I Have done A Lot
— and I mean a lot — of content audits. I have looked at a lot of content operations that were not working.
Today I want to tell you the by-far most consistent finding.
It’s not the keywords. It is not publishing frequency, or content length, channel mix, the absence of a documented strategy. Those things are real: fixing them matters.
The most consistent finding is that the wrong people are making the editorial decisions.
Not wrong in the sense that they’re bad or unqualified people. Wrong in the sense that these are people making calls they are not set up to make well, in a structure that doesn’t support editorial judgment, because nobody ever explicitly designed an editorial decision structure — it just accumulated.
How It Accumulates
It starts, like all messes, with very good intentions.
The company needs content. Someone gets handed the blog — often the marketing coordinator, someone with bandwidth and enthusiasm and a genuine interest in writing. They start publishing. The content is fine. Nobody is paying close attention.
the company grows, or the content operation grows, or someone senior decides content matters and wants to be involved. Now the coordinator’s drafts go to a VP for approval. The VP has opinions. These opinions are not always strategically informed — they are the opinions of someone who knows the company deeply, the content landscape less deeply — but they are the VP‘s opinions, and they are applied.
Then a subject matter expert gets involved, because accuracy matters. Then legal needs to review anything that makes any kind of claims or says anything interesting. Then the founder wants to see the posts about their area of expertise.
Now, each of these additions makes sense individually.
Together, they mean an approval process that is slow, inconsistent, and optimized for not offending anyone rather than for producing content that actually works.
Nobody designed this, it grew. Like broccoli or a fungus. But now, it’s the organizational structure within which every content decision gets made.
what to do?
What the Wrong
Structure Produces
Content that is safe.
It has had every edge removed by a revision process that is not interested in edges. Whose every layer contains someone anticipating the next person up’s objections, and arriving there early. It reads like it was written by a committee — because at this point, it basically was.
Content that is slow.
The approval cycle I above does not move quickly. It moves at the speed of the busiest person in the chain, which means it often does not move at all until a deadline forces it.
Content that demoralizes writers.
Good writers — the kind who have a point of view and can argue for it — simply do not thrive in environments where their work is routinely softened by people with different agendas. They leave, or they learn to write to the committee rather than to the audience.
Content that cannot improve.
Improvement requires feedback, which requires someone with editorial authority and the expertise to give it. A VP who reviews for accuracy and tone, a legal team that reviews for liability, a founder who reviews for brand feel — none of these is editorial feedback. None of this produces better writers, better writing, or stronger content over time.
What You Can Fix
Without Changing
the Org Chart
The honest answer is that some content problems require structural change that you do not have the authority or appetite to make.
If the VP reviewing every piece of content is doing so because they truly must, and the org is not going to change, that constraint is real.
But, and this is a big old but, there is almost always more room to work within the existing structure than it first appears.
Name the editorial decision-maker.
Someone needs explicit, acknowledged authority over whether a piece of content is ready to publish. Not review authority — decision authority. The difference here matters a great deal. Review can be distributed; decision must not be.
Figure out who that person is, and again: make it explicit.
Separate editorial review from compliance review.
Legal, regulatory, and accuracy reviews are real and necessary. They are not editorial review. Running them on the same timeline, through the same process, with the same authority over the final product, produces content that confuses safety from a lawsuit with being good. These should be parallel processes, with different scopes.
Give the editorial decision-maker actual authority.
This is the one that requires the most organizational will and buy-in. If the person responsible for editorial quality does not have the authority to say “this is not ready” and have that decision respected, the role is not real.
You have a person whose job is to recommend, and someone else whose job is to decide, and the content will always reflect the preferences of whoever decides.
Audit the revision history.
Look at a piece after it publishes and trace what changed, from the first draft. If the changes made it better — sharper, more specific, more useful — the process is working. If the changes made it safer, softer, less distinctive — the process is filtering out what made the content good.
This is diagnostic information. Use it.
The Structural Fix
If you have more latitude, the structural fix is simple to describe and hard to implement: put a person with genuine editorial expertise in charge of editorial decisions, give them the authority to make those decisions, and hold them accountable for the quality of the output, rather than the smoothness of the process.
This is what a managing editor does. It is what a fractional editorial director does. It is what doesn’t happen at all in most content operations, which is why they produce stuff that exists but does not particularly matter.
The content problem and the people problem are the same problem. Solving one without the other is solving neither. Both have the same starting point: a real content strategy that defines what the operation is actually trying to accomplish.
I write about content strategy, editorial leadership, and the organizational dynamics