President Biden, in his farewell address warning of a new American oligarchy that owns a “tech-industrial complex,” talked about the threats to a free press. He mentioned that “editors are disappearing.” I have often told people who worry about evils of the “media,” meaning social media, entertainment and maybe cable TV news, the key is the disappearing figure of the editor. Editors are what distinguishes journalism from everything else. This idea made me dig up my article in the 2006 Encyclopedia of Journalism on “Editors.” If you have time to read this little history, be my guest.

Editors

The title of editor is conferred on a wide variety of individuals who determine what appears in newspapers and magazines. The term editor today can refer to a newspaper’s top executive or a lowly copy editor. Every news department, such as those responsible for a newspaper’s sports, features, or business sections, usually has its own editor to assign or approve stories and manage reporters.

By the early nineteenth century, the editor was the most important (and often the best known) figure at a publication. He (most were men) often combined several roles that were “editorial” in quite different senses of the word. A traditional editor was the paper’s opinion-leader, executive, spokesman, literary stylist, and on occasion the publisher or owner. Such were the eclectic pioneers of the mid-nineteenth-century penny press, notably James Gordon Bennett Sr. at the New York Herald and Horace Greeley at the New York Tribune. Starting around the time of the Civil War, editorial functions began to be divided up; a publisher would hire an editor-in-chief, while the daily management of a newsroom would fall to a managing editor. A century later, the various jobs of the old-fashioned full-service editor had been further split and downgraded into specialties within a corporate structure.

Still, a publication’s top editor was its public face. As late as the 1980s, executive editors such as Ben Bradlee at The Washington Post and Abe Rosenthal at The New York Times could attain a certain nationwide fame, even though they did not determine the editorial position or business side of their publications. But the next generation of executive editors, in an era of falling circulation and media-industry consolidation, had little fame and that only among journalism insiders. Top newspaper editors of the early twenty-first century were typically corporate functionaries or, at best, fighters of a losing cause for professional autonomy and higher newsroom budgets. Many lost their jobs to that cause. In the heyday of mass-circulation magazines, meanwhile, the personality of a single editor often stamped the character of such periodicals as The New Yorker (under Harold Ross, then William Shawn), the original Vanity Fair of the 1920s and 1930s (under Frank Crowninshield), Time (under Henry Luce, then T. S. Matthews), and The Saturday Evening Post (under George H. Lorimer). Since then, the age of the titan magazine editor has passed.

Origins

The earliest definition of “editor,” a word derived from the Latin verb edo (to bring forth into the world), applied to the publisher of a literary work. An editor as “one who conducts a newspaper or periodical publication” began to appear in 1803, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. This was when the older archetype of printer-proprietor was being replaced by a new type of newspaper chief. In colonial America, the men and women who published the first newspapers and magazines were called printers. With the proliferation of printing presses, heads of newspapers took on more literary status and the new title of “editor.”

John Fenno, a Bostonian, became the first editor of the Gazette of the United States, the mouthpiece of the new Federalist government and, in particular, of Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton. To advance an opposition party, James Madison, a key author of the Constitution, along with then–Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, sought an editor to create an anti-Federalist newspaper, the National Gazette. They installed Philip Freneau, a patriot-poet who had been Madison’s college roommate. Fenno and Freneau were editors of the new style rather than printers who happened to own the mechanical means of communication.

The 1790s and the next three decades, which have been called “the dark ages of the partisan press,” continued to produce editors under the sway of political interests and patronage. But political spoils and control by factions did not dampen the individuality of editors from this era, most notably Aurora editors Benjamin Franklin Bache and William Duane, English gadfly William Cobbett, Wasp editor Harry Croswell, American Mercury editor Noah Webster, and Columbian Centinel editor Benjamin Russell. Each of these editors tended to be colorful, vitriolic, and abusive in a tradition of personal and partisan journalism that would continue throughout the nineteenth century.

