Editors - The Best Is Yet to Come?

"The new golden era for editors will dawn as evolved, Web-based institutions germinate in the ashes of the newspapers that are dying such excruciating deaths as we watch."

The claim at the centre of this 10-page article from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University in the United States (US) is that networked digital journalism needs editors more than ever. Author Tom Stites speaks from his experience as founder and moderator of the Banyan Project, a group of senior journalists and their allies devoted to creating a new model for quality journalism that can thrive in the digital future.

Stites begins by making the case for inventing new, robust, Web-based journalistic institutions. He explains why "blogosphere vs. institutional journalism is not an either/or matter, it is both/and; each form is important and together they are synergistic." Further, each is necessary to sustain a healthy democracy, he claims, in the face of ballooning antidemocratic institutions, especially transnational corporations. That is, "journalism needs muscular institutions with the resources and budgets needed to cover the transnationals in a way that helps regular citizens understand the scope of their power and how it plays out in their communities and their personal lives."

This argument rests in part on his analysis of what bloggers and editors share, and how they differ. (In the category of "bloggers", he includes citizen journalism advocates). Bloggers and editors are, he finds, more alike than expected. For instance, "[l]ike bloggers, editors select the material they present according to their taste and judgment - and unexamined biases - about what's truest and most important." But the crucial difference is worldview: "although not all bloggers see the world through the same lens, they tend to be fiercely independent. Not all editors see the world through the same lens, either, but they tend to be institutionalists."

This means that, unlike most bloggers, editors operate in an institutional setting with a division of labour, where many people contribute to the final product. They also select and shape their material with an intended audience in mind. "Editors select and oversee writers with the aim of ensuring that the material presented by the institution that employs them meets this audience's need for trustworthy, relevant, and useful information; they present the material in a format designed to make it accessible to as many people in their target audience as possible."

Can participatory journalism provide the helpful and trustworthy journalism that helps people make good lifestyle and citizenship decisions? Stites concedes that participative elements like "crowdsourcing" can support some investigative reporting projects - and that these are actually variants of long-proven journalistic practices, such as the use of all kinds of paid and unpaid contributors, like the "country correspondents" who mailed their "local items" to rural county-seat weekly newspapers, as volunteers. A modern example of this is OhmyNews", which uses the Web-based amalgam of professional and amateur efforts that is the prototype for what participatory journalism advocates call the "pro-am approach". He explains that "with the Web, editors in journalistic institutions can mix staff reporters, paid freelancers and moonlighters, and amateur volunteers in almost limitless ways, depending on what the story calls for....In Web-based news institutions, editors will be able to hold on to the best practices of pre-Web journalism yet cross-pollinate them with the best uses of Web 2.0, to expand, accelerate, and enrich journalism."

Yet Stites' core point persists: participatory media cannot have much of an impact without journalistic institutions to provide the coordination, continuity, skill, and organisation to write and edit comprehensive stories, and distribute them broadly. This requires "business mechanisms that can bring in enough revenue to more than pay for editorial efforts as well as a marketing engine, including promotion and brand building, that's sufficient to cement enduring relationships with a large public. Such institutions will also require high-level editors skilled at management and at imagining and delivering coverage that a broad public finds trustworthy and relentlessly useful."

Stites calls problematic the prediction of "a democratization of media based on the news consumption habits of a participatory elite." For instance, he observes, 70% of the US population has no college degree, a majority of people work for hourly wages away from desks with always-on Web access, and "millions work more than one job and thus have very little time for participating in journalism. So although direct civic engagement through participatory journalism is a democratic ideal, there is a second, complementary ideal: getting comprehensive, quality journalism to as many Americans as possible whether they participate in it or only just take it in."

That is, since Web-based journalism has a participatory divide, "developing a clear understanding of who is inside and who is outside the participatory community is critical to sharper thinking about needed new journalistic institutions and about how the decay of traditional journalistic institutions is impacting democracy." Furthermore, Stites contends that "[t]he have-nots, who far outnumber the haves in our society, need journalism that shows them how policy changes will affect their lives as much as the haves need to know how they will affect their investments. Employment and other economic reports have distinctly different meanings to folks on either side of the income gap."

And it is in just this sense that editors - whose fundamental role is to bring journalists and audiences together - do have, and always will have, a place. As Stites elaborates, "[i]t's their job to know their audience and know their journalists and to guide the journalists so their work best serves the audience's needs, and then to deliver their material in a form that's relevant, appealing, and accessible to the people they serve." In the the new institutions he is imagining, "civically potent software that draws approaches from social networks...would deliver editors far more nourishment than they've ever known. This would include not only direct feedback but also page-view data galore plus conversations in groups that form around issues and other participatory aspects of the institution's Web presence." The new newsgathering institutions, he says, will still need a top editor to oversee the whole operation, including policy and budget matters, and people to fill at least these roles: (1) managing editor, to be in charge of day-to-day work; (2) assigning editor, to work with reporters, freelancers, and volunteers and shape the stories that result from their work; (3) news editor, to assemble the news report and publish it; and (4) copy editor, to provide fresh eyes and do detailed editing of copy that the assigning editor has shaped.

"As the future unfolds, more and more institutional journalism will be prepared with the Web in mind and loaded with links that offer readers depth, sidebars that offer different perspectives, feedback tools galore, and Web 2.0 tools to engage with others on the issues. So preparing articles for publication will evolve to engage editors in interesting new ways. And future editors have great opportunities to use databases to do powerful Web-based investigative journalism....The possibilities are limitless. And, for editors, that will make for a golden age."