13 September,2026 08:31 AM IST | Mumbai | Tanisha Banerjee
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What is editing? A large number of people confuse editing with copyediting, consisting of fixing typos, checking grammar, and making sure a story follows a publication's style. But it's more than that. "A good editor is the difference between a good story and an award-winning story. Without a good editor, I don't think that's possible," says award-winning journalist Parth MN.
The dictionary defines editing as preparing a piece of writing to be published, making sure that it is correct, the right length, etc. "But if you're a writer, you need an editor to poke holes in it. Their job is to point out flaws in your writing so that when the story is eventually published, it looks better than your original draft," says Parth.
To edit is to understand the world of writing with all of its rhythms, loopholes, structures, and possibilities. It means knowing when to cut a paragraph, when to ask a writer to go deeper, and sometimes, pushing the writer in the right direction. Parth works closely with People's Archive of Rural India (PARI) founding editor P Sainath. "Back in 2016, I was covering Marathwada and the agrarian crisis. Sainath called me up and asked me to accompany the migrant workers and write a story of their migration," Parth narrates. Even though he was unclear what that would add to his article, he ended up squeezing himself onto a tractor with the migrants. He spent two days and two nights under the open sky with them as the workers migrated from Maharashtra to Southern Karnataka. "I ended up winning the Lorenzo Natali Media Prize in Brussels by the European Commission for this piece," Parth says. He ends up applying this lesson to every article that he works on till today.
This is why editing is one of the hardest skills to hone and one of the most important processes in publishing. Yet, it is often one of the least thanked jobs in the room.
The recent upheaval at The Polis Project is a reminder of just that. On August 19, the New York-based progressive publication founded by Suchitra Vijayan terminated three full-time editors. They say this came after they raised concerns around editorial independence, the work environment, and organisational policies. The former editors say they were given no prior notice.
"Suddenly we could not access our mail and servers on that day. We had no prior notice and we could not communicate this with the writers we were working with," says Kaashif Hajee, one of the former editors at The Polis Project. A writer and editor based in London, Hajee had worked with the publication for two years.
Following the departure of two political editors, Vijayan took on the role of political editor. Hajee says this raised questions about the division between an organisation's executive and editorial functions. "Suchitra herself didn't do any editing work. When she got a piece she would offer developmental changes. Then the rest of it would fall on her assistant editors," explains Hajee, "It put disproportionate work on us, but also compromised the editorial independence of the organisation. Effectively, the executive director who's in charge of fundraising and managing people's salaries was also acting as the political editor. So that also creates another issue of governance."
Parth believes that the loss of an editor is not just the loss of another pair of eyes on a copy. It is the loss of a mentor. The journalist, who has also won the Ramnath Goenka Award, says he would rather not write for a publication where AI is the only thing editing his work. "I will be mortified if somebody tells me that only AI is going to edit my copy," he says. He further argues, "The editor shapes the reporter. The new generation of reporters will lose a mentor if there are fewer or no editors."
The Polis Project's former editors also wrote in an Instagram post how writers were shocked by the explicit use of AI in the comments and suggestions made by Vijayan. Hajee sees a similar problem with AI, but from the other side of the editing desk. "I would expect that it would offer you extremely superficial ideas about how you can improve the story without making much sense," he says.
This is part of a larger devaluation of writing, creativity, research, reporting, and intellectual work with AI representing the idea that this work can simply be generated. The irony, he says, is that editing is already a thankless job. Editors may spend hours shaping a piece, but their names rarely appear on the finished work. PARI and Reuters are one of the few platforms that does credit its editors.
Yet Hajee says there is an ownership that comes with editing. "In a good magazine, you feel a sense of ownership over anything that the magazine actually puts out," he says. At The Polis Project, he says, editors were repeatedly told that they were "the heart and soul of the organisation". But that sense of ownership becomes complicated when the work is not valued through pay, credit, or even job security. "Editing is vital. It should not be so, but it does feel quite thankless. It's not like the money is actually good at all," he says. As an editor, he questions whether he wants to continue editing when the industry does not value the labour behind it.
We reached out to Suchitra Vijayan, who did not respond to us.
Associate Director of New India Fellowship, Nandini Nair talks about the value of an editor at their fellowship programmes
The value of an editor becomes even clearer when a manuscript moves from an idea to a book. At the New India Fellowship (NIF), every fellow's work is seen by a full-time in-house editor before it reaches a publisher. Nandini Nair, associate director at NIF, says editing is treated as being as important as the financial support given to its fellows.