In the 1830s, editors of several big city newspapers embraced innovations that greatly increased circulation and revenue. They severed ties with political parties, added amusing human interest stories of crime and sports aimed at working-class readers, dropped their daily price from six cents to a penny, and charged advertisers more as circulation grew. The leaders of this “penny press” revolution were founders, owners, and publishers of their own newspapers, but also proudly bore the title of editor. They did not renounce traditions of violence or partisan politics. Bennett deliberately provoked rival editor James Watson Webb to assault him twice in the streets of New York, which Bennett, as victim, gleefully reported in his paper. Greeley, founding editor of the New York Tribune, embraced some political agendas with a childlike fervor. But these editors largely relied on advertisers, not political machines, as their chief patrons. They were careful to appear neutral in covering politics, at least in their paper’s news reports, and sought entertaining news for the masses as well as timely information for the elite. The modern editor was henceforth to be a guardian of journalistic independence and an authority on developing content with mass appeal.

As with newspapers, American magazines have often mirrored the personalities of their editors. In Victorian America, editors such as poet James Russell Lowell and novelist William Dean Howells at the Atlantic Monthly helped set the intellectual agenda of the cultural elite, while female editors such as Sarah Josepha Hale (who got Thanksgiving to be a national holiday and wrote “Mary Had a Little Lamb”) at Godey’s Lady’s Book and Miriam Folline Squier at Frank Leslie’s Lady’s Magazine (who took the name of her husband, Frank Leslie, after he died) constructed America’s culture of the “domestic sphere.” The editors of successful magazines in the first half of the twentieth century, especially editors who launched new titles or built huge circulations, tended to be unusually competitive and innovative in their market strategies and graphic design, but also culturally conservative and attuned to the values of the American heartland.

The modernization of newspapers after 1900 saw editors-in-chief diminished in number and in importance. Publishers consolidated newspapers into chains; reformers emphasized schooling and professional standards, thus reducing the importance of editors as on-the-job trainers. After World War II, newsrooms of metropolitan newspapers achieved their greatest energy, size, and professional standards. Editors of various ranks now ran the show. Late City Edition, a 1947 book by editors at the New York Herald Tribune, describes the three main news desks controlled by editors: local or city desk, national or “telegraph,” and foreign or “cable.” It was an all-male club until well into the 1970s. “The best editor is the man with an insatiable desire to know the facts of a matter, and an instinctive tendency to be interested in the matters his readers care about,” the Herald Tribune‘s city editor wrote in the book. Most major newspapers by this time had separated the function of editorial page editor from that of news editor, generally called managing editor or “M.E.” Under the managing editor came department editors responsible for particular topics—arts, women, sports and business, for example. These editors were usually anonymous to the reader, yet influenced the paper by hiring staff and shaping the news, from story assignment to copy editing and headline-writing.

The skills of a good editor are distinct from those of a reporter or writer, yet successful newspaper editors invariably emerge from the ranks of news reporters with little or no formal training to be an editor. Even heirs of newspaper-owning families who are being groomed for editorships take a turn as cub reporters. Jonathan Daniels, for example, was a Washington correspondent for the Raleigh, North Carolina, newspaper his father owned, The News & Observer, before the younger Daniels became editor in 1933. Daniels served as editor in two stints for a total of 29 years, writing editorials and overseeing news while his two brothers managed the business side. Management skills, increasingly important for any newspaper editor, sometimes pushed a good editor into the job of publisher or company president. Lee Hills, for instance, markedly modernized the Miami Herald as its managing editor, then executive editor, from 1942 to 1966, systematizing recruitment, bringing colorful design to the paper, and sharpening its news writing. For the next 16 years, he was a publisher or president within the paper’s chain, Knight Ridder. His ideas gradually permeated the chain through the many editors who followed in his footsteps.

In contrast to the inventive and eccentric editors of the nineteenth century, however, successful newspaper editors of the twentieth century fit comfortably into the conventions of newspaper production and management. Few editors tried to invent anything as new as the penny press. Ralph Ingersoll, who had been an editor at The New Yorker and Fortune, attempted a radical experiment in newspapering with PM, an afternoon tabloid that relied on wealthy patrons instead of advertisers. Ingersoll’s PM, which accepted but did not solicit advertisements, was greatly admired for its coverage of modern cultural topics, its quality art and photography, and its literary writers. But it never gained the circulation or influence Ingersoll had sought, and folded after eight years, in 1948.

