Web editing

Venture capitalist Fred Wilson hoped aloud on his blog earlier this week for a software application that would allow his readers to edit and proofread his content after it has been posted.

The idea of audience-powered editing is enticing, and at least one company, gooseGrade, is betting on its popularity with both bloggers and readers.

Lawrence Downes writes a heartfelt piece in the New York Times this week titled “In a Changing World of News, an Elegy for Copy Editors.”

Downes laments the plight of the traditional newsroom copy editor, whose job it is to “trim words, fix grammar, punctuation and style, write headlines and captions.” He says that copy editors are a dying breed because their function—“to slow down, think things through” and “make sure that the day’s work of a newspaper staff becomes an object of lasting beauty and excellence once it hits the presses”—is incompatible with the speed with which news is published online.

Type “web content editing” into Google, and almost all of your top results will be for software that edits web code, not text. You’ll find the odd site that offers advice on writing for the web. But no results lead to companies that provide editing services exclusively for web content.

We think that’s a shame, because people who want quality editing for their websites will have to dig fairly deep to find viable options. With the Internet being the main source from which vast (and still growing) numbers of people get news, information, and entertainment, there is a lot of room to improve the standard of writing on the web.

The web isn’t starving for another company blog, so we were reluctant to start this one. But it makes sense that a business providing editing services for web content would have a regular voice discussing the topic. So here it is.