I became an editor because there are so many stories that need to be told. As a media writer, you can only work on so many at a time. You might have several stories going at once: You’re working on a long form story, a shorter story, and something more personal while also writing something with characters. Media education is a booming field, and as an editor, I can assign more pieces for media writing and have more stories being told at the same time to produce a wealth of storytelling.

Nowadays, there is an entrepreneurial side to writing. Writers are urged to publish newsletters, post blogs, or maintain a Medium account. You’re going to write online media education materials continuously. But you’re still limited to the amount of physical effort you can put into it. At some point you’re going to burn out.

When you’re an editor with a hundred writers all writing at once, you can time the release of their work, you can pace it. You can publish at different intervals and tell a variety of stories that relate to the media industry. You have the chance to share a broader perspective with these options in play that allow you to publish an abundance of stories.

Nowadays, when we think about the multimedia environment, there’s been a lot of change from the past. We’ve been talking about new media like eBooks and sort of this evolving landscape for a good 20 years now. Remember that as you continue your online media education.

There’s always been a great deal in the way of antecedent and history in media writing. Because when you look at the invention of the printing press, even there you have this long cycle of egalitarian movement in print. You had originally these illuminated manuscripts, which were handwritten by scribes which took a very long time to produce compared to the blazing speed of today. You could really just produce only one of that manuscript.

But then you had something that just poured out into the world with the printing press. That’s essentially what we have again with the information on the internet, which was great for media education. And again, as it happened with the printing press, we had information that was really good and valuable in the beginning, and then kind of a sea of nonsense. Now you have this shrinking pool of where you want to get your information from. So increasingly it became these high-powered publishers because you trusted them more in the same way that we have our trusted websites today.