Ask HN: The future of the editor's human touch
Hey all,

Over the last few weeks, I've found myself thinking a lot about what's coming next for the journalism industry – not for the industry itself but for the talented journalists – editors, specifically – still out there who need something to grasp onto.

I've seen a lot of my friends lose jobs at the hands of shortsighted news conglomerates looking to make it through this quarter rather than the long run, and as a result, you have this contraction going on. Creative destruction, if you will.

I still have a newspaper job that pays the bills – I work full-time at the Washington Post Express. But I'm more the exception than the rule. I have friends who have given up on news careers altogether, have had to revisit their small-paper roots, or have been out of work for unbelievably long periods.

My last job showed me all the promise modern journalism still had and the shortsightedness currently at play in the industry. I used to work at this wonderful paper called Link, which was run by The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Va.

The ideas behind it I thought were impressive. A newspaper where all the information was broken down in visual, well-thought-out ways. Where things were made for smart news consumers who knew the Web (we knew it back). Where ideas were thrown at the wall, picked up and put into the next day's paper. And readers loved us for that.

It was the kind of job where the ideas were so amazing and fresh that something catastrophic had to happen to end it. And well, the parent company sold The Weather Channel. And then it laid off hundreds of people across the company. Guess that was that.

When this happens, where do the people go? Do they just pick up their unemployment checks and give up on a future in journalism? Turn to that backup career running a karate school in a strip mall?

Online, it seems like news is becoming more of a democratic, automated thing. Sure, this is true to some degree, but I feel like nuance sometimes gets lost in the Digging and buzzing up of articles. Even Twitter seems to fall prey to some of this loss of nuance. Part of the reason why I like YC so much is that it tends to be a little more than that. It has a brain and heart, too. But it feels like the exception to the rule.

I have a blog of my own, ShortFormBlog (http://shortformblog.com/), that's designed around this crazy idea that the editor should not only have a space in this new journalism environment but that they can be self-contained. I try to make the process of posting things simple, visual and substantive, so that the idea of aggregation by human hand can still have a place.

My blog has weaknesses. It doesn't scale well and hacks up a lung sometimes. It's built on Wordpress, which is the equivalent of trying to turn a Ford Taurus into Speed Racer's Mach 5. (And I've got a redesign ready to go to help turn Wordpress at least into a Ford Explorer, but as you guys know, people aren't buying SUVs anymore.) But I feel like the reason I built it – and what I'd like to see long-term – is that I want to try to find a way that laid-off journalists and editors can still have a life after the media eats itself and turns into something else. And in building up my own site, I'm trying to explore those options so maybe I share these ideas down the road.

For me, it's not about saving newspapers. It's about saving journalists – not the guys out in the field so much as the ones behind the scenes who run the engines. The copy-editors. The section editors. The designers. They have skills that can be translated, but nobody's figured out the best way. And I fear that their careers might be killed off by automation when they could be saved by innovation and careful thought.

Yesterday, Twitter – a democratic place – falsely reported that Zach Braff died. To me, the very fact that something like that happens so easily tells me that there's a need for editors, even if they don't have a tie outside of an industry group that gives them a badge to put on their site.

What do you guys think? Is the art of editing dying in the midst of this mess?