Quote, unquote
Anne Moore, Chair and CEO of Time Inc., who submitted to a quizzing by Advertising Age (subscription req'd) about recent cuts of 105 staff positions, including some very senior people:
I still believe in the magazine industry. What we do, our core competency, is trusted editing skills. Whether we do it on paper or not remains to be seen, but in an age of too much information, isn’t our core competency worth more, not less?
posted by D. B. Scott at
12:35 pm
2 Comments:
Sounds like wishful thinking to me. The Web has destroyed the mass audience that Time is edited for.
I would argue that editors' core competency is our ability to aggregate disparate sources of information for specific audiences. Knowing what to leave out is not important any more. (It was always more about our space constraints than readers' interest, after all.)
In the Web world, more people want to go deeper on more and more subjects. The media's ability to bring us boiled-down nuggets of information (a 100-word brief on a presidential speech, or the latest Hollywood marital squabble)will satisfy neither those who care about the information, nor those who do not care.
"Professional generalists" such as journalists are going to have to rethink what they do for a living. Because Google aggregates content better than we do.
And readers can now decide for themselves when they are finished reading a story.
I think it is a sweeping generalization to say that Google aggregates better than journalists do. Google's aggregation is largely managed by journalists. So I agree we will have to rethink the job. Anyone who produces a blog as specific as this one knows that there is a hunger for someone to do the work for the reader, almost an "information sherpa". The Chair of Time Inc. is probably wrong, as you say, but it is a function of running out of runway (she's close to retirement) and going with what she knows. However, I think younger people who can read and write well and can parse situations, data and information generally will always be in demand. Probably not using ink on paper, though even that will continue to be appealing to enough of an audience to mean it will keep on happening.
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