Inspired by Leigh Butler at tor.com, I’ve been re-reading Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time books. This happened to coincide with my recent vicious cold, which is good, because they’re great sickbed reading.
Most of my re-reading has been done on my Palm, which miraculously came loaded with electronic copies of all the books. These are of, shall we say, variable quality, and riddled with typos, including one hilarious bit in which Rand is pursued by “Trollops.” It’s a little like reading the Wheel of Time as written by Matthew Yglesias.
As a result, the re-read is also serving as a nice reminder of just how important the editorial function is. As is reading Matthew Yglesias’s blog, for that matter– Heads in the Sand is really well done, but he can’t get through two paragraphs on the blog without at least one really distracting typo, usually of the “take-the-first-option-from-spell-check” variety.
This is why I find comments like this one from Bora so maddening. In response to Chris Mooney’s lament over the death of science journalism, Bora writes:
Paper, ink, presses, trucks and truck drivers….those things are expensive. Thus, ‘real estate’ on the printed page is expensive. Thus, someone has to decide who gets to have words (or images, cartoons, obituaries, ads, horoscope,…) printed on that piece of real estate. People who decide this, the pre-publication filters, are called Editors.
Online, the expense is extremely low. Thus, the filtering happens after publication. There is no need for Editors, as everyone and their grandmother can put stuff online, on that cheap real estate.
This is a constant source of irritation for me when reading “triumph of New Media” pieces on-line. Editing is not some disposable adjunct to the writing process; editing is essential to the writing process.
This is something I run up against all the time, at different levels. The lowest level is with students, the ones who hand in hastily spell-checked first drafts as lab reports. The resulting papers usually have most of the crucial elements of a lab report there, but they’re not in any particular order, and there’s nothing approaching a coherent flow in the report.
These reports fail at the first and most critical level of editing, which is self-editing. There are people who have enough talent to bang out good work in a single draft, but there aren’t many of them. Those of us who are merely mortal need to read and revise before releasing work with our names on it to the wider world. Even if it’s something as half-assed as an intro physics lab report, or a blog post.
(This is why I’m constantly on the verge of deleting Yglesias and Ezra Klein from my RSS feeds. They’re both smart and I like what they have to say, but they’re both prone to jaw-droppingly stupid typos, that never get fixed. I have to avoid them entirely when I’ve been grading lab reports, otherwise it’s just too damn painful.)
The second level of editing is selection. This is mostly what Bora’s talking about, and it’s a staple of blogger triumphalism (at least that subset of triumphalist blogging that acknowledges a need for some editorial function). In the Happy New Media World, paid editors can be dispensed with, and the selection function will be done by some wisdom-of-crowds social media thing.
I’m not a big user of Digg and the like, but my limited encounters with them make me pretty dubious about this sort of claim. There really doesn’t seem to be any relationship between the quality of a piece and its likelihood of getting Digged. Social aggregators like FriendFeed and del.icio.us have their moments, but even with that level of pre-selection, I end up reading the first paragraphs of a lot of gibberish for every great article that I find.
But even if social media is successful, it’s still missing a critical piece of the editing function, which is dialogue. Not in the “So, I says to her, I says…” sense, but the dialogue between writers and editors that helps shape and refine arguments.
As I’ve said before, I found a lot of the editing process for the book-in-production to be maddening, but there’s absolutely no question in my mind that the final draft I sent in Sunday is orders of magnitude better than the first draft I sent in a year ago. And that first full draft was vastly better than it would’ve been without Kate’s input in the early stages.
There’s really no substitute for talking your ideas out with another person to refine and strengthen arguments. I’ve never sent a scientific article out without at least one other person reading it through and commenting on it, even when it was essentially a single-author publication. And I’ve never had a scientific article published without a few tweaks and corrections suggested by outside readers.
I won’t even put up a really important blog post without bouncing it off Kate first. (Ironically, this one’s going out without her looking at it…) Generally, I do this when I’m writing on a sensitive topic, and want to make sure I’m not inadvertently saying something stupid– there’s just no substitute for having someone else look at your argument when the goal is to get what’s in your head across on the page or screen.
That’s what’s missing from the “social media will save us” view of crowdsourced editing. You can cobble together some means of picking out the raw materials with the most innate promise, but even at its best, blogdom doesn’t allow for the give-and-take that’s essential to turn a good idea into a great article. You get the occasional fact-checking comments and response posts, and sometimes there’s a good exchange between bloggers or commenters, but that rarely if ever results in a revised version of the original that highlights the strengths and shores up the weaknesses of the first pass.
That’s the biggest loss in the death of “old media” writing venues. Blogs can nominally fill a lot of the functions of science journalism, but by their nature, blogs are perpetually in the rough draft stage. There are very few blog posts out there that you could just hit “print” on and put in a magazine, or a book.
Now, you can argue about the degree to which that refining function is really being provided in modern journalism– the Washington Post certainly isn’t doing much to polish up George Will– but that’s one of the things that’s being lost in the collapse of science journalism that Chris Mooney writes about in the post that Bora commented on. And that’s a real loss, with no obvious way to fill that gap.