When I first worked for a (student) newspaper, the job of a publisher seemed odd to me; as far as I and my editorial colleagues were concerned, the pu

Faceless Publishers

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2022-01-17 19:30:04

When I first worked for a (student) newspaper, the job of a publisher seemed odd to me; as far as I and my editorial colleagues were concerned, the publisher was the person the editor-in-chief, who we viewed as the boss, occasionally griped about after a few too many drinks, usually with the assertion that he (in that case) was a bit of a nuisance.

That attitude, of course, was the luxury of print: whatever happened on the other side of the office didn’t have any impact on the (in our eyes) heroic efforts to produce fresh content every day. We were the ones staying in the office until the wee hours of the night, writing, editing, and laying out the newspaper that would magically appear on newsstands the next morning, all while the publisher and his team were at home in bed.

The moral of this story is obvious: the publisher represented the business side of the newspaper, and the effect of the Internet was to make the job and impact of editorial easier and that of a publisher immeasurably harder, in large part because many of a publisher’s jobs became obsolete; it is the editorial side, though, that has paid the price.

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