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

The digital revolution has driven another stake into the heart of the old world. And as a journalist who’s entry into the field was as a photographer, this one hurts.

Kodak announced on June 22 that it was ending the production of Kodachrome slide film, it’s oldest film product, and for many photographers, the gold standard for capturing life-like color.

This comes on the heels of other bad news in the photographic world.

Nikon, probably the world’s most famous manufacturer of cameras, now builds only two flim cameras, both SLRs, one pro model and one for amateurs. It makes no point and shoot film cameras. None. This contrasts with the nine digital SLRs it builds and the 17 digital point and shoot models it carries.

As a photography buff and a student of the art, this is a low moment indeed.

Sure, digital cameras make images instantly available, and I doubt the growing clamor for instant gratification in the United States will ever be slaked, but whatever happened to the good things that come to people who wait?

And yes, digital photos can be e-mailed around the world at the touch of a button, and yes, digital photos can be printed in the comfort of your own home, but hasn’t this level of convenience cheapened the value of a photograph? Are they still even worth a thousand words?

Of course, the quality of digital prints is still lower than what comes from 35 mm film. Even the best digital cameras only capture a fraction of the amount of information that’s enclosed in a single frame of 35 mm. That, coupled with most people trying to print digital photos on poor quality paper and using as low a resolution as possible, means that many, many digital photos barely qualify as snapshots.

But the worst thing about digital photography is that it kills the magical alchemy behind photography. It used to be an art, something that required skill, innate talent and time spent working in an apprenticeship role to someone who could pass on years of knowledge.

Photography classes must still teach composition and exposure, but with ever-more-automatic cameras and computer programs to fix nearly any photographic glitch, how long will it be before we are looking at nothing but perfectly composed, perfectly cropped and perfectly exposed — yet utterly lifeless and soulless — photographs?

Yes, I’m talking to you, Photoshop.

The days of students learning how to mix chemicals and how to work an enlarger in total darkness are long past, and the art is certainly poorer for it. Photography no longer requires a knowledge of chemistry, mathematics and physics. Everything is reduced to little ones and zeros, like so much else in the world.

I still yearn to have a darkroom in my home, a place filled with trays of acrid chemicals and kept in soothing darkness much of the time. A place where the right combination of science and artistry can still yield magic, magic in the deep blacks, the bright whites and the countless shades of gray of a real photograph.

—Jonathan

Photo by michelphoto53 en Rénovation

A lot of the discussion in the content strategy Twittersphere has the feeling of a group of blind people trying to describe an elephant.

There’s a lot of talk, all of it descriptive, some of it incisive, but it falls far short of describing the elephant.

And that’s the problem: talking about content strategy isn’t going to answer any of the problems at hand: if you really want to know the elephant that is content strategy, you need to talk to a zookeeper.

The content zookeeper has a base of knowledge that may have come from textbooks. But the reality is, those textbooks were written by professors who spent little, if any, time in the field. The theory of content-keeping differs widely from the dirty reality of it all.

No, the content zookeeper has gained much knowledge the old fashioned way—he has earned it. The lessons were frequently visceral and, as such, unforgettable. They often contradict the textbook, and sometimes, go places the textbook author has never even imagined.

So who are today’s content zookeepers?

• The content zookeeper has learned the hard lessons of information architecture and user experience from the daily maintenance of a web site. He has dealt with the limitations and woes of various content management systems and knows how to make them dance.

• The content zookeeper has learned the intricacies of SEO and SEM by digging deep in the stinkiest piles of metadata.

• The content zookeeper has learned the care and feeding of freelance writers and bloggers, because he not only writes his own blog, but has written hundreds, maybe thousands of articles and edited at least that many more.

• The content zookeeper has sketched wireframes on a cocktail napkin and turned them into a website.

• The content zookeeper has learned unanticiapted lessons about how content interacts with other content and either creates synergy or anarchy.

• The content zookeepers is nimble, adaptive and can see to the root of a problem quickly and efficiently.

• The content zookeeper’s mantra is: “Test, Assess, Repeat.” What’s working? Keep executing the content strategy, keep monitoring the metrics and keep cleaning up the messes. The content strategy may be static, but the tactics keep changing to meet the conditions.

Ultimately, the content zookeeper is there to cultivate the tension between what people do when they visit a website and what we want them to do there.

