So, what does an editor do?

Probably a good place to start.

So if we’re going to discuss what makes good editing then it’s probably worth starting at the beginning. What is an editor really there for?

Here’s a work-in-progress in what an editor can do: Feel free to send your suggestions, I’m riffing.

At its most basic level, editors work with a story — help to find an idea, decide on its value, assign it to a writer, shape the text, improve it (hopefully) and then prepare it for release. But in a newsroom at least, there are many elements before, during, and after that too. Editors generate concepts, ideas, departments and series, they find stories, discover voices they can work with, and help them develop. They can broker access, interviews and potential sources, and wrangle the pieces into place — sometimes doing secondary reporting or research, or directing that secondary reporting and research. They make decisions about what needs to be said.

Depending on the organization and their position in the hierarchy, editors may run a team of staff writers, work with freelances, manage departments, administrate contracts, organize payments, deal with production issues like entering a story into a CMS, layout, production assets, display copy, promotion, and post-publication pushes like press and social media.

They’re usually pretty busy.

To me, though, one of the most important parts of being an editor is the job of acting as a representative of the reader. Sometimes that’s merely knowing your audience — Who’s going to receive this story? What are they going to ask about it? Sometimes it’s being the audience: Most gut instincts are based around this ability to know not just that you are a proxy for the reader, but why you feel the way you do about certain things. Other times it’s a more detached kind of representation: that knowledge that you can be a tastemaker, a decider, a questioner, a participant, and that you can take the reader along with you.

OK. That’s the beginning of putting some flesh on the bones of the what. Maybe now we can start to work out how it’s done, what works well, what doesn’t, and what some of the common issues are. Feel free to ask questions.