have to fit a story into a limited space says Jarvis. Obvious really.

“Users go straight for the content they want”
Three years ago I wrote about the demise of internet portals due to users primarily using search as a navigational tool. Jarvis argues along similar lines.

“And when most online readers on most news sites skip home pages and the packaging editors do there - going directly to stories via search and links - one wonders whether we also need editors to pick the news anymore.“

Jarvis qoutes Steve Smith, editor of the Spokesman-Review paper in Washington State, who wrote an elegy for “the bison of the information age,” the “newspaperman”. “I am among the last of a dying race,” he said.

Jarvis reckons this news of the editors demise is premature.

“There is a need to curate”

There is still a role for editors, but it changes. There is a need to add context and fill holes in understanding - by using links. As we move from an economy of scarcity in media to one of abundance, there is a need to curate: to find the best and brightest from an infinite supply of witnesses, commentators, photographers and experts.

“Editors will have to become community organisers”
For Jarvis editors will also have to draw on the wisdom of their crowd.

“As news becomes collaborative, editors will need to assemble networks from among staff and the public; that makes them community organisers. I also believe editors should play educator, helping to improve the work of the network.”

Jarvis’s editor is besides being a newshound, a nice guy. He has a lot of friends. Friends that are knowledgeable of his beat.

He does not know everything about his beat however, but he sure knows how to get to it or who does. He is not just an editor. The editor is a curator of his world.