Amused, and disappointed, at editor's jargon

Reuters blogger Felix Salmon doesn’t like the jargon that came from CNNMoney.com executive editor Chris Peacock during the interview posted earlier today on Talking Biz News.

Salmon writes, “The top editor of most publications has always been wheeled out to impress advertisers on a regular basis, but online editors can often be much more constructive and helpful, without violating any ethical boundaries, than their print counterparts. They tend to have an instinctive idea of what works and what doesn’t, on their site — and that kind of hard-won intelligence is exactly what advertisers want to know.

“It’s important, then, for top online editors to be able to speak the business side’s language. If nothing else, it helps them to get the resources they need to create a great product. But equally when they’re not dealing with business-side issues, I think there’s a lot of value in them showing that they haven’t had their brains eaten by zombies.

“When economics meets politics, as we all know, politics wins. And when the business side meets the editorial side, the business side wins. And that’s the downside of merging the two: in a medium which in journalists are already increasingly pressured to maximize their daily pageview numbers, it falls to their bosses to fight for the kind of things which might not be as immediately quantifiable, but which are much better at building a long-term franchise.

“When journalists instead see their bosses spewing missions and strategies and coverage-supporting application packages, they tend to get a little demoralized. Those things are all well and good, but I tend to get worried when I see them emanating from anybody with the word ‘editor’ in his job title. It means that a crucial part of editorial leadership — clearly articulating the vision of the site or publication, rather than just asserting that you have one — is prone to getting lost.”

Read more here.