Understanding anti-editors

I had a great chat with SixApart’s Anil Dash today, the transcript of which I will turn into an edited Q&A for infoworld.com over the next week or so.

The conversation covered everything from the company’s personal publishing products and positioning, to the role of RSS and Atom, the importance of APIs to enterprise blog adoption, and how blogs are feeding the notion of participatory journalism.

On the tech side, one interesting prediction from Anil was that he suspects the next major revisions of messaging clients such as Outlook and Notes will contain RSS support. It’s just inevitable, he figures. I agree and look forward to that day with relish.

With regard to the social and utility aspect of blogs, Anil observes you are more likely to find interesting stories on Blogdex or Daypop than CNN’s homepage. “There is some value in seeing what percolates to the top,” he said. True — I can’t ever imagine going back to a world without news aggregators.

But that got me thinking. In the days before aggregation, we relied completely on editors, such as yours truly, to filter and arrange the news. That practice is still an integral part of every newspaper and magazine. Readers still look to Page 1 or the cover to see what stories really matter.

But when you read stories like this one on the rise of participatory journalism, you wonder if interest in blogs is driven by some type of anti-establishment ethos. I call it an anti-editor movement. Anil agreed with my assertion, likening this juncture in the blog evolution to that of teenage rebellion.

So then, are blogs and news aggregators making editors redundant? Well, naturally I disagree! On one hand, I do agree with and support the idea that RSS-powered news aggregators subvert the editorial judgment applied to the positioning of online news stories. As an editor, you want the most important stories easily accessible to the widest possible audience.

But as Anil implied, there’s more to editing than applying value judgements and deciding where stories appear on Page 1. “It’s a brutally boring job to write and then edit your own blog,” he said.

And so, the editing function will never die. I’d argue that in the process of writing, you are also editing (or making decisions about) what content you value and how it should be presented. Unlike Anil, people like me actually enjoy both writing and editing the written word. News aggregators might change the goalposts, but people always appreciate well-written copy.

Full disclosure:

1. TechWatch runs on Movable Type. We bought it for $150. I called Anil to discuss Six Apart’s enterprise story.

2. The second one’s funny. Since it’s late Friday (yes, I’m going home now) I went looking for someone to read this post for clarity. The only people around were copy editors. I swallowed my pride first, then opened my mouth. One guy said no, “because it’s a blog. It’s the principle!” Then Clary stepped up. After seizing the opportunity to point and laugh at an editor, she happily agreed. I wasn’t asking for her to correct grammar and spelling, but she said she couldn’t help herself. So ironically enough, this has become TechWatch’s first edited post, with the exception of this full disclosure section.