OPEN

Peter Preston‘s column in today’s Observer gives some careful thought to the “wisdom” of the crowds when it comes to editing newspapers (and websites).

Doffing his hat to Digg.com and the Web 2.0-inspired redesign at the BBC, Mr Preston contrasts the instant reading of the public pulse that today’s editors can  perform with his own experience of editing by instinct during his time at the Guardian.

He sees dangers in all of this:

Editing – at least for the Beeb online – has become a more passive concept. Post the stuff on the web. Judge by results. Public service broadcasting is just serving up what the public wants.

And that is a step change….

Mr Preston concludes:

Response rate gets results and shapes how the news is reported. Give the people what they want? Naturally you do, most of the time. But do you only give them what they want because they want it? You can’t call that dumbing down: countless readers are sharp, informed, and far from dumb. Yet they aren’t editors, trained to select, and highlight to make sense of the maelstrom.

And what is there left when voices rise in debate without chairman or standing orders? You have babble, not Google.

I think that he is in danger over-simplifying The Public as an entity and its interests and tastes. For sure, editors watching the zeitgeist in real-time need to watch out setting the news agenda according to some tyranny of the majority, but that’s not necessarily what will happen. But The Public is myriad, a sophisticated and diverse society, not a slack-jawed, reactionary mob with a low attention span. Not all of it.  

Populist newspapers and media have always aimed for lowest common denominator. Their editors foudn their way downmarket in the past largely by instinct an in the online network age will use the web to help them.

Editors skills will remain the largely same, but they will be operating in a more informed, data (and opinion) rich world, and will need to resist the temptation to take easy choices and follow the Digg, Reddit or Google News view of the world in that instant. But resisting making easy choices has always been the mark of a good editor.

: : I’d also be interested to see what responses Mr Preston’s column brings from the BBC’s The Editors blog and especially the Newsnight team, which has been very open about how online discussion has been shaping its highly respected news agenda.