Who Is Your Editor?

“With all thy getting, get understanding.”
--Proverbs 4:7

What do Yahoo, "The New York Times" and Maxwell Davies have in common? Hint: they all provide an invisible but vital function.

Another hint: Maxwell Davies, who was born on this day in 1885, was considered one of the best editors in the English language, and is responsible for the versions we read of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, Ring Lardner and others. A good editor can make bad writing readable and good writing great.

"The New York Times" prides itself on having the best journalists and reporters in the business. But it’s the editors who make the Times the nation’s ”newspaper of record”--a title it will not be giving up anytime soon. The editors select whether and where and in what form stories will appear in the paper.

And the paper itself serves as an “editor” for the nation. Heads of news organizations and average readers across the country read the paper to know what is news on any given day.

Yahoo is also an editor. Whether through search algorithms or human selection, when you use Yahoo to look for something, it will tell you what is most important.

We have more access to more information than at any time in human history. Random and semi-random walks through this information may be fun from time to time. But we need very good editors--and we need to be conscious of who they are.