Some thoughts on editing...
This is my weekly newsletter on technology, media & culture. With a combination of marking and the holiday, instead of the usual email format I’ve made this a different sort of letter - I want to vary the form a bit from time to time. This issue focuses on editing. I'll be returning to the usual format next week.
Editing, editing, editing…
There is a satisfying relentlessness to editing a periodical. The work is never really complete. Issues and volumes reach an endpoint and go to press, but these are only fleeting moments, a brief pause in the cycle. When an issue is completed the next one is already well underway. Pieces are simmering away at various stages of development, ready to be packaged together in a future issue. Yet each issue still feels like a milestone. Editing is a task that is never over, the momentary reward that issues bring punctuates the unending roll. Editing has a rhythm; it's collaboration to a drumbeat.
I’ve held some sort of editorial role for about 8 or so. I did a couple of years as book reviews editor at Information, Communication & Society before moving to be the website editor at Theory, Culture and Society. About three years ago I moved from the TCS website to co-editing the journal. The three editorial roles have all been quite different. The reviews editor role was mainly about commissioning. Finding the right books and matching them with reviewers is the main activiy in that role. Very few reviews arive without being commissioned. A reviews section requires ongoing activity and the pursuit of content. Then, of course, you have to read and edit the incoming reviews. Only about a quarter of invitations turned into actual reviews, so it required quite a bit of energy to keep the section moving. Lots of commissions are needed to get in a decent stock of reviews. The good thing with this is that a reviews editor has lots of scope to be able shape the coverage and direction of the section. I’ve always thought that book reviews are important to dialogue and debate - there is a defence of book reviews I wrote a little while ago here - so it was worth the effort.
At the same time I was editing the ICS reviews section I had set up my own blog that covered issues around culture and media. This led the editors at TCS to invite me to edit their website. It was a great opportunity to do something with a wider remit. So I left my reviews editor role and I also closed down my own blog to focus on the TCS site. We spent some time reimagining the existing site — one of the things people perhaps don’t know about editing is that it can be about shaping the infrastructure as well as the content. We created an outline of types of content and thought about how to develop the site as a supplement to the journal. Then, again, it was about commisioning. This time trying to find different styles and topics of writing, emerging ideas and interesting developments. The editorial task there was about trying to imagine what content and formats people might want to read about, and then trying to secure it. Commisioning can be overlooked, but it is probably the most direct way that an editor can shape a field and a publication.
Over time I moved, about three years ago, to working on the journal. Editing the TCS journal is a slightly different mix of activities. We still commission pieces, which helps us shape the direction of the journal, but it is also about managing the flow of articles we recieve as submissions. We get quite a lot of material. So, it is about handling the stream of very different types of content whilst also trying to work out the gaps or exciting developments for commissioning. The decision about what to leave out of the journal are often quite hard, but peer-review is a limited resource and we also want to keep a sense of the direction and coverage of the journal. Editing is often about trying to imagine how things will turn out in the future, a sensitivity to where things are going, as much as it is about holding things together in the present.
In academia editing is often sidelined. It's viewed as being something editors should fit in around everything else. The research assessment measures largely ignore it, except it can be included as part of the narrative about environment. Editing works if our eagerness for involvement in producing something interesting outweighs the costs. It always has for me, and I’m hoping to keep an editorial role if I can. I like that ongoing rhythm.
More often than not writing is a lonely craft with only books and ideas for company, wheras editing is always about collaboration and being part of something. It’s about building and connecting as well as crafting. There is also something rewarding about seeing the finished product of the work you have done to facilitate and give a platform to other people’s writing and ideas.
David Beer
The Data Gaze was published in December and is available in paperback and ebook. Georg Simmel's Concluding Thoughts: Worlds, Lives, Fragments is now out.