"The Age of the Editor"

Speech delivered at "The State and Fate of Publishing: A Flair Symposium"

Virginia Postrel | November 11, 1994

(Page 3 of 3)

It is silly to debate whether conservatives really dominate the radio airwaves--despite occasional exceptions, they clearly do. And so, too, do leftists dominate urban weekly newspapers, and for similar reasons that have to do with timing, technology, and opportunity.

Each of these once-new media not long ago represented abundance. When music stations moved to FM radio, AM needed programming. Conservatives who were too different, too unconventional and discomfiting, for the mass media found a place in the newly abundant AM spectrum. Beginning in the 1970s, they slowly built audiences for their talk shows until AM radio listeners came to expect a certain point of view from most talk hosts. Talk radio was built on two-way communication--that's why it's different from all-news radio.

And it exemplifies the Age of the Editor. People listen to Rush Limbaugh or Dennis Prager or even Howard Stern because they identify with him and trust him to represent them as he sifts through through the masses of data out there in the information age and finds what they, the community of listeners, will agree is important. Gordon Liddy begins each day of his nationally syndicated radio show by reading from the newspaper, primarily The Washington Times, for half an hour--with attitude.

By now, those of you who don't identify with Rush Limbaugh or Gordon Liddy are probably horrified. But the point isn't to celebrate particular radio hosts. They're just examples of a general trend as media become abundant. I could tell a similar story about offset printing, the heyday of the New Left, youth culture-driven advertising, and why all urban weeklies are left wing.

Many intellectuals, including many journalists, would dearly love to be omniscient and authoritative--to know everything that's being written or said and to determine which things are important, true, or interesting. But we live in a world of subcultures--fully developed social ecologies we may know nothing about. Tom Wolfe has made his career writing about some of those subcultures--telling their stories to his subculture, which passes for mainstream journalism but is really very specific in time, place, and attitude. And Pat Robertson has made his career producing new media--from news programming to family entertainment--for one of the largest and most important.

All we who like to decide what is important, true, or interesting can do is serve as editors and let communities of interest find us.

The new media make more editors, and more communities, possible. People can become editors by avocation--running bulletin boards or setting up usenet groups in their spare time, for example. But I have a warning for them: They risk becoming professionals. Reason's publisher and former editor, who got into this business during the heyday of alternative magazines and the dawn of cold type, spent 8 years producing the magazine out of his kitchen while working as an engineer and consultant.

There's also a demand for editors of editors--for people who sift not through Newt Gingrich's masses of raw data, but for people who read or watch other people's work. Eric Utne has done a tremendous job defining a community of shared interests and creating a magazine, The Utne Reader, that sorts through the "alternative press" for those readers. The Utne Reader has turned Eric Utne's mattering map into a defining characteristic of a new media community. From a business point of view, I find The Utne Reader fascinating, since it's one of the few general-interest, politically charged national magazines to make money. It does so, in part, because it lets smaller publications do the expensive work of finding and reporting stories; it supplies the crucial value added by its editors of editors--the value of sifting through all those publications for a broader audience.

The Utne Reader has made the communication two-way--and multi-way, among readers--by starting "salons," discussion groups that meet in readers' homes around the country. Reason has done something similar, on a smaller scale, through "Evenings with the Editors," cocktail parties where readers can meet the editors and each other.

Such gatherings assume like-mindedness. They assume new media communities of shared interests and attitudes.

But new media communities don't just break up the common culture into subcultures. They allow outsiders to peek into communities of thought by visiting their media. You do not have to visit a Penecostal church with a politically active pastor to have some sense of that community's mattering map. You can watch the 700 Club, as I occasionally do, just as I read The Utne Reader to keep up with its community.

This peeking into other communities is important. For one thing, it allows people with disagreements to challenge and check each other's claims. In her recent book, Who Stole Feminism? Christina Hoff Sommers challenges many of the statistical claims made by "victimhood" feminists and propagated through the mass media: claims, for instance, about the frequency of date rape or domestic violence or the relationship between the self-esteem of girls and their academic achievement. Some of these claims have already been challenged--and, I would argue, debunked--in alternative publications, including Reason. But Sommers's book--which has been publicized both through excerpts in such specialized publications as National Review and Allure and through the author's appearances on previously nonexistent new media such as CNN, C-Span, and CNBC-- has translated the debate from the outsider communities of academic feminism and anti-victimhood political journals into mainstream, mass media.

Translation is, in fact, one of the roles for editors in the Age of the Editor. Abundance of information and media creates a role for bridges between subcultures. Indeed, one of my most important roles as editor of Reason is to act as a translator among at least four wildly different subcultures: the various policy establishments of Washington; the economists, political scientists, historians, and natural scientists of the academy; the small business owners of middle America; and the techies of Silicon Valley and cyberspace. In other words, Reason is the place where the readers of The New Republic, The Journal of Economic Literature, Science, Inc., and Wired find common ground. My readers would find nothing weird about the idea of a Ph.D. turned Congressman campaigning at a science fiction convention. They would just be surprised that his Ph.D. is in European history from Tulane, not economics from Chicago.

And Reason readers will, I'm sure, be delighted with the idea of the virtual Congressional Record. And some will even periodically search through it for subjects of interest of them. But most will be too busy running businesses, raising families, and otherwise getting on with their lives to act as their own editors. As magician Penn Jillette recently told Wired, "The whole world is pretending the breakthrough is in technology. The bottleneck is really in art." The age of abundant media doesn't put editors out of work. It just puts a premium on our art.

Comments

منتدى العرب|3.9.11 @ 8:43PM|#

Thank you

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