Being a content zookeeper isn’t rocket science, but it IS science. Hire a trained content keeper for your next project.

Here are a few other places to look: Brain Traffic, scatter/gather, Predicate.

— Jonathan (@bentpiton)

Photo by thinboyfatter

OK, so let’s say you are managing a website. It could be as simple as a blog written by one person on one general topic or something complicated that weaves massive amounts of content into an eCommerce matrix. Either way, it’s a large interconnected web of content—your content ecosystem.

Bottom line: your content already rocks, but it’s not bringing in the readership and without the readership, you are failing to deliver what you promised the CTO (sales leads, widget sold, butts in seats, whatever metric you are beholden to) when you were given control of the site.

So now what? How do you spread the word? How do you evangelize for your content without being obnoxious?

New school versus joins old school
This is going to require a blitz that’s at once comprehensive and low key. It’s going to require the latest social media savvy as well as traditional marketing tactics.

Navigating social media
Do you have a Facebook page? Are you still using MySpace? Who’s tweeting about you? Have you snagged the obvious domain names and Gmail accounts for your brand? (For a mighty herd of social media marketing tools, go here, or for a counterpoint on the value of social media for business, go here.)

Social networking
Facebook is growing explosively and has recently accelerated past MySpace in several key user metrics. Continue to ignore Facebook at your peril. This is not to say that Facebook in three years won’t be in the same tailspin that MySpace is currently experiencing, but you can’t afford to give those years away to your competitors.

Content promotion tactic: Establish a Facebook page. Do not let anyone who doesn’t have a personal Facebook page operate it. Give the operator free reign to update the page with the appropriate multimedia content and use the status update as an additional outlet to promote new content on your main site.

Micro-blogging
Twitter is something that makes no intuitive sense to many people before they start to use it. Once they do, however, its utility as an instantly updated and instantly responsive news and information kiosk becomes abundantly clear. How is your brand being talked about on Twitter? Are you tweeting, or has some impostor hijacked your brand for nefarious purposes? If your brand has yet to be sucked into a Twitterstorm, consider yourself lucky and be prepared.

Content promotion tactic: Establish a Twitter identity for your brand. The person in charge of your Twitter account should already be a Twitter user as they will know the etiquette as well as the advantages and disadvantages of the medium. Encourage them to start tweeting, but more than anything, encourage them to listen, monitoring what is being said about your brand and using Twitter to respond to customer relations issues. A little good will is going to go a long way. Then start using Twitter to promote your content.

Social aggregation
Search engines are just one gateway to online information. While SEO is important for now (but is likely to be made irrelevant by semantic search very soon) there are ways to avoid the deep dark pit of the Google algorithm and promote content through other types of search.  Social aggregation sites like Digg, Mixx, StumbleUpon and Delicious all offer some variation on the theme of sharing stories.

Content promotion tactic: Post a story to Digg and get some colleagues to Digg it. If it’s good content, it will gain its own traction and move up the list. Don’t overdo this. Same deal with StumbleUpon and some of the others. Be selective and use your best content.

Old School
Yes, you still need to be writing SEO friendly copy, entering appropriate and comprehensive metadata for each piece of content, sending out email newsletters, blogging, posting videos to YouTube, posting photos to Flickr and more. No one said all this free promotion wasn’t going to be time consuming.

Happy curating. Your content ecosystem will be all the healthier with a little care and feeding.

—Jonathan (@bentpiton)

Photo by baxterclaws

Simon Dumenco has a great interview with David Carr of the New York Times on Advertising Age’s Mediaworks blog. Carr talks about his new book (now out in paperback) and the rapid decline of media fortunes of late:

“I think one thing that people do not understand is, as recently as four or five years ago, to be a member of Manhattan media, you weren’t rich, but you lived as a rich person might. You went to the parties that a rich person would go to, you ate the food that a rich person would eat, you drank the vodka that a rich person would drink, and you’d end up in black cars, and you’d end up sometimes on boats and in helicopters. We lived as kings, and it convinced us, I think, that there was a significant underlying value to what we did. And I think we’re finding out now that the real, actual value of journalism in the current economy is not that high, and that what the dot-com bubble did and Tina Brown and others did to boost the value of journalism and writing to the point where some people were being paid $5 a word—well, I think there are a lot of people right now, really talented people, who are working for 50 cents or a dollar a word, and you know what? It’s pretty hard to make a living doing that.

