Taste and/or big data?: post-digital editorial selection

Abstract

Trade publishing has been transformed by the interventions of digital technologies in workflow, products, sales, marketing and distribution, placing the twenty-first century industry in a post-digital age. Editorial commissioning, however, remains a largely traditional process, in which the individual editor’s taste, judgement, and gut instinct combines with company behaviour and market environment in selection processes. Drawing on analyses of publishing’s gatekeeping processes, and a dataset of interviews with UK commissioning editors, the article argues that while, for the main, editorial selection does not currently incorporate big data and algorithmic processes, its reasons for so doing might reside in the need to retain the human within publishing processes, and an evasion of the ‘machine imitating human’.