The Internet presents journalism with so many challenges that it's hard to isolate any one of them as primary. But it may be ultimately that the power described in "The Wisdom of Crowds" (James Surowiecki's excellent book) will overwhelm what editors do and render us irrelevant. In that outcome, we will have been disintermediated. Google News already harnesses the crowd to surface news stories without human editors being involved at all. Algorithyms, not editors determine placement.
What is it that is vital that editors do? I'm not sure that our journalism community has been able to successfully articulate an answer to that question, but we better prepare one, because the crowds are coming.
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