The future for editors is at brands, not magazines

A successful editor today is not the cultural curator of legacy days

What is the role of a fashion magazine editor today? If the job, traditionally, was to be a kind of cultural curator, an arbitrator of who should be talked about and what is worth looking at – showcasing the best new talent, clothes and perspectives – then what does that role mean in an algorithmically shaped world? Now that tastes, trends and cores are created at high speed by “digital mechanisms that absorb piles of user data, push it through a set of equations, and spit out a result most relevant to preset goals,” as Kyle Chayka puts it in his book Filterworld, curation and commerce are practically indistinguishable. 

We’ve moved past the stage of social media being a democratising force within the industry to being something we are all reliant on. The power held by these tech companies and the business decisions they make have reshaped the entire media industry several times over. To varying degrees, all editors now answer to social media. As one I spoke to put it (they decided to remain anonymous out of an abundance of caution in regards to iron-clad NDAs they’ve signed, so let's call them The Editor), magazines and brands are “leveraging similar mechanics to ensure that they are getting as much attention and engagement as possible.”