Some Notable Newspaper Editors

James Gordon Bennett Sr. (1795–1872)

Bennett launched the New York Morning Herald as a penny paper in 1835, and during the next 37 years as its star reporter, top editor, and irrepressible salesman, helped to invent the modern concept of “news.” With an entertainer’s flair for writing and a cynic’s understanding of public appetites, Bennett changed American journalism by his example, showing how newspapers could be far more democratic, sensationalistic, and profitable. Rivals waged a “moral war” against him, and the diarist George Templeton Strong summed up the elite view of Bennett when he wrote that no one had more debased American journalism. Yet Bennett was hailed as a genius of the profession he helped create. A gangly, cross-eyed Scottish immigrant, Bennett learned editing at the Charleston (South Carolina) Courier, the New York Enquirer, and the New York Courier. After many business failures of his own, he threw everything into his vision of a paper that cost a penny, like Benjamin Day’s New York Sun, but outdid all its competition with a frenzy of news for every class of citizen. Bennett turned over management to James Bennett Jr. in 1866.

Benjamin C. Bradlee (1921–)

Bradlee was a high-profile editor who ran The Washington Post during the heady years when the paper exposed the Watergate scandals of the Nixon Administration from 1972 to 1974. A prep-school and Harvard graduate from Boston, Bradlee began reporting for the Post in 1948. Later, as Newsweek magazine’s Washington bureau chief, he and the magazine’s business editor, Osborn Elliott (soon to be the magazine’s editor for more than a decade), convinced Post publisher Philip Graham to buy Newsweek in 1961. Bradlee, a friend and neighbor of Senator John F. Kennedy, enjoyed being at the center of Washington’s social life from the time Kennedy became President. Named managing editor of the Post in 1965, then executive editor in 1968, Bradlee flourished with the support of Katharine Meyer Graham, the publisher after her husband’s death. Bradlee led the paper’s aggressive coverage during the Pentagon Papers case of 1971 and the Watergate years. His reputation was damaged by the fabricated “Jimmy’s World” feature story about an eight-year-old heroin addict by staff reporter Janet Cooke, for which a 1981 Pulitzer Prize was retracted when Cooke confessed that she had concocted the story’s main character. Bradlee was the last of the flamboyant big-city newspaper editors. When he retired in 1991, editorial writer Meg Greenfield complimented him as one who had “made the Post dangerous to people in government.”

Arthur Brisbane (1864–1936)

Brisbane was the highest-paid and most widely read editor under yellow-journalism publisher William Randolph Hearst. The European-educated son of a wealthy Buffalo, New York, family, Brisbane became the chief advisor and front man for Hearst. He had proved himself a facile writer for Charles Dana at the New York Sun and then for Joseph Pulitzer at the New York World before becoming editor of Hearst’s Journal in 1897. There, he was the first newspaper editor to reach a circulation of 1 million. He also wrote articles for Hearst’s Cosmopolitan magazine and penned a popular editorial column, syndicated as “Today” in Hearst’s papers and hundreds of others, giving him an estimated readership of 30 million. Critics derided his columns for their banal wisdom, but his concise style made a rising new middle class “think they think,” as he once described the goal of an editorial.

Turner Catledge (1901–83)

Catledge was a Mississippi-raised journalist who worked at The New York Times for nearly forty years, half of that as managing editor, executive editor, or vice president. He retired in 1970, moved to New Orleans, and wrote a memoir, My Life and The Times. Catledge expanded the Times‘ cultural and national coverage, giving attention to the South and the issue of civil rights before any other national news publication did so. He was the most influential of a series of top editors at the Times from the South, such as Edwin James, Clifton Daniel, and Howell Raines, reflecting the Southern origins of the patriarch of the Times‘ dynasty since 1896, Adolph Ochs.

Charles A. Dana (1819–97)

Dana enjoyed a long and influential career as a gifted newspaper editor, first at Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune from 1847 to 1862, and later as editor of the New York Sun from 1868 until his death in 1897. His interest in radical politics led him to join the New England Transcendentalists at Brook Farm, where he edited The Harbinger, and to cover the revolutions of 1848 in Europe, where he recruited Karl Marx as the London correspondent for Greeley. Dana also played a key role in the Lincoln administration during the Civil War, as assistant secretary of war. But his great talent was not his political vision, which was spotty and often vindictive. Rather, Dana raised the quality of newspaper writing, making the Sun one of the best of the major papers of the period. He virtually invented the “human interest story.” Dana, who was the first managing editor ever, believed that “the invariable law of the newspaper was to be interesting.”

