Editor as Aggregator

A speech given at the SXSW festival in Austin about the future of the news biz has attracted lots of attention. The speaker, online media maven Steven Johnson, also appeared last week on one of my favorite radio shows, On Point with Tom Ashbrook.

Johnson (in the festival speech) echoed what other media analysts are starting to say about how newspaper Web sites can stay relevant in a link-happy world:

Let’s say it’s just too overwhelming for the average consumer to sort through all the new voices available online, to separate fact from fiction,
reporting from rumor-mongering. Let’s say they need some kind of
authoritative guide, to help them find all the useful information that’s
proliferating out there in the wild.

If only there were some institution that had a reputation for journalistic integrity that had a staff of trained editors and a growing audience arriving at its web site every day seeking quality information. If only…

Of course, we have thousands of these institutions. They’re called
newspapers.

In other words, as Johnson says, "old media" can be the authoritative guide to the vast ecosystem of news. Or in the catchy phrasing of Jeff Jarvis, "Cover what you do best. Link to the rest."

Thus, some reporters keep their beats. Editors, for the most part, become aggregators. To some extent, they are already. They have the last say on what news stories are covered by their trustworthy (we assume) reporters. In this brave new world, an editor's job would be not only to set an internal budget but seek out trustworthy and talented outside voices in the community who could fill the holes that a much smaller staff misses.

Besides becoming best friends with Google News, The Editor 2.0 would need to think a little differently about how to use his resources. At a publication like the Seattle P-I, which is basically becoming a start-up media company, it will be an interesting experiment to see how editors' traditional training prepares them to become master of their online domain.