COOKED
The bulk of editorial hours — copyediting, grammar and style enforcement, headline and SEO variants, trimming to length, rewriting weak drafts, formatting to house style — is exactly what language models do at usable quality and near-zero marginal cost. What survives is the commissioning and accountability tier: deciding what stories are worth running, judging whether a source claim holds up, managing writers, and owning the legal and reputational consequences of publication. The modal editor today spends far more time on the first list than the second, and there is no license or signature requirement anywhere to slow substitution.
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. Line-level work — enforcing AP or Chicago style, cutting a 1,400-word feature to 900, generating six headline and dek variants, fixing subject-verb agreement, checking that a byline matches CMS metadata — is now a prompt away, and what pushes this to 7 rather than 4 is the residue that still needs a human in the room: pitching decisions in the morning meeting, calling a reporter to ask how they know a claim, and deciding a piece isn't ready to run.
Fully desk- and screen-based. The job is a CMS, a style guide, and Slack; the only physical element left is print-era press checks and proofing physical galleys, which almost no one on this SOC code still does, hence 2 rather than 0.
No licence, no signature requirement. There is no editorial licence, no board, no continuing-education requirement — anyone can hold the title tomorrow, and when a defamation claim lands it names the publisher and the corporate entity, not the editor who approved the copy.
Some relationship component. Writers do choose to work with editors who improved their last piece, and freelancers follow trusted commissioning editors between outlets, but readers never learn who edited what — the relationship is with a few dozen contributors, not the audience paying for the product, which caps this at 7.
Meaningful discretion. Deciding whether a single anonymous source is enough to publish, whether to hold a story for another day of reporting, or whether a correction needs to be a retraction are genuinely unscripted calls with real consequences — but they sit inside a masthead where an EIC, standards desk, or legal review signs off on the truly dangerous ones, keeping this at 11 instead of the high teens.
Archivists EXPOSED
Producers and Directors EXPOSED
Has AI actually changed your work?