For those of you just tuning in to our on-going blog series, check out our two previous posts about how the new incarnation of Digg came to be, and user feedback on what Digg should become.

To some Internet denizens, the method by which the front page of Digg comes to be is still a complete mystery. Gone are the days of power users — the digg action has been rendered impotent at the feet of all-powerful “human editors.” Or so the story goes. But of course, that’s not the whole story.

I’m here to lift the curtain a bit on exactly how a story lands on the front page of Digg. Who am I, you ask? Allow me to introduce myself: I’m Anna Dubenko, the Editorial Director of Digg and the person leading a team of six full-time editors who scour the best of the Internet just for your benefit. Here are their beautiful faces, illustrated to protect the identity of the innocent.

Below, for your edification/enjoyment, a step-by-step breakdown of the life of a link on Digg:

How The Heck Do Editors Source Their Hot Content?

There are a number of ways a story can get the attention of a Digg editor.

1) RSS
After three years of scouring the web for the best stuff, we’ve acquired a pretty robust RSS list. As of this writing there are 3,601 unread items sitting in my Digg Reader, just waiting to be read, evaluated and selected for the front page treatment. I have trained myself to not get anxious about this number.

2) JustTheTip@digg.com
Did you just publish your magnum opus? Is your YouTube video the next Sizzler sizzle reel? This very special email address is your direct line to a real, live Digg editor. We’re giving it to you because we trust you. Don’t abuse it.

3) Data.digg.com™ or as a predecessor like to call it, “Proprietary Social Scoring Algorithms”
This is one of the tools our crack squad of data-scientists and engineers hacked together that’s become indispensable. It transforms the cacophony of Twitter into a manageable list of stories scored by social signals. Until now we’ve kept this tool relatively hidden, but we figured, what the fuck? In the spirit of sharing the riches of the Internet, we’re opening up our data mine to the coal workers of the web. Digg through it with caution. (See what I did there?)

4) Friends, family and insignificant others.
This category is reserved as a catch-all for the stories our cool aunts email to us from a local newspaper, or the great video our friend from college uploaded to our Facebook timeline. It may be a truism in this digital age of media, but it bears repeating that social networks (dark and otherwise) fuel an incredible amount of discovery and traffic — even for readers as savvy as Digg editors.

5) Our very smart brains.
We got into this business because we love the news. We love reading great journalism and discovering the coolest, most interesting stuff the Internet has to offer. And there’s nothing that makes us happier than discovering and promoting a small blog or under-subscribed YouTuber.

What Happens To A Link Once It’s Been Selected By An Editor?

The driving purpose as editors at Digg is to promote high-quality content — to send precious clicks away from our own site to deserving publishers and video producers. As such, we add a little window dressing to a story to make sure that we’re giving you, the reader, the full pitch.

We might change a headline (no offense to the original writer):

Our story:

Their story:

We also might change the image — as we did in this example — or the description of a story to make sure it works for our audience. You know, different strokes for different folks.

What Are Those Little Captions Above The Headline And Why Are They So Gut-Bustingly Hilarious?

They’re called kickers. You can follow them on Twitter here. We occasionally use this space as way for editors to communicate important information to our readers (when a story is developing or breaking, for example). We mostly use this space to exercise our pun muscle. Here are two of my all-time favorite kickers.

Do Digg Editors *Just* Curate Other People’s Content? Don’t They Write Anything Themselves?

Glad you asked! We’ve been doing a lot more than just curating the best of the web for the front page of Digg. In fact, there’s a tag for that!

Dan Fallon has been summarizing long-form articles for you in his weekly Long-Reader’s Digest column. Steve Rousseau, apart from performing editorial magic as our Features Editor, brings you the best/weirdest news of the week in his recurring series: What We Learned. There’s also Bryan Menegus who, besides running the video page, also creates original video for Digg and puts together Videos of Substance for you to watch and feel good about. If politics are your thing, check out Ben Goggin’s Enthusiasm Gap, a weekly roundup of the circus that is political life (complete with a weekly conspiracy theory). Veronica de Souza, our Social Media Editor, performs the impossible and entices our Tumblr audience to leave their dashboard and come to Digg. To find out how she does this, read this post. If you’re a cool teen, a) thanks for reading this whole blog, and, b) check out what most certainly can be called works of art created by Joe Tonelli for Digg’s Snapchat account.

TL;DR: We’re human and we’re proud of it. Digg editors are here to bring you the best of the Internet and highlight the stuff that most robots would miss (low batteries are such a bummer). Pretty soon, we’ll put some of this editorial power back into the user’s hands, but that’s a blog post for another day…

If you’ve got any feedback for me or my team, I’d love to hear it! Leave a comment below or write to me at anna@digg.com.

-Anna