So that’s one tier, and the other tier is I feel as if media has become a kind of reverse roach motel, in that once you’re out, you’re probably not coming back in.”

Read the rest here.

—Jonathan

Yes, I am piggybacking off of Jonathan’s last post. He wrote about interns, and I am putting in my two cents in.
It hasn’t been all that long (but definitely long enough) since I graduated from college, so my intern wounds are far from healed. I spent two semesters as an intern with a major publishing house, and the last semester of my senior year as an intern for a trade magazine. Here are my top five tips for being an intern, whether you are an aspiring intern, or an intern supervisor desperate to understand the angsty, over-worked college student sulking in the corner cubicle.

1. Meet with your supervisor on a regular basis
Just because you see your supervisor every day doesn’t mean you both are on the same page. Remember, you are not an employee of the company, you are an intern with the company. Your responsibility is to work and to learn and not get your employer in any legal trouble, and your supervisor’s responsibility is to make sure you are learning all you can.  Good communication can only make your internship better.

2. Address a new responsibility as soon as you receive the assignment
This tip goes hand in hand with good communication. When you receive new assignments and take on responsibilities, immediately open up communication with your supervisor. Maybe you are ecstatic about having the first read of a newly submitted manuscript. Maybe you are not cool with rummaging through stacks of papers on the senior editor’s desk to find a disk that she misplaced. Let your supervisor know how you’re responding to your new duties.

3. Make friends with your superiors
Chances are your internship is in a field that you want to work in. Engage your superiors; they will teach you something. At the trade magazine, I would make cappuccinos for a guy in advertising, and he would return the favor. He went to school in Western New York, where I grew up, and we never ran out of things to talk about, whether it was bars in downtown Buffalo or the progress of my undergraduate thesis.

4. Ask for more
As an intern, you are usually responsible for keeping yourself busy. Ask for more work (as long as you don’t have a school assignment hanging over your head). Look alive, and remember, that graduate school recommendation isn’t going to write itself.

5. Take as much as you can (but don’t steal anything)
Long before I owned a coffee table, I had plenty of art and design books to put on it. Though they may not be paying you, more often than not the company you intern with is more than happy to bequeath upon you the products of your labor. Make sure you have a copy of a book you worked on, even if you only copied and distributed the manuscript.

Of course, you should be taking away more lessons than things. By the end of your internship, you should know whether or not this industry is right for you, built a substantial relationship with your supervisor and have at least one professional reference.

—Wendy Joan

Intern.

If ever there was a word associated with suffering, intern is it.

Interns get no respect. Not that they’ve earned all that much, but all too often, they are treated like chattel. Interns have even had been auctioned off on eBay.

But this is not to say that an internship can’t be a benefit for both the intern and the mentor.

It has been a few years since my intern days as a young field biologist, but let’s just say that my months collecting data for other people’s research projects taught me a great deal about life and two important corollaries to Murphy’s Law:

• Nothing is so bad that it cannot get worse, and

• There is no limit to how bad things can get.

I won’t go into the details, but I learned to problem-solve my way out of situations that included the following obstacles: pelican vomit, bicycle handlebars that occasionally detached at speed, rotting sea turtle eggs, the four worst employees in the entire Costa Rican national park system, clueless and sunburned tourists and bird-eating spiders. Yes. Bird. Eating. Spiders.

Fellow Eat Media Content Editor Wendy Biddlecombe also had some memorable experiences as an intern:

• Trade Magazine, New York City: Ridiculed by conservative, old New York executives for wearing fedoras and a Hillary Clinton campaign button. Said New York executives tried to turn me into a cigar smoker. This is the only internship that gave me a stipend. That stipend was well spent when the company fired their senior editor during her maternity leave, promoted the junior editor and assumed that I could pick up the slack. Plus side: I know more about tea, coffee and cigars than anyone else I know.

• Book publisher, New York City: After a semester spent as an editorial assistant with a killer midtown view from my personal office, I interned with the company again after a semester in India, only to find that the office has been filled and the only desk available to me was in the window-less mailroom. I spent the semester looking for little pleasures, like snooping through high profile writer contracts and returning new releases to Barnes and Noble for store credit. In my defense, it was only to afford books for school.

All that said, internships are highly sought positions, even by those who are already earning the big bucks.