"When a manuscript from an NIF reaches publishers, a lot of their work has been done because it has been better edited at a line level and a big-picture level as well," she says. For a writer, she adds, the greatest value of an editor may simply be distance. This also allows an editor to protect an individual voice. "When you're writing a book or even an article, it's also about retaining your own voice, about laying your own style," she says.
She worries that an over-reliance on AI could flatten those differences. "A big problem in the industry is that editors are being sidelined. The fact that we can say that, âOh, AI can do this as well', is an issue. You want the human voice. You want articles to sound different from each other and you don't want it to be completely uniform," she says, "That personal connect between a writer and editor can be essential to how a book finally emerges."
Senior Features Editor of Vogue India, Sadaf Shaikh, talks about the need for editors to have respect for a writer and build a relationship through that
For Sadaf Shaikh, senior features editor at Vogue India, editing rarely means simply receiving a finished draft and passing it up the chain. She was recently praised on her editing work for a Vogue article. In her five years at the publication, she says there are usually several conversations before a story reaches her own editor. "I don't think it has ever happened in my five-year career where a draft has come in and I've just been like, okay fine, just immediately pass it on to my editor," she says, "There are almost three rounds of editing between me and the writer before it goes to my editor."
Sometimes, the editing begins even before the first draft. "What a contributor has pitched is interesting, but we've already explored various versions of the story," she explains, "So we'll be like, okay, what if we tweak it a little bit?" This is where editing becomes more collaborative.
That also extends to a publication's stylesheet. Vogue's global teams develop its Universal Content Guide, which is then contextualised for each market. "We standardise and we contextualise them for each market," she says, citing the decision not to italicise Hindi words as an example. "We felt that otherwise we were othering ourselves, considering this is Vogue India."
But perhaps the most important editorial skill, Shaikh says, cannot be found in a style guide. "Being courteous and having that rapport with a writer should be put down as a skill for an editor to develop," she says, "For an editor to have respect for a writer, I think that is an admirable skill. I have seen stories fall apart because an editor and writer could not get along." The aim, she says, is to know the work better without assuming you know the writer better - "I know where you're coming from and I want to meet you there." Speaking about ownership in her work, her final reward is not a byline. "An editor's sense of fulfilment just comes from a good story on the page. And every writer usually credits their editor."
Nishka Rathi, a ghostwriter, explains how clients refuse to hire an editor for her work
Nishka Rathi has ghostwritten eight books while also helping authors with their books. Her need for an editor becomes clearest when she gets too close to the person whose story she is telling. Her process involves hours of conversations with authors, which she records, transcribes, and revisits to understand not just what they say, but how they say it. "Some words stick in your head, the way the authors speak, the way they say certain things. It's like method acting for me in a way," she says.
But after 40-50 hours of conversations and a first draft, Rathi says she can begin to think like the author herself. That is where an editor provides the distance she can no longer have. An editor, she explains, might tell her, "For your reader, just explain this more," or ask her to make something "more concise" or "more emotional". The intervention can make an idea crisper and the writing more polished. "An editor helps polish it, helps make it better, defines it better," she says.
Sometimes clients do not always see that value. Rathi has had clients tell her they do not want to spend on an editor because the manuscript is "good enough". "It is good enough because I would never give a bad copy," she concedes, "But I feel an editor will elevate it, which they don't understand." She also finds herself explaining to clients that editing does not mean someone simply rewrites their book. "There are different levels to this work," she tries to convince them. Sometimes, she adds, she has had to agree when a client refuses an editor only to later hear complaints about the writing. "I was like, I told you, we need an editor. I told you that for a reason."
Samarth Menon, Managing Editor at Writer's Side, says time constraints placed on editors in book publishing industry actually plummets the quality of books
Samarth Menon, managing editor at Writer's Side literary agency, brings in the book-publishing perspective, where an editor's relationship with an author can stretch across months or even years. He says the editor is not merely a manuscript's first reader, but its "biggest champion". At the acquisition stage, "if the editor can't justify or understand what the book is about, then there's nowhere else for the book to go," he says.
But as publishing timelines shrink, Menon says this process is increasingly under pressure. "I've seen a lot of copy editors actually getting the short end of the stick," he says. With understaffing and shorter news cycles, editors are sometimes expected to turn around manuscripts in days. "In order to hit deadlines, the quality of the book is essentially compromised," Menon says, "That's where you see errors start to creep in. That's where you see overall just quality of the books go down."
