i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Ann Rockley's article for L12, "Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy" includes a section at the very end called "Redefining Roles in the Organization" that bugs me. Author, editor, and information designer roles are listed as completely separate roles that seems to imply mutual exclusivity—i.e., authors should just write, editors should just edit, and the design of information and content management systems should be left to a seaprate class of information deisgners. What I was trying to get at regarding the academic journal authors in class today is less applicable to academic journal authors than for, say, a copywriter or even a culture critic. It is completely possible that an author or an editor can be a qualified information designer and, in fact, may have specific and unique perspectives because they are more familiar with the content than anyone else. After all, they produce it. An author or editor who can learn to see the content from the message and execution perspectives as well as from the higher level system design perspective is positioned to be a fantastic information designer.

With publishing trying reinvent itself to make money, an author or an editor who can fill both her original role and the role of information designer is more valuable to the organization—specifically, cheaper than hiring two different people to fill the roles. This is especially to a small, struggling, or up-and-coming publication trying to keep costs low. For instance, my knowledge of HTML allows me to work quickly and efficiently as a blogger, somethign I've been doing before WYSIWYG formatting tools became standard in blogging interfaces. It's comes around to the idea of the T-shaped professional that anyone else in MIIC is learning about: my specialty may be i authorship, but if I develop an understanding of the other aspects of the process, and even become proficient at something like information design, I become a more valuable employee. In a time when writing jobs that pay well are not easy to come by, developing a more diverse skill set could be a way for writers and editors to get paid and still do what they enjoy.