What does 'editorial work' mean in photography?

Strictly speaking, a photo is a photo. What delineates an editorial photo from a commercial photo, a technical photo, an artistic photo, etc. isn't necessarily determined by the content of the photo. Rather, it is the way in which a photo is used that determines if it is editorial or not. Many photos might be used for more than one usage at one time or another.

The usage of a photo is considered editorial when the photo is either used to tell a story or to aid in telling a story. Photos used for editorial purposes can fall into several categories. In the news business things such as Spot News, General News, Features, Sports, Photo Illustrations, and Portraits are all considered editorial usage. This list is far from being comprehensive, but covers the most common types of editorial work. Newspapers and magazines may use some or all of these types of photos to tell or help to tell the stories they publish. Magazines such as Sports Illustrated, Newsweek or National Geographic are full of editorial photos, but so are magazines such as the National Enquirer and People and publications such as The Weekly World News.

When it is said that a photographer does editorial work for a particular magazine or group of magazines, it either means that the photographer generally shoots images on assignment for the magazine(s) in question or that the photographer shoots images of subject matter he hopes the magazine(s) will be interested in publishing as part of a story they will want to tell.

An example of an assignment from a magazine may be anything as general as documenting "America's Homeless Persons" which could cover photographing any homeless person anywhere in the United States to something as specific as shooting a portrait of the Queen of England in Buckingham Palace for a story on her 80th Birthday. It could be anything from a one day assignment to capture photos of a sporting event to spending several decades following the lives of a set of sextuplets at periodic intervals.