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About ten years ago, when newspapers, TV channels and other news organizations started to go online in earnest, people started asking the question: Do we really need journalists? Most readers of this blog will probably be familiar with the context of the question – anyone can write and post online these days, who is a journalist really etc etc. The question is still asked ten years later, perhaps even more insistently: the rise of blogging and other forms of user-generated content has kept the issue on the agenda. But in recent years, there is a new question that is slowly rising to prominence over the old one: forget about journalists, but do we really need editors? The problem with online news and information isn’t that there is too little of it; it’s making sense of what’s there. Is it important? Is it trustworthy? What is the context? How can you tell? The need, this argument goes, is not for more people posting news online, but for someone to filter all the chaff, give context, and present some kind of coherent narrative: in short, the Internet needs editors. This is the argument made, forcefully, by Martin Moore in a recent post on his blog – in this specific case in relation to the BBC’s new report on “Safeguarding impartiality in the 21st century”. Opening up online discussions on news media sites is all good and well, and they clearly have a value for the people participating – but do they have a value for the reader? Moore argues that they do not. The question of editorial judgment online is at the centre of no less than three recent books about the future of journalism in an age of media convergence and interactivity – a very good summary and review of these books can be found in the San Fransisco Chronicle, here. While the author of the review, Todd Oppenheimer, clearly does not want to go as far as Andrew Keen, who thinks that the lack of proper editorial controls online is killing news as we know it, Oppenheimer does seem to agree that there is a need for some kind of more stringent editorial practice online, preferrably done by the people who have traditonally been doing it, i.e. journalists and newspapermen/women. A person with a radically different idea about how to assign importance, coherent narratives and context to the torrent of information that is the Internet is Yale legal scholar Yochai Benkler. In his recent book The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (available online here - see chapter 3 in particular), he argues that the social character of online communications will solve the problem of what he calls accreditation, i.e. deciding what is important and trustworthy. Just as “we are all journalists now”, we are also all editors: accreditation will occur wikipedia-style, when readers “tag”, mark or grade what they read for the benefit of other readers. Relevance, trustworthiness etc will be decided collectively – maybe each piece of information will not be rated instantly, but given time and enough readers, they will collectively do the work of the editor and decide whether they think that what they read is to be trusted and considered important. Not only wikipedia operates on this principle, but many other online information providers, like for example the blog portal Technorati and the technology news site Slashdot. Or so the argument goes. But there is one thing that Benkler does not take into account in his book: in order for his “collective intelligence” (see Pierre Lévy’s 1995 book for a further explanation of this concept) to work, the collective needs to be big enough, i.e. there must be enough interested and knowledgeable readers to do the accreditation. Citing Wikipedia, Technorati and Slashdot as examples (as Benkler does) only proves that these are in fact among the few sites where the system currently works – and neither of these sites deal with general news of the kind we might find in a newspaper or on TV. I can imagine quite a lot of subject areas where collective accreditation/editorial procedure would not work simply for lack of active readers-editors. But then again – does this mean that the lack of an editoral process is really the problem? Maybe the success of Wikipedia, Technorati, Slashdot and similar sites means that the problem lies with “news as we know it”, i.e. that the editorial processes of traditional news organisations just exclude a lot of voices and subject areas, and that these voices and subject areas are now coming into their own, developing mechanisms and tools for handling the editorial process differently. If you think that the problem with news is that it excludes what you are interested in, then there is certainly a lot of appeal in the “we-are-all-editors”-model. I must confess: I am not at present sure on which side I come down in this argument. What do you think? Do we still need skilled editors to get good news – or should the very concept of “news” being redefined to make the editorial process more collective and interactive?