Why? Because they not only offer a glimpse at what it’s really like to ply a trade but you might even pick up some of the tricks of the trade along the way, depending on the quality of your mentor. Also, depending on how much independence you are given, you may get to learn a lot about self-reliance and problem-solving in a non-academic setting. No more theory. Time for some practical skills.

Sure, you probably won’t be paid much, if at all, and you will likely be asked complete some hideous, mind-numbing task of the sort that goes along with the phrase, “We’ll get the intern to do it.” But even these tasks can have hidden Easter Eggs within them; you just have to be willing to strive for the Zen state of Samadhi—total oneness with the moment—and don’t mess up the Starbucks order.

— Jonathan

Photo by dsb_nola

Freelance writers, ya gotta love ‘em. Sure, they can be a prickly and fickle bunch, but spend enough time prospecting and you will uncover the geniuses among them. Treat these gems right and they will take you far.

If you’ve ever worked as an editor, you’ve had to learn a lot about the care and feeding of this unique subset of humanity. Here are the top 10 tips for managing a stable of off-site freelance writers:

1. Write the most comprehensive creative brief you possibly can. Initially, some freelance writers are like Harry Potter’s house elf, Kreacher—they require extremely precise instructions if you want the desired result. Leave even the tiniest gap in the creative brief and the story you had in mind may not be the story you are returned.
2. In addition to the creative brief, provide as much background as possible about the publication the piece will appear in and who makes up the target audience. A story on fusion technology that’s written for engineers will look a lot different than one written for a general audience. The background is also a good place to tell the writer what NOT to do. Again, this will save a lot of time for both of you.
3. Specify the length, the tone, the takeaway and the format for the story. If you want 1,500-word case study written for MBAs that concludes with a list of five process implementation tips, ask for it.
4. Be clear, up front, about the expectations on revisions. If you have a kill-fee policy, be up front with it: writers need to know going in that if they fail to revise a piece to a reasonable point after two revisions, they will get the kill fee only (and probably won’t ever see another assignment from you). Though if you reach the kill fee phase, some of the blame lies with you, editor, for failure to vet the writer properly or for failing to adequately communicate what you desired in the story.
5. Tell the writer what they will be paid, how they will be paid and when they will be paid. Honor your financial commitment to the writer in a timely fashion.
6. If a piece needs major alterations, let the writer do them. Give as much direction as is necessary and let the writer do the work. The piece belongs to them. (At least until it’s published, depending on your contractual agreement.)
7. Remember that your writers will be working on other projects at the same time as yours, so you may not be able to get instant turn-around on revisions.
8. Be specific about the supporting materials you expect to be turned in with the piece. If you want source contact information, brief source biographies and source headshots, along with five links to related material and a 50-word call to action, ask for them. And if you want something in a specific format, ask. But be reasonable and respectful: If you think you need to ask for a full interview transcript, why did you hire the writer?
9. Be available for questions. No matter how good your assignment is, questions may come up—some may improve the story in a way you’d never considered. Writers must be able to reach you by phone, email or IM during normal business hours. The work you save may be your own.
10. Be clear about the deadline, but also be flexible with your writers, especially the ones you have an established relationship with. There should be enough room in your editorial calendar to wait a few more days for information from a key source. If there isn’t, build it in for the next round.

A final, bonus tip: Writers are people too. Treat them like adults (as long as they continue to act like them). Keep the lines of communication open, honest and timely.

— Jonathan

Content wants to be free.

We all want free content.

But somebody has to pay for it, and that somebody is you. And me.

What are we willing to pay to get our content for free? What costs are we willing to pay beyond the monetary?

How much of our privacy are we willing to have invaded to get the information and convenience we desire free of charge?

How good does the content need to be in order for us to part with our hard-earned bucks? I was certainly willing to pay for New York Times opinion articles when the Times Select program was in place, but apparently, there were not enough people like me as the program was discontinued.

Now, the Wall Street Journal is one of the few major content providers to charge for content, but it’s not content I’m willing to pay for. However, when an iPhone app recently appeared that allowed free access to WSJ content, I was all over it. Rupert Murdoch is, apparently, quite upset at the existence of the app, but the technology does not exist to charge iPhone users, yet.

