Success Quote by Jesse James Garrett

In Garrett's framing, "journalist" and "information architect" aren’t distant professions so much as adjacent survival strategies for the same modern predicament: too much stuff, not enough sense. The key move is the phrase "give shape to the pile". Information isn’t presented as truth waiting to be discovered; it’s a raw heap that has to be structured, edited, sequenced. That’s an argument about power as much as craft. The person who organizes the pile quietly determines what feels obvious, what feels secondary, and what never gets seen.

Calling comprehension "easy and natural" is the subtextual tell. He’s describing an ethical ideal (reduce friction, respect attention) and a design ambition (make the interface disappear). In UX terms, the best architecture is the one users don’t notice. In cultural terms, it’s a promise that the chaos of the information age can be domesticated without users having to become specialists.

The context here is early web and UX thinking: Garrett is famous for articulating user experience as a discipline when websites were still treated like digital brochures. His businessman’s pragmatism shows in the non-romantic equivalence: journalism isn’t elevated as a noble calling; it’s treated as training in constraint, clarity, and audience empathy. The final line is career-legitimizing, but also quietly radical: it argues that "content" and "structure" are inseparable, and that sense-making is the real product.