Is Editing a Lost Art?
By Jonathan Maziarz / July 8, 2009
We may have reached the point in the internet revolution where pervasive broadband access has made everyone a publisher, but this explosion of content providers—most of them roaring pell-mell down the information superhighway—has made the need for savvy editors ever more acute.
This thought struck me yesterday as I was plowing through Flickr, looking for some photos to accompany an upcoming story. The simple search for “student teacher”—and mind you, this was not on the full Flickr library, but just the Creative Commons subset—led to nearly 900 results.
Too many to wade through, but after having exhausted the 7.4 million photos on Shutterstock and not even finding one appropriate and non-cheesy photo, it was off to the wild, wild West of photography, Flickr.
Screen after screen shuttled by, but eventually, I was able to dig up a few gems that could be sent to the stakeholders along with the story.
As I chugged through the 895 items tagged with the words student and teacher, I did find myself longing for a little self-editing from the photographers on the other end. Many of the photos were of dismal quality, the kind of snapshots that in the Fotomat era, would never escape the little envelope and find their way into an album. What, I wondered, was the person thinking who uploaded all 200 shots from a new teacher retreat in China, most of them underexposed and completely bereft of anything resembling composition? And what was with all the shots of the guy scooping out the innards of a watermelon? Why did the photographer feel compelled to take those photos in the first place, and then, later, decide that more than one needed to be shared with the world?
Why wasn’t the photographer editing as he went? When I trained as a photojournalist, I was repeatedly admonished to “Crop with the camera, not in the darkroom.”
Memory cards with massive capacities have made it too easy to take too many photographs. Giant hard drives make it too easy to keep every photo; just download and resume shooting. I am guilty of this at home. There are seven years worth of photos of my dogs and five years worth of photos of my son at home on my iMac.
But yes, only select images have been edited in Photoshop and either printed or emailed to family and friends. I can remember a set of photos, uploaded to a sharing site by a-family-member-who-shall-remain-unnamed, that contained more than 100 images of his young child, all from the same trip to a pumpkin patch or petting zoo. I scanned the thumbnails, but I couldn’t make myself leaf through all of the photos.
Which brings us back to why editors are going to be ever more valuable as the amount of content on the internet continues to burgeon. We may all be publishers, but we are not all editors.
1. Editing is a skill. Whether it’s text, photos, video or audio, deft editing takes experience and knowledge.
2. Editing is an art. Having the ear that detects a tin word, the eye that can pull the one image from hundreds or thousands or the touch to slice up an hour of raw video into 10 compelling minutes, there is an aspect to editing that cannot be acquired; it must be possessed.
3. Editing takes time. If it’s not being done as the writer writes or the photographer shoots, it’s going to have to happen at the editor’s desk. The less care taken on the front end means the more care that will need to be taken on the back end.
4. Editing takes care. Corralling and curating your content so that it stay fresh and compelling is the only thing that is going to keep your readers coming back.
5. Editing is necessary. Is it reasonable to ask users to edit their own content? Maybe. Is it going to happen consistently and carefully? Probably not. There are plenty of websites that are just content dumps. Don’t let yours be one of them.
—Jonathan
(@bentpiton)
Photo by Jennie Faber
July 8th, 2009 at 12:43 pm
Nice, thoughtful article. It always frustrates me when I come across sets of images that contain very similar images. The photographer should take the time to pick the best ones. No one wants to look at 10 photos that are hardly different except in focus, framing, etc.
I find it happens a lot with stock images on deviantART.com. Some stockers will upload 50+ (and I’ve seen 100+) from the same photo shoot, where about 25 would give photomanipulators enough variety.
Editing does seem to be somewhat non-existent on the Internet. :(
July 8th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
This post would be more credible without the typo. “Memory cards with massive capacities have made it too easy too take too many photographs.”
Thanks for the insightful post, and I’m looking forward to sharing it!
July 8th, 2009 at 2:53 pm
This is what happens when the market expect pictures for pennies, and reward the amateur/citizen/crowd-sourcing websites by buying from them rather than the traditional picture agencies.
Even pro photographers often need a second opinion on their editing, which is done at the (ever fewer) “old fashioned” picture agencies, where they still have editors. However the extra time and employees will of course lead to extra costs, so the pictures become more expensive from such agencies.
But as you choose not to spend the extra money, YOU will have to spend the extra time wading through heaps of unusable material. I don’t know your hourly rate, but perhaps it is worth doing the calculation for the time you spend doing this research, versus asking an “old fashioned” agency – with pro photographers and editors – to find what you are looking for, then pay their rate. It may actually be cheaper in the in end. And apart from price, you’re likely to get better quality. That could benefit the product you are making too, right?
You can choose to buy a needle in a shop, or hope to find a free one in a haystack. The choice is yours..
July 9th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
And I work with developers who fancy themselves writers and editors! I guess because I can cruise the Internet, I should be able to write code as well.
July 9th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
I completely agree! Too often I go to an executive’s blog and find that they have misused the word “their,” or something else as equally elementary. It’s time to go back to grammar school!
July 14th, 2009 at 3:36 am
[...] http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/04/managing-the-content-cascade/ [...]
July 14th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
I have a hard time believing that editors will soon be a hot commodity, or even that they’ll enjoy an increased demand, simply because we continue to face a content deluge.
For years now, few in the web industry–and thus, their clients–have taken content seriously enough to consider content professionals an essential (or even necessary) part of the design and development team. Consequently, clients have largely failed to properly consider content development for site launches and beyond.
I agree with your point–that web publishing needs good editors now more than ever–but am deeply skeptical that anything will change. I’ll try to be hopeful, though. :)
July 19th, 2009 at 9:51 am
It is unfortunate that in this day and age the traditional standards of value and quality are being severely compromised. Our language is changing at a rapid fire pace. More and more “Slang” is finding its way into everyday acceptance.
This is also the problem as you stated in your post, with the advent of “easy” technology, everybody and their brother out there with a cheap cell phone, is now suddenly a professional photographer. They simply have to share with the world 75 pictures of their little brother picking his nose. It is simply a sign of the times.
I also agree with Fredrik Naumann who commented: “This is what happens when the market expect pictures for pennies, and reward the amateur/citizen/crowd-sourcing websites by buying from them rather than the traditional picture agencies.” This indeed is a contributing factor to the problem.
July 31st, 2009 at 4:30 am
This is a really good post. I agree with Gaby, it really annoys me when you are looking for images and you get lots of similar ones. Alright take a lot of the same image but don’t display them all just select the best one.
July 31st, 2009 at 6:33 am
It seems editors are a dying breed, I second the frustration felt when crawling through endless image galleries to only find cheesy or low quality photographs.
July 31st, 2009 at 2:21 pm
Editing certainly is essential if you are concerned with quality and getting results. Unfortunately most people don’t seem to be concerned with it! If they were, they would take some care in what they post. I think editing needs to be tempered in the name of efficiency though. I don’t expect my blog posts, for example, to measure up to the same scrutiny as something in print media. However, I do wholly agree with the sentiment here. Unedited content is pervasive and out of control :)
February 28th, 2010 at 1:31 am
I totally agree with you that editing is a must. I have stumbled a lot of blogs with poor grammars and thought that they have not paid much attention in editing their work. Even personal blogs should be given time to edit primarily because this reflects their personality and the business they are offering.
June 30th, 2010 at 7:04 pm
[...] Eat Media muses on this topic in their excellent blog post, “Is Editing a Lost Art?” [...]