The most powerful man in business journalism

John McDermott of Digiday writes about LinkedIn editor in chief Dan Roth, who spends his day scouring pitches from the financial media, looking to aggregate those most likely to resonate with their own audience of 86 million U.S. visitors.

McDermott writes, “But LinkedIn’s core functionality as a professional network is exactly what gave it a huge advantage when it came to building out is media operation. ‘At Fortune and everywhere else, we were constantly fighting to get the professionals’ attention,’ Roth said. ‘The idea of building a content operation at LinkedIn where the professionals already were seemed incredibly valuable.’

“Weiner’s only mandate to Roth was to figure out how LinkedIn could grow its media operation. How that was accomplished was entirely up to Roth and his project manager Ryan Roslansky, however. After a year of experimentation, they realized that aggregating news stories wasn’t enough.

“Roth’s focus when he started was LinkedIn Today, the recently launched business news portal. The hope was that human editors would complement the site’s aggregation algorithms. Roth hired two former Associated Press journalists to help him curate.

“‘Curating newsy content was not a distinguishing component for LinkedIn,’ Roth said. ‘Even if our algorithm got 20 percent better and our editors got 20 percent better, there was no way for members to know the difference.'”

Read more here.