Issue 28

Who has the authority to stop content at your company?

Before my career in the tech sector, I was the managing editor of a small weekly newspaper. I had a number of duties, but one of them was making sure that stories were well-reported and ready to be published. Occasionally I would hold stories for a few issues so that we could finalize them. And, I suppose, there were a few stories that we never did publish.

Fast forward a bit, and I’ve spent most of 20 years in software companies working on enterprise content. More than half of that time, there’s been no person who had the authority to prevent a piece of content from getting published.

I know that there are companies that may have a more mature content operations practice that may have someone in that role, and I imagine that regulated industries may have more editorial oversight.

I feel like organizations and event content professionals have silently stopped saying “no” or “not yet” to content, and we’re paying the price for it. We’re drowning in unhelpful content as consumers and drowning in content that we as content professionals must manage.

It seems to me that most organizations have quietly removed the idea of editorial authority, and we haven’t talked about the consequences of that change.

We aim to optimize for speed and volume, but we’re really exchanging quality for quantity.

Here’s how editorial oversight manifests, depending on what you care about:

• Managing risk: Publishing inaccurate, confusing, misleading, or libelous content introduces legal, financial, and reputational risk to an organization. Publishing incomplete content or failing to publish certain content also introduces risk, especially for regulated industries. Publicly traded companies also need to exercise extra care.
• Establishing consistency: Consistency builds trust. You may have style guides and voice and tone guidelines to foster consistency, but the more people interpreting the guidelines, the less “on brand” your content will be. And we know that the guidelines are often ignored—on purpose or not.
• Striving for clarity: In many organizations, more people are contributing to public-facing content. They are not traditional writers or content professionals. Someone needs to take complexity out of tricky ideas, remove jargon, and make content more reader friendly. For a product company, clearer content means faster onboarding, fewer support tickets, better self-service, and higher adoption of software features. And, as Brené Brown says, “Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.”
• Aligning on vision and strategy: As teams optimize for their own goals—like persuasion, conversion, or precision—they can drift from the bigger picture vision for organization-wide content. Someone needs to look across everything and help teams pursue their goals while staying on narrative. Someone needs to help snuff out short-term tactics that undermine long-term trust.
• Enabling scale: We already talked about the fact that more people are contributing to public-facing content. You have engineers, product managers, marketers, advocates, and maybe even partners creating content in addition to technical writers, content designers, and so on. Having more people creating content increases scale. Someone needs to be creating guidelines and teaching these new content creators. Editorial oversight isn’t a bottleneck. It’s an enabler of sustainable growth.

How can we bring editorial authority back?

Most organizations probably don’t want a top-heavy team of editors that stifles the production of their content teams. Indeed, that’s probably usually the wrong approach.

At one point, my UX content strategy team worked closely with a team of editors that might be a useful model for others to adopt. They had a handful of editors, each with their own strengths such as copyediting or developmental editing, working under an editor-in-chief.

In many ways, they were an exemplary editorial team. They were not heavy-handed, throwing their weight around. Rather, they poked and prodded, asking tactful questions. They coached and partnered with stakeholders, and they had eyes on content across the enterprise.

If I were creating my own editorial team, I’d stick close to that model, but I’d be sure there would be an editor-in-chief who had ultimate authority to hold content back from being published, with delegated authority to a team. However, the team’s first course of action would be to question and coach past the problems. Exercising authority to stop content would be the last resort.

If my budget was big enough, I’d want editors on the team with different skillsets. Some of those skillsets would include actual, focused editing abilities, but my dream world probably also involves roles that bleed into content operations, content design, and content strategy.

What does this look like where you work?

I accept that not every organization needs an editorial team—it may not work financially or culturally, for example.

I’m curious what editorial oversight looks like in your current or past roles related to editorial oversight. Who says “no” or “not yet” today? How is that authority communicated? What works and what doesn’t?

Reply to this if you’re a subscriber, or email model-thinking@tripleoakenterprises.com if you’ve landed on the web version of this article.

Top of mind

Things that are bouncing around in my head as I synthesize a range of ideas

John Collins

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