Editors

The title of editor is conferred on a wide variety of individuals who determine what appears in [Page 478]newspapers and magazines. The term editor today can refer to a newspaper's top executive or a lowly copy editor. Every news department, such as those responsible for a newspaper's sports, features, or business sections, usually has its own editor to assign or approve stories and manage reporters.

By the early nineteenth century, the editor was the most important (and often the best known) figure at a publication. He (most were men) often combined several roles that were “editorial” in quite different senses of the word. A traditional editor was the paper's opinion-leader, executive, spokesman, literary stylist, and on occasion the publisher or owner. Such were the eclectic pioneers of the mid-nineteenth-century penny press, notably James Gordon Bennett Sr. at the New York Herald and Horace Greeley at the New York Tribune. Starting around the time of the Civil War, editorial functions began to be divided up; a publisher would hire an editor-in-chief, while the daily management of a newsroom would fall to a managing editor. A century later, the various jobs of the old-fashioned full-service editor had been further split and downgraded into specialties within a corporate structure.

Still, a publication's top editor was its public face. As late as the 1980s, executive editors such as Ben Bradlee at The Washington Post and Abe Rosenthal at The New York Times could attain a certain nationwide fame, even though they did not determine the editorial position or business side of their publications. But the next generation of executive editors, in an era of falling circulation and media-industry consolidation, had little fame and that only among journalism insiders. Top newspaper editors of the early twenty-first century were typically corporate functionaries or, at best, fighters of a losing cause for professional autonomy and higher newsroom budgets. Many lost their jobs to that cause. In the heyday of mass-circulation magazines, meanwhile, the personality of a single editor often stamped the character of such periodicals as The New Yorker (under Harold Ross, then William Shawn), the original Vanity Fair of the 1920s and 1930s (under Frank Crowninshield), Time (under Henry Luce, then T. S. Matthews), and The Saturday Evening Post (under George H. Lorimer). Since then, the age of the titan magazine editor has passed.