Sean Blanda of eMedia Vitals is looking at the how editors are still a vital component of the media business, despite reports to the contrary.
“Aggregation is just bringing stuff together, just collecting stuff and laying it out there. We used to do that more in the old days,” says Mindy McAdams, an online journalism professor at the University of Florida.
Presenting endless volumes of content is no longer the defining characteristic of a good digital publisher. Instead, the core competency must shift to presenting the most relevant information.
Just yesterday I wrote about content mills, and there are countless other examples of shotgun approaches to digital publishing. It’s not something I believe in, although it’s hard to argue with another publisher’s success.
Call me crazy, but the more information that we feed the machine every day, the more value editors–professional people capable of presenting the right news at the right time to the right audience–provide. Even if I could trust an algorithm to this task, I wouldn’t want to.
