We’re All Our Own Editors Now
Editing is a becoming a lost art. We humans need to prepare for its shifting responsibility from the professional to the individual.
September 18, 2024
The word Editor had a renaissance in the 1990s; Google nGram says its English-language usage neared its highest point ever. That peak reflects American culture at the time: newspapers were flush with classifieds and cash, new magazines like George and Talk were popular, and the internet was still a promising infant. The late ‘90s were a great time to be an Editor.
But the 21st century has been a different story: Editor’s English-language usage has declined 80% in the last 25 years. The word Editor is now at its lowest usage since 1793.
The sharp decline doesn’t affect all forms of the word: editor (lowercase e) has only dropped to its lowest point since 1869. Meanwhile, writer has reached a 50-year high. Reporter and publisher are now at all-time highs. This 21st-century decline seems isolated to the professional Editor alone.
Editors have been society’s invisible information filter since journalism started, the unsung heroes helping us understand our world. A good Editor not only improves syntax and grammar but also tells us what information is important and why it matters. The New York Times called its main conference room ‘Page One’ for years because it knows ranking information is often an Editor’s most important decision each day. The art of choosing credible information is as crucial as writing itself.
But language changes can reflect a society’s changes. It’s no surprise that Editor’s usage drop coincides with Google’s founding: Google’s filtering shift from humans to algorithms made an Editor’s choices less important in an era of search optimization.
How Google, X, or Meta filters information is different than how a human Editor does it. Both approaches have their virtues. The problem is that Google’s scale has left few Editors remaining: there were only 38,400 U.S. news editors in 2023, a roughly 70 - 90% decrease from 1999. It seems Editor’s language decline mirrors the profession’s job losses.
The 21st century has seen a great democratization for creating information — newsletters, tweets, etc. — but little democratization for how that information is ranked or filtered. Google’s elimination of human Editors has left scant competition between today’s biggest Editors: Google, X, and Meta. They’ve left us an information firehose that’s hard to control. The Editor’s role has become more important than ever, but its responsibility has shifted to us, the individual. We’re all our own Editors now, whether we want to be or not. Choosing credible information lies on us.
We humans struggle with our new responsibility because we haven’t fully acknowledged it or equipped ourselves with the education or tools for the role. That might explain society’s misinformation issues, its attention crisis, and why phrases like curation and media literacy are spiking to all-time highs right now.
It might also explain why the word overload has increased since the late 1990s, too. Choosing is a difficult thing to do. It’s hard to appreciate an invisible art until it’s gone.
We can’t return to 1999, and the prominence of the marquee human Editor (except for Anna Wintour) is likely gone. But we can learn from other industries — particularly personal finance — where responsibility has already transitioned from professionals to individuals. Information is now undergoing a similar transition, but we haven’t prepared for it in a meaningful way.
We need better technology and literacy to curate the internet, both for ourselves and for one another. We need more options for how information is filtered and ranked, not less. And we need both humans and AI working together, not one or the other. This transition will work if we elevate editing and curating into visible arts, not invisible ones. Only when we can appreciate the Editor’s lost art of choosing can we start building a better future.
~~
You can send me comments via email or sign up to receive future essays in your inbox.