Horace Greeley (1811–72)

Greeley was the founding editor of the New York Tribune, his national “pulpit” from which he crusaded for various reforms and rebuked the other penny papers for their money-grubbing sensationalism. The Tribune, he announced when it started in 1841, would advance the interests of “the People” and avoid the “immoral and degrading Police Reports, Advertisements and other matter which have been allowed to disgrace the columns of our leading Penny Papers” (Stoddard, 61). He crusaded for temperance, workers’ rights, an early form of socialism, and an end to slavery. Raised poor in New England, Greeley failed to make a profit from The New Yorker, a weekly literary magazine he ran for seven years in the 1830s, or from the Log Cabin, a propaganda sheet he edited for his Whig Party mentors Thurlow Weed and William H. Seward. He ran the Tribune with an energy, eccentricity, and idealism all his own, “no man’s man,” and it flourished in that spirit. He was the first editor to allow by lines, and his published interview with Mormon leader Brigham Young is considered a breakthrough in reporting. Other editors of renown began their careers under Greeley at the Tribune, such as Charles N. Dana (later editor of the Sun) and Henry J. Raymond (who launched The New York Times in 1851). Other notable correspondents for Greeley’s Tribune were Karl Marx, in London, and feminist Margaret Fuller.

Ralph McGill (1898–1969)

McGill was called the “conscience of the South” as editor, columnist, and publisher at the Atlanta Constitution from 1938 through the years of the civil rights movement. A former college football tackle and Marine from Tennessee, McGill was sports editor at the Constitution in the 1930s. Doing feature stories on his own time for the newspaper, he witnessed the sad waste of rural poverty and racial hatred in the South during the Depression. He traveled to Europe on a Rosenwald fellowship in 1937, seeing firsthand the relationship between an un-free press and the rise of Nazism. His page-one columns in the Constitution—more than 10,000 were published by the time he died at age 70—drew on his love of rural culture but also applied an almost religious morality to race questions that few others would write about. In the old style of Southern editors, he was at once the paper’s public face, political captain, and literary voice. His criticism of white bigotry and his eventual support of the civil rights movement brought local hate mail, but national fame. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1959 for editorial writing and published a historical memoir in 1963, The South and the Southerner.

Carr van Anda (1864–1945)

Van Anda was managing editor of The New York Times during the formative period of 1904–32, when his mathematical and scientific intellect helped make it the most respected newspaper in the world. Van Anda, a child prodigy, had dropped out of Ohio University and abandoned his plans to become a professor of physics or Greek to work on the mechanical side of several Ohio newspapers. He then switched to reporting, in which he excelled by his detective-minded diligence. But it was as night editor at the Baltimore Sun and the New York Sun where his energy and news sense achieved the most. Later, as managing editor of The New York Times, he kept a night-editor’s hours, scooping other papers and catching last-minute errors. Adolph Ochs, who had bought the Times in 1896 with the goal of rejecting sensationalism for “all the news that’s fit to print,” found in van Anda his ideal of an independent, intellectual news chief. Ochs gave van Anda a good salary and a free hand. Van Anda is credited with making the Times the admired newspaper of record it became.

Henry Watterson (1840–1921)

Watterson was editor of the Louisville Courier Journal for a half century after the Civil War. He was a “Kentucky colonel”–style orator with a message of reconciliation he called the “New Departure.” His message was like Henry Grady’s editorial campaign for a New South, but more partisan, less visionary, and drawn out over a much longer career. As the son of a Tennessee congressman, Watterson learned to love politics and the Democratic Party as a child who literally played in the halls of the U.S. Capitol. His service in the Confederate army was desultory but placed him in the company of legendary generals Leonidas Polk, Nathan Bedford Forrest, and Albert Sidney Johnston. He developed an extravagant writing style as editor of a Confederate propaganda organ called the Rebel, followed by stints as editor of a Cincinnati newspaper and an editorial-opinion writer at the Nashville Banner. In partnership with Walter N. Halderman, he helped merge Louisville’s Courier and Journal and made the combined paper one of the best and largest in the South. He viewed the editorial page as the heart of any newspaper, and had as many as ten editorial writers on staff. He and his partners sold their stock in the Courier-Journal to Robert Worth Bingham in 1919.

