I found two very talented editors who worked from morning Eastern time to late afternoon Pacific time. Every story went through them before being published. They were fantastic.
They also slowed the publishing process to a screeching near-halt. And, even more importantly: No. One. Cared.
Hiring them was part of a larger, and ultimately failed, experiment to bring magazine-style editing and quality control to tech blogging. We would write fewer, better stories. Our copy would gleam. Readers would swoon.
It was a train wreck. Traffic plummeted. By half. Literally, month-to-month traffic cut in half. As we tried to right the sinking ship the first thing I did was fire the copyeditors. During the eight-or-so months they worked for us no one had ever commented on our clean copy. No one told us they came to our site because we had fewer typos than TechCruch. I saw the difference. It’s not that readers didn’t, they just didn’t care.
Abraham Wyatt argues that websites don’t need copy editors.
I feel like we keep seeing more proof that the Internet en masse punishes that which we’d traditionally describe as “good journalism.” I’m still trying to work out if that means that it’s not worth trying at all, or merely that no-one’s discovered the right model yet.
