Magazine editing takes you in a slightly different direction, as well, and provides you the opportunity to build some expertise in a highly specialized area of journalism. Editing is critical to journalism, because, at the most fundamental level, editing is the last line of defense between whatever writers have put together and what the public reads.
Readers rely on editors to do all of the above.
As important to readers is simply that editors are needed to put stories in shape so that they the readers want to pick up the copy and read it. Magazine editing is a specialty that involves considerable concern for audience, for a particular style, for helping writers to have their voices heard. Magazine editors, probably more than newspaper editors, have the time, and therefore the obligation, to pay close attention to spotting and fixing factual errors and holes in stories. All editors at least all good editors are people who care passionately about language, about accuracy, about presentation. Editors are folks who don't get their self-esteem from seeing their names in print.