William Allen White (1868–1944)

White became nationally known as a prototype of the kind of editor most likely to remain unknown beyond the county line—the proprietor-editor of a small-town newspaper in the American heartland. For nearly 50 years he ran and wrote for the Emporia (Kansas) Daily and Weekly Gazette, with a circulation of less than 8,000, but achieved fame by having his editorials reprinted throughout the country. White’s columns appealed to a wide audience because of their earthy, clear style and his wholesome-seeming political values. After an apprenticeship under William Rockhill Nelson at the Kansas City Star, White made a name for himself in 1896 with a widely reprinted editorial called “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” It was a sarcastic attack on the Populist revolt against industrialism in farm states like Kansas. Under the later influence of reform-minded President Theodore Roosevelt, White turned more progressive in his politics. But he remained a loyal, active Republican most of his life.

Some Notable Magazine Editors

Edward W. Bok (1863–1930)

Bok edited the Ladies Home Journal from 1889 until 1919, during which time it became the best-selling magazine in history. He filled it with functional advice in home management and cheery fiction by celebrated writers. Born in Holland and raised in New York, Bok left school at age 12 to hustle his way, Horatio Alger style, from stenographer to writer to editor at various enterprises. In the Journal, as in such books as his Pulitzer Prize–winning memoir, The Americanization of Edward Bok (1920), he preached a sunny philosophy that treated poverty as a spur to character building and embraced mild reforms, such as an anti-billboard campaign, that rarely challenged the status quo.

Helen Gurley Brown (1922–)

Gurley Brown was the editor of Cosmopolitan for 32 years, turning a failed old general-interest magazine in 1965 into an ad-thick, self-help monthly for sexually liberated young females. Her Cosmo, which she called “feminist” and not a woman’s answer to Playboy, was focused mainly on how to win male attention in any way that felt good. Without nudity, it developed a sex-manual style that a Tom Wolfe novel later satirized as “some sort of pornographic parody of Cosmopolitan.” The daughter of a poor Ozark couple, Helen Gurley succeeded by her wits and charm as an unmarried secretary and advertising copywriter in Los Angeles. She argued for such feminine self-reliance in her 1962 best-selling book, Sex and the Single Girl. By then, she was happily married to Hollywood producer David Brown, who helped her seek ways to repeat the book’s success. The Hearst Corporation rejected their proposal for a new magazine, but let her revamp and edit Cosmopolitan. The female consumer she targeted and influenced was the type she described in Sex and the Single Girl as economically “a dream,” because this individual was not a “parasite” in a family but living alone and supporting herself. “You need an apartment alone even if it’s over a garage,” she advised in her 1962 book.

Norman Cousins (1915–90)

Cousins was editor-in-chief of the Saturday Review, a national weekly literary review that grew from a circulation of 20,000 when he began there in 1940 to 650,000 when he fell out with new owners in 1971. Cousins, an irrepressible optimist, returned in 1973 as owner and editor to revive the bankrupt magazine as a biweekly focusing on science and education. It suspended publication in 1982, except for a brief revival in 1986. The Saturday Review had started in 1924 as a continuation of the New York Evening Post‘s literary supplement after the newspaper shut down the supplement. But it flourished only under the sway of Cousins’s boyish faith in well-educated magazine readers who were not of any intellectual clique but simply loved discussing ideas. Cousins later applied his intellectual optimism to the idea that a sick patient’s attitude could contribute to self-healing. He experienced this personally in overcoming a potentially deadly form of arthritis, and promoted the idea in several popular books and as an adjunct professor of biobehavioral science at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Clay Felker (1925–2008)

Felker was a magazine editor credited with inspiring national and city magazines with his 1960s-style creativity in graphic design, New Journalism, sophisticated satire, and service coverage of where to eat, shop, and live. With designer Milton Glaser, Felker exerted this influence mostly as editor of New York, a slick weekly he launched in 1968 as a stand-alone version of the New York Herald-Tribune‘s earlier Sunday supplement. He lost the magazine to media mogul Rupert Murdoch in 1977, but went on to edit other magazines. Felker, the son of two newspaper editors from St. Louis, Missouri, had been a reporter for Life, worked on the 1954 creation of Sports Illustrated, and edited features at Esquire before becoming editor of the Herald-Tribune supplement in 1963. His brash style, on paper and in person, both inspired and intimidated. One former employee said Felker grew bored faster than anyone she ever met, forcing staffers to make their ideas seem interesting within ten seconds. Projecting an in-your-face elitism in print was his great insight into how magazines could survive in the age of television. Print, he said, had become a niche product for well-educated, affluent people with elitist attitudes.

