The new editorial control

For any of us that work at newspapers, big or small, we’re seeing our own demise. It’s neither our reporters nor our content that is causing this decline: it’s the distribution. We watch as the paper in newspaper dies, with only our news intact. We watch print circulation decline as many people flock to news sites online. For many, you could say that print is dying. Hundreds, maybe even thousands, of editors have said the same.

For us, the new media creatives, the readers, the Web 2.0 users, and the bloggers, it’s silly for us to say that print is dying. To us - the people whose native languages are written in IDEs or text editors, and whose art is measured in pixels on liquid-crystal canvases - print is already dead. Our time spent online, reading online content, greatly eclipses the time spent with newspapers, magazines, or other, similar content distribution. We aren’t exposed to print ads. We aren’t exposed to editorial opinion or control. With new media and its RSS, as well as its social control, we form our own opinions instead of allowing editors at a newspaper to choose where our content priorities are.

I try to keep myself grounded in the print half of things. Instead of reading the Daily’s website every morning, I try to dig up a print copy. Regardless of my efforts, I find myself rarely reading a print newspaper. In September, I paid for a (rather expensive) subscription to the Financial Times for half of a year. Every day, one of the salmon-coloured bundles of journalism appeared outside my apartment door, making it tens of miles and fourteen floors from its offset press. Every morning, as I rushed to class, I saw that paper on the ground. I looked at its headline and the top-page teases. I picked it up the day after the Hong Kong ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organisation. I picked it up when “Creative Business” was teased on the top. Nearly every day aside from that, I’d let seven or eight of the papers pile up in the hallway before picking up the stack, and, with not so much as a glance inside, walking them the ten meters to the hallway recycling bins. I didn’t want to waste my time with useless information.

How’d I keep myself from utter ignorance? My Treo 650. With a few RSS feeds and websites, I’d check the news from my Treo. I read about the WTO and the German elections. I read about Iraq and the national administrative scandals. On top of that, I also read my favourite blogs and A List Apart. I was connected to a media sphere where I had editorial control. I chose what I liked reading. In all honesty, the content that a paper’s editor-in-chief cared about, I didn’t. Instead of playing their priority games, I supported the sites that regularly posted my favourite content. Sometimes it was from mainstream media such as The New York Times, Financial Times, or my own Daily. Most of the time, my content came from BoingBoing, Subtraction, or kottke. The content all came from individual RSS feeds directly into my reader; I never saw the featured articles on news sites. I didn’t know whether the newspaper content I was reading was on the front page or the second-to-last of Section A. The editorial priorities meant nothing, and traditional editorial control didn’t exist. In my world, I could give priority to the writers I enjoyed reading content from, like my friend Cyrus or columnists like NYT’s Paul Krugman.

Traditional editors, however, see this lack of control and structure disappointing, displacing, and, in some cases, excrutiatingly immoral. In a meeting a few months ago, my own editor-in-chief expressed this lack of editorial control as driving his own position into obsolescence. He felt that editorial control was the only reason people were exposed to (and sympathetic toward) the victims of the Darfur genocide. Editorial control was what gave the information its organisation. Editorial control was what gave a newspaper its purpose. Editorial dictatorship over the media’s priorities where what gave news to the stupid hordes. The reputability of a paper, in this case, seems to ride on its editorial control and the steadfastness of its uneditable paper media rather than the quality of its individual journalists. (And yes, to those who are journalists: you’ll probably say this is an oversimplification of the reputability of a paper. It may be, from a universal perspective, but not for the sake of a new media argument.)

Sadly, regardless of traditionalism, the common reader and user is honestly entirely apathetic to this control. Jeff Jarvis had it right when he stated “give people control of the media, [and] they will use it.” In our socially-networked world, this apathy is painfully evident that as we watch the increasing popularity of social news services such as Digg and Newsvine. In a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Rupert Murdoch, the head of media conglomerate News Corporation, stated the shift in control bluntly: “[Those in the online generation] want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it.”

Murdoch is entirely correct: if one doesn’t care about something as mundane as Martha Stewart or as high-profile as the Plame leak, they aren’t distracted by it in the online world, promptly choosing to ignore it due to the customisability of online presentation as well as the findability of online news content via search engines such as Google News. Editorial control means nothing to an Internet where ambient findability reigns free, and if one wants to consider this immoral, ignorant, or simply evil, it is a cold fact in the new social sphere of the Internet. Editors hate it. Traditionalist journalists hate it. The loss of tradition and authority is against the very core of their print-media mainstays. Unfortunately, they will eventually have to choose between altruism and their own jobs. If they will not adapt to new media, they will become obsolete in April, 2040 as the last printed newspaper is recycled.

The thing that very few editors that I have come into contact with are realising is that this editorial control isn’t vanishing; it’s just shifting its place to another medium and section of the journalism industry. Even readers may not realise that editorial control is moving; in fact, they may not see this control at all. It’s a pretty logical yet often overlooked conclusion: editorial control is no longer the control of the editor-in-chief. The new editorial control is in the hands of those who are the managers, creators, and editors of new media. If you are an Online Managing Editor, Design Director, or new media writer, you are the new editorial control. I am the new editorial control. Through our own skills, we must give that control to our increasing readership as people hop to the island of online media. The thing that we must make sure not to do, however, is be what our editors-in-chief are. We must be presidents to a democracy instead of dictators over an unruly horde of information-hungry readers. The editors-in-chief will become queen-like figureheads that accept feedback and take questions from our users and the niche of media traditionalists and take the time to relay this information to us. They will be relegated to the position of public editor and ombudsman.

Through our information architecture, our user interface design, and our means for distributing our newspaper’s content, we will shape the voice of our newspaper.

I know this still sounds a little abstract: we certainly aren’t journalists. We might have been. We may not know AP style. We may only be able to write coherent things in markup languages. If that’s the case, we’re fine. The first step of this new editorial control is in our content’s accessibility.

Just for the sake of example, let’s do something drastic: let’s kill the syndication of our content entirely. Let’s eliminate RSS feeds. Let’s eliminate links to our content by sending anyone with an external HTTP_REFERER to a blank page. Let’s also eliminate newswire services from syndicating our content so our site exists in total isolation. Now, by doing so, our writers’ content is only available on our own papers’ websites. We’ve violated a major rule of hypertext. Now, to even find our paper’s online voice, you’ll have to type in its URI. This is how our old Web functioned. People read our content if they know we have a website. These people were primarily local unless we had serious international influence. In this case, our paper’s content, our editorials, and our information is exposed only to an isolated sphere of influence, a sphere dominated by locals and loyalists. If our work isn’t widely syndicated in print, this is actually worse than what could happen with print media.

This horrific situation actually gives us a decent illustration of a small, local newspaper: our sphere of influence, in print, is almost primarily local. We still exercise full editorial control, both in print and online: just as in print, we can hide articles by priority, forcing them to look at things with a no-search, torturous navigation in a skewed UI. Traditional editorial control is preserved, and our circulation stays within our local sphere. In a way, this works for small newspapers. The cost of printing is high enough to where it is probably economically infeasible to spread the local news to those outside of the local sphere.

Online, however, we’ve witnessed content production with impressive increasing returns to scale. We can index, search, and add tons of intensive functionality at absolute fractions of a cost over a print paper. An extra hit to our site costs us hundredths, maybe even thousandths, of a cent. In the new media world, with its lower operating costs, we can saturate our content into a drastically greater social sphere.

Let’s move to real new media now: we’ll open our content to full indexing and syndication of any type, RSS, Atom, spider, or what else the world wishes to throw at our servers. Now, we’ve not just let our information become more accessible: through that accessibility, our content’s sphere of influence is exponentially greater than we could have ever achieved in print. The information propagates throughout networks worldwide; it is syndicated, cached, translated into multiple languages, and turned into something that people worldwide may have a concern for - and can access instantaneously - for virtually no extra cost to the parent media corporation. Bloggers and other social-media advocates pick up our content and move it into social networks that prioritise our content on what is pertinent to them. It is the full freedom of information to the apex of our current technological ability. We have no traditional editorial control anymore, but we have reached an international audience. We have given people content that they may be passionate about on a great level. Society’s subcultures can foster new thinking and innovation by a spark given to them by our content. We have made the world drastically better off, giving them our voice through individual content and creating quantitatively greater statistical concern throughout a whole range of topics and media-covered issues.

Even then, what if we limited the propagation of our content in the most minute of ways? What if we hid certain topics from our on-site search engines? What if we chose excerpt-based RSS feeds? What if we release all of a day’s stories at once, as in print? With new media formats, we make these design decisions daily and think next to nothing about the greater impact they have on newspapers as a whole. In each of these changes, we exercise the editorial control and the effects our reporters’ content will have on humanity, not just a local culture. In every way we make our content more accessible, more searchable, more filterable, and more ambiently findable in the common public sphere, we open our newspaper’s content to a larger sphere of influence, expanding our reader base to numbers unheard of in print. If we wanted to add or take away these privileges, we can. The new editorial control is not the stories above the fold; the new editorial control is in how we construct our online architecture and modify our own media’s accessibility.

What about that “voice” that traditionalists hold as a tenet of the journalist’s religion? If our content and architecture is not adapted to interactive media, it is going to be absent as print dies. It doesn’t have to be: by embedding the voice into our content, by maintaining a skilled supply of solid, passionate journalists, and by hiring design visionaries with a passion for new media and content management, the voice of a newspaper - this heart and soul of the very existence of a newspaper held so dearly by the traditional media - can be both translated and adapted to fit the new media’s formats both in innovative design and strong, compelling copy.

For us at the fulcrum of a newspaper’s survival, we hold an immense amount of power in the way the future of media is shaped. Our competence in web technologies can construct an ideology and style guide for newspaper Web design if we only so much as care enough. There are design guides for print news page designers; there are guides for journalists such as this AP Stylebook I carry with me in my messenger bag. Now is the time for every online content director, every design director, and every online editor, from as big as Khoi Vinh at The New York Times to as small as myself and all the others in student-run college newspapers, to make our stand and form the very foundations of what makes online media both now and for hundreds of years to come. Using web standards, common design practise, and excellent typographic style, we can build an extensible, accessible, beautiful, and findable source of information with the reputability and quality our journalists and staff have earned our papers in print. We are the new editorial control. We are the designers and architects of a new generation of digital media. We are on the forefront of a new media legacy, and it is time for us to wake up, orient ourselves in a common direction, and give mainstream media its respectable social and intellectual keystone in a world where what actually ends up in ink no longer matters. Although tradition and paper may be obsolete in our digital world, the foundation of journalism - information - is still at our very core.

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