Many sites exact a non-monetary toll, requiring you to create an account that collects personal data that, theoretically, can be used to market products to you. These sites do assume that you are faithful in reproducing your biographical information. I am not. I have signed up for many a site as Phil McCracken, Hugh Jass or Jacques Strappe. Age 104. Etc. (While this makes me feel better, I doubt this small-time deviancy really affects the value of the database.)

But there’s other information about yourself online that you can’t hide from the marketers.

If you have a Gmail account, as I do, you already agree to let Google read your email. Why do you think the ads you see are uncannily related to the content of the message you are reading?

Troubling? Yes. Worth giving up the convenience of my FREE Gmail account? Not yet.

(As an aside, it’s really wonderful when contextual advertising fails spectacularly. See this great juxtoposition between a swine flu story, an advertisement for White Castle’s new pulled pork sandwiches, and the cover of The Jerusalem Post. Kosher? No. Funny. Yes.)
Contextual advertising is just one of the tools the advertisers have to get their meat hooks into us when we’re partaking of the free content.

On a logical level, and this is coming from a former newspaperman, I know that there is a cost to producing content. I know that top-notch, unique content costs even more. For years, I readily paid a nominal fee every day to have that content delivered to my doorstep, but the internet changed the content landscape in a fundamental way.

(Interestingly, I pay more each day for internet service than I ever paid for a newspaper subscription; ironically, none of the money I pay my ISP goes to the content creators. It’s like if my newspaper subscription money just stayed with the paper carrier and never went to the New York Times.)

So I am conflicted. I know that advertising pays for content, but I am used to getting my content for free on the internet and there is a part of me that will do what it takes to make sure I don’t have to pay, monetarily or otherwise. However, there is exceptional content out there that I have paid for in the past and would pay for again rather than go without (Sunday just isn’t Sunday without The Times, printed or not.).

And I have resigned myself to the fact that Google reading my Gmail is probably just the beginning of the future of advertising that’s directed solely at me based on where I have been browsing and what I have been writing. Behavioral targeting is the next step, but that’s another post.

— Jonathan

Photo by Fagerjord

If you are just graduating J-school or have recently left another industry and for some odd reason, have a hankering to parlay your writing skills into the field of journalism, you may have heard that this is not the greatest time to be entering the business.

In one sense, you would be right. The field has lost thousands of jobs in the past couple of years as several factors have come together to put a serious financial crimp on the industry.

So, the likelihood of you landing a job at a major daily newspaper or national magazine is low. Very low.

But if you swing over to JournalismJobs.com, you will see that there are hundred of jobs available in the field. They are just probably not the sort of job you’d have previously considered. And they are not in the sorts of places you think of as journalism hot spots.

Idaho Falls, Idaho. Sierra Vista, Arizona. Waynesville, North Carolina. Sharon, Pennsylvania. And many other spots that line the blue highways of America.

But these jobs, most of them at small community newspapers, offer an immense number of benefits.

1.    You get to hone your craft every day in close proximity to your subjects. This is both a blessing and a curse. I won’t elaborate further.
2.    You get to practice every facet of journalism. You will write news and features, editorials and columns, sports and business, you name it. You will take photos. You will shoot video. You will learn a whole host of computer programs. You will blog.
3.    You will learn humility. You will screw up and it will be in everyone’s hands the next day. Your office will likely be on Main St. People won’t be shy about pointing out your shortcomings.
4.    You will get to know a community better than you have ever known any place in your life.
5.    You will get to experience the upside and the downside of the sort of Mayberry-like living that’s still present in broad swaths of rural America.
6.    The public will get to know you better than you’d ever dreamed of. People you’ve never met will approach you in public places with “something that has to go in the paper.” Depending on your personality, you may or may not get used to being a local celebrity.
7.    You will get creative. The paper must go out every week and some weeks, especially around the holidays (and during the off-season if you are living in a tourist town), there will be NOTHING going on.
8.    You will become a better writer because you will be writing a lot. You will learn to edit your own work, quickly and ruthlessly.
9.    You will also learn to edit the work of the barely literate and the hardly coherent, AKA, letters to the editor.
10.    Finally, you will hone you web skills. Even the tiniest newspapers have a website these days and you will be maintaining it.

Full disclosure: I spent 10 years working at community newspapers in Colorado, Nevada and Georgia. And if you decide to take the plunge, read Jock Lauterer’s Community Journalism, Relentlessly Local.

— Jonathan
Photo by Marcin Wichary