Henry R. Luce (1898–1967)

Luce, the founding editor-in-chief of Time, Inc., created three or four of the most influential magazines of “the American century,” a phrase he coined that expressed his somewhat imperialistic view of the twentieth century. Born and raised in the isolated American culture of a Presbyterian mission in China, Luce started Time magazine in 1923 with his friend from prep school and the Yale Daily News staff, Briton Hadden. The success of this news weekly, the first of its kind, made both men millionaires before they were 30. After Hadden’s untimely death from a strep infection in 1929, Luce launched Fortune magazine and established “experimental” departments to investigate other innovations in magazine forms. Fortune, a pro-business magazine paradoxically flourishing in the Depression, published high quality profiles of businesses with artful photography. Luce launched Life in 1936, buying the name from a former humor magazine, and Sports Illustrated in 1954, proving that excellent writing and photography could appeal to sports fans even if it covered many sports those readers didn’t care about. Luce also created “The March of Time,” a radio and newsreel dramatization of the news that ran from 1931 until 1951, and subsidized a commission chaired by Robert Hutchins to study threats to freedom of the press. Luce retired as editor-in-chief at Time, Inc. in 1965, after it had become the largest magazine publishing company in the United States.

S. S. McClure (1857–1949)

McClure created and edited McClure’s Magazine, a ten-cent monthly that introduced the reform-minded journalism of the early twentieth century known as “muckraking.” He claimed that the alignment of powerful exposés of political corruption and industrial exploitation by Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and others in McClure’s, starting around 1903, was an unplanned “coincidence.” But it was really the result of his long preparation. McClure’s energy, gut instinct for new markets, and good relations with literary journalists put him at the center of this progressive movement of the press. Although McClure struggled financially, his talent for publishing good writers in new forms changed magazine journalism. Samuel Sidney McClure emigrated from Ireland at age nine after the death of his father. He graduated from Knox College, where he met friends and lifelong business partners. In 1882, he launched what was probably the first quality niche magazine, a periodical for the new outdoor activity of bicycling called the Wheelman. He created a syndicate to sell short fiction and nonfiction by big-name writers to American newspapers. He launched McClure’s in 1893, and edited it until forced out by a reorganization in 1911, though he remained active in journalism for another 20 years.

Conclusion

Changes brought by the Internet and digital communications reshaped the various roles of editor. Magazine editors were able to take advantage of the web as a free advertisement, or tease, to draw new subscribers to their print product, which had more sensual appeal in its images and text than either newspapers or the Internet. But for the three major types of newspaper editor—corporate executive, news editor, and opinion writer—the first decade of the twenty-first century presented difficult challenges.

As an executive of a large news operation, a newspaper’s top editor was deeply involved in seeking a new business model for sustainable revenue. Executive editors had to invent—and often upgrade— newspaper websites to serve both readers and advertisers. Working out the relationship between the printed and electronic versions of the paper became a central function of senior editors. Web revenue for newspaper companies seemed to be quite limited— about 10 percent of the industry’s advertising income in 2006, with the rapid early growth showing signs of slowing. By 2008, a weakening overall economy forced many executive editors into the bleak role of overseeing major staff cuts.

News editors face an equally difficult task of finding a balance between the traditional daily news cycle of their newspaper and the instant-update pace of their webpages. Webpages can be updated with an immediacy and ease that newspapers and TV news can’t match. But filing and editing stories for the web takes time away from in-depth reporting for the newspaper. Furthermore, with staff cuts, the additional work has to be done with fewer workers. One editorial response is to equip reporters with video and audio recording equipment to make them more flexible in their work, with less editorial intervention. Another response has been to separate “content”—journalistic coverage of the news—from its delivery or “platform.” This further divided news editors into “news and information” managers on the one hand and digital, audio-visual, or print editors, on the other.

In complex ways, the digital age has loosened the grip that editors traditionally had on their readers, their advertisers, and their reporters. But the flexibility and speed of evolving digital technology also gave new importance to news managers—editors— who could navigate the changes and meet the needs of consumers for information and storytelling.

Doug Cumming