Reply #9: I had this discussion years ago in writers' groups, and... [View All]

[TreasonousBastard]

I'm firmly in the experienced editor camp.

As much as many of us would like to think we do, most of us don't have either the time or the expertise to wander through the infinite number of submissions on myriad topics and magically find the best ones. The worth of editors has always been that they can sort through the chaff and deliver the good stuff.

Do they occasionally miss something? Sure, but how much do we miss now that we dig through blogs looking for the good stuff?

The dirty little secret of Gourmet was that hardly anybody read it for the recipes. Martha Stewart and Emeril have known this for years, and the Food Network is just figuring it out.

Gourmet was a lifetsyle magazine. Its purpose was to show us the high end of life, and how much of it we could partake of ourselves, and how much we could just dream of. As with Architectural Digest, we can live vicariously dreaming of the possibilities, with no real hope of living in those mansions, but maybe taking a few tips to make our own humble abodes a bit nicer.