Ed from IT

What about editors? You can be sure that Dagfinn Føllesdal has published work, he's a professor emeritus at two universities. Given that prestige, does this mean he can forego an editor? A look at his page tells us that he edits collections himself.

As we can see from these links to publications, many are edited collections and there is work by single authors that is nonetheless edited. As a career it is complicated by the rise of text editors and code editors that literally cut out the middleman. Sure, that's in a cyber environment but many writers would be working on their PC even if the finished product is to be published in hard copy.

Editors (the old fleshy kind) can be found working on journals, magazines, short story collections, novels and non-fiction/reference.
There's a vast array of work that has to pass the editor's glance before being published and printed.

To look at the work of some editors, let's take the editorial team at History of Human Sciences, a publication of SAGE Journals: Felicity Callard, Rhodri Hayward, Angus Nicholls and Chris Renwick. They're academics and they write and publish work around the subject in addition to their editorial duties.

With other work both online and published in print, the background of the editors changes, if not the role they perform.