What is the name of this (editing) job?

August 3, 2020 2:04 PM

Editor-in-chief would like to do more editing, less chiefing.

Doing this anon because a medium-motivated person could connect my account to my real identity and it's probably not politic to talk about things you hate about your job in that case.

I'm the editor-in-chief of a small online magazine. I'm fortunate that because we are small and nonprofit, I can actually spend a lot of time on improving people's writing through multiple edit rounds (many sites don't have the leisure). But that's still only a fraction of my job. I'd like to do more of that and less of the rest.

The part of my EIC job I like:
Making writing better. I mostly do this in-depth over multiple rounds of edits for essays, which is great, but I also enjoy improving grant language, streamlining emails to authors or publicists, writing fundraising letters. For essays I do a lot of developmental work, trying to hone arguments, and it's often a near-therapeutic process where we're figuring out what the author really means, but I would be fine just improving sentences. In my ideal world, I would like to just be handed a steady stream of writing to make better, and mostly otherwise left alone to do my work.

The parts of my EIC job I don't like:
In media, editing is like... the least of an editor's job. Mostly I should be coming up with story ideas, "driving the conversation," creating and maintaining the voice of the site. I'm tired! I often wait for people to pitch me something I can work with instead of being a fount of ideas, and it makes me feel like a failure. I'm tired of deciding whether pitches are good, even! I am tired of being a gatekeeper, with the sole responsibility to seek out and maintain diversity of voices (this is important to me and I do want to contribute to increased diversity but I don't want to be THE potential bottleneck). My job also currently involves a TON of stuff that doesn't have to do with content at all—social strategy, fundraising, budgeting, scheduling, lots of management, dropping everything when my boss has a thought she needs me to engage with. I enjoy these things when they have to do with making writing better, e.g. editing a grant proposal or putting a finer point on an email one of my editors wants to send to an author. I do not enjoy them otherwise. Also, it would be nice to get out of media, which is rapidly crumbling.

Basically, I want to be the editor NOT in chief. No chiefing. Chiefly less chief of anything. Just hand me the sentences that need fixed and leave me alone.

Obviously people don't get to have jobs where they like every part. (And I know looking for new jobs at all is largely fantasy in this economy!) But I feel like this job exists in the business or ideally nonprofit or academic world, and I just don't know it because I've always been in media. Would it be called copy editing? Is it communications, or is that something else? The gig I've had that was closest to this was "content strategist" for a nonprofit, but I'm not sure if this is what "content strategist" normally means, and the "strategist" in there makes me suspicious. (In the case of this gig the strategy was just voice.) Do you have this job? Do you work with someone who has this job? What's it called and how do I find one?

posted by anonymous to Work & Money (8 answers total)

This job exists at larger media companies. I know assistant/associate editors who basically do this, and a higher-level editor is the gatekeeper for pitches, and a managing editor handles some of the administrative work, a social team handles social media, others handle finances and the business side, etc. But if you want to get out of media because of the uncertain state of the industry, I think you could also find this in something like technical writing (I'm guessing on this last part, because I haven't done technical writing).
posted by pinochiette at 2:29 PM on August 3, 2020 [1 favorite]

The nuances of what this is called will really vary from company to company and industry to industry. In some of the publishing worlds I am in, this is a copy editor or editor.

You might look to traditional (book) publishers for more editing-heavy jobs.

Also look for freelance "proofreader" jobs. These may be a bit editing-light, but might help to scratch the itch...

You might also be interested in working at a marketing agency or a large corporation, assisting in brand compliance - basically ensuring that everything a client puts out matches branding standards (including press releases and the like).
posted by hydra77 at 2:51 PM on August 3, 2020 [1 favorite]

I’m a copy editor, and I would call the position you want manuscript editor.

The distinctions aren’t super clear and wouldn’t apply everywhere, but in my world (science/medical editing), manuscript editors are more able to actively try to make work better while copy editors are mostly making it not wrong. Manuscript editors are also able to take a more global approach to improving a piece, while copy editors tend to work sentence by sentence. But the area you want to work in may use these titles in different ways.
posted by FencingGal at 5:43 PM on August 3, 2020 [2 favorites]

I would be fine just improving sentences. In my ideal world, I would like to just be handed a steady stream of writing to make better, and mostly otherwise left alone to do my work.

This is me, exactly. In academic book publishing (humanities/social sciences), I am called a copy editor. But the scope of a copy editor's job description depends on the field/industry (as hydra77 and FencingGal point out), as well as on the particular client. For example, the medium-sized press I work for the most defines copy editing primarily as "making sentences better." However, I've talked to managing editors at giant presses (coughOUPcough) who told me that their copy editors basically just insert tags for ebook publication and don't touch the writing unless there's a serious problem with it.
posted by Beardman at 6:52 PM on August 3, 2020

A content or developmental editor? There are many independent editors who work by contract and choose the specific type of work they offer.
posted by stormyteal at 7:04 PM on August 3, 2020

PM me if you would like some suggestions about how to get more people pitching you with appropriate ideas while you look for a job that is a better fit. (I am a former editor so I also appreciate writers who bring ideas with them.)
posted by Bella Donna at 5:22 AM on August 4, 2020 [1 favorite]

A decent fraction of my work right now is basically what you describe. I call it developmental editing. But it's not the work itself or the name for it that shields me from the nonsense--it's that it's freelance. If I worked in-house, I'd be the gatekeeper again. I'd have to come up with the ideas. I'd have to go to meetings and try to translate the garbled nonsense tumbling out of the grandboss's mouth into something possible to execute at lightning speed. As a freelancer, they send me the text, I work on it, I send it back, I never think about it again. It is, quite frankly, The Dream. But it doesn't pay enough to be my only gig, I pay for my own health insurance, and there's no guarantee for how much work I'll get or even if at any point I'll ever get work again. It also hasn't gotten me out of media.
posted by lampoil at 5:30 AM on August 4, 2020

For a non-media alternative, you might look at government. I've worked with several people who have jobs that aren't necessarily writing material from scratch, but improving what other people write. In my current job, we write quasi-judicial decisions and we have a team of editors who take our draft reasons and make them better. In my previous job, one small part of it was responding to Ministerial Correspondence, and there was a team of editors who took our drafts on what to include in the reply and banged them into actual correspondence in the Minister's voice. There are lots and lots of things that get written for public consumption in government and at least where I've worked in the Canadian federal government, almost all of them go through a formal edit first, so there are a lot of editors working all through the government -- on communications teams, on correspondence teams, and in their own particular little enclaves in all sorts of departments. Usually those jobs are listed as writer/editor, but how much writing and how much editing they do varies considerably.
posted by jacquilynne at 6:35 AM on August 4, 2020