The other day I chanced to eavesdrop on a Twitter conversation led by Skift co-founder Rafat Ali:
Via Twitter
The conversation continued, thus…
Rafat’s broad point is that editing — a job too often, and too sadly, defined as checking grammar and spelling, if that — is about a whole lot more; that it involves a partnership with a writer that begins at the concept of a story and continues through the various stages that follow: defining the elements, determining what parts of it will be told in which formats, working with the reporter even as she is in the field, drafting, shaping, editing, and design stages all the way through to publication.
He then introduces the question of what is lost — from the reporter’s point of view — as this partnership dies out. Writer/editor/educator Adam L Penenberg — most remembered for the Forbes story in which he first blew the whistle on serial fabricator Stephen Glass — joins in. Storify-ed, below:
The conversations involving Rafat, Penenberg and others are a cumulatively sorry commentary on the brave new world where “metrics”, “ROI”, “business models” and such are the sole topics of concerned conversations in newsrooms and boardrooms when media leaders gather for “planning sessions”.
Which is not to say that none of the above matters — the problem is that the industry has moved from putting the cart before the horse to deciding that no one even needs the horse any more.
During my time at Yahoo, I had the chance to observe the sort of partnership Rafat talks about, when editors Nisha Susan and Gaurav Jain founded content-creation outfit Grist Media and, working off a rolodex of talented young writers who wanted more elbow room than “traditional media” would permit, produced a little over 400 deeply reported stories over the space of two years (The full archive of Yahoo Originals here). In a recent blog-post, Nisha and Gaurav summarized their journey thus:
Grist’s Originals has been a grand run of nearly 400 stories across two years, a space where readers could find mid- to long-form journalism that was not just long but also clear, relevant and stylish. We’re proud to have published on-ground reportage from across the subcontinent and beyond, from Bhubaneswar to Jakarta, from Kabul to Istanbul, fromWarsaw to Chennai, from Chhattisgarh to the Andamans, from Manipur to Jharkhand. Alongside, we’ve also published a thick clutch of experiential personal essays, specially commissioned photography, artwork and fiction, lightly embroidered non-fiction, and even produced a short film. We’re particularly proud of our immersive and investigative reports in the areas of gender and sexual violence.
Our clutch of honours so far have included several RedInk awards, a Laadli award, two Kurt Schork Awards in International Journalism, and a finalist for the Thomson Foundation Young Journalist from the Developing World Award. Our writers have charged across the country, the culture and sometimes themselves (sometimes with juice). Their work has also slayed us with happy-happy when it’s got them book deals, newspaper columns, invitations to public forums and soulful emails from readers.
Earlier this month Yahoo, for reasons best known to itself, decided to terminate the partnership with Grist — but it was a wonderful ride while it lasted, and I am personally glad I was present at its birth, but not at its execution. The biggest delight other than the stories themselves was watching, at some remove, young writers get fired up by the fact of having responsive editors willing to work with them through every stage of the reporting process.
The most eloquent testimonial to the power of the reporter-editor partnership I personally heard was when the much-awarded National Geographic photo journalist Steve Winter was guest of honor and keynote speaker at the 2014 Nature in Focus event in Bangalore.
Asked the secret of his sustained success (Winter won his first World Press Photo award in 2008 and his latest in 2014; in the intervening years he has won pretty much every major accolade open to his tribe), Winter said, simply: “My editor. Just knowing he is there gives me the confidence to go into the field and do the stories I do.”
In retrospect, those words have the doleful tone of an epitaph to a vanishing tribe and an “outdated” model.
The post The Editor, RIP appeared first on Smoke Signals.