In my post last evening about BusinessWeek freshening up the talent pool by permanently relieving journalists of their obligations there was the name Shirley Brady. She had some extra duties at BusinessWeek that make her a great example of the this talent.

Brady is a new breed of editor that must take the time work work the site and cull the value of the community. They like every other community manager have a responsibility to the publisher bring up levels of engagement and work towards as much transparency as possible.

What makes her a unique breed though is that she herself is a journalist and to perform the duties of a community editor is required to understand her fellow journalists, the editorial process, corporate messaging and managing digital brand artifacts, both legacy and current. The community editor is at the forefront of digital engagement and the public voice for many company – a tall order.

Now in this expanding pool of talent is Shirley Brady. I don’t know Ms. Brady, but I can tell you that anyone at a corporation performing these types of duties has their work cutout for them. This role is presents a major culture shift corporate structure and often goes, as in this case unappreciated.

You can read a short interview with her and other community editors on PBS’s MediaShift blog from yesterday. Brady will be available for the draft on Dec 1.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Add A Community Editor To That List is a post from: TechStartups.com

Bloomberg is helping to ensure that when it comes time for you to hire a trained journalist that you can pick from top talent – the highly trained kind with decades of writing under their belts and rolodexes full of names.

Sure names like those that are coming out of Bloomberg would be costly and increase the overhead of any business significantly. But man, in a time when content is driving every business and the ones that are built on poor models are failing, this is where the rubber meets the road. Quality content matters.

There are media networks that are being crushed under their own weight as they stopped licensing content from organizations like AP and Reuters. They’ve been dropped because of the annual expenses that networks thought they could earn back in creating content on their own or annexing it from citizen journalists.

There is no mistaking that when major media outlets are in a race to the bottom that the reason is because of content. The fight for audiences with extreme views either right or left have enamored the outlets for the last five years. What they created was an insatiable desire from their audiences for spectacle. The next needing to be bigger than the last. Usually these players were left to their own devices to rile up their contingents.

The rise of the internet exacerbated the need for major media outlets to become salacious and embrace tabloid tactics to compete for audience – so the outlets thought. Those that chose not to do this needed to grow news bureaus or create content for syndication. NPR is one such company that followed this model. Even helping its radio personalities find their way to the tube. The ones that haven’t are at the bottom of the ratings with diminishing audiences for their news fed shows.

They are there because they pander to the basest human intellect. Believe me when I say that what puts a media company in this position is a lack the foresight and strategic planning. When you have little or no original content and add little value to purchased content, it doesn’t matter how great the technologies supporting them are because they too will falter. It will be at a later time than the demise of on air personalities with nothing to say or partner providers of Google food for the online rankings that keep bytes flowing through expensive data centers.

Depending on how you look at this situation it is a dire state of affairs or the greatest opportunity to begin building a media company in decades. There is talent to be had as it is being cut loose from business models that refused to embrace the coming of online distribution. The next web is waiting. Who is going to be weaving it? You?

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Journalist Draft Pool Growing is a post from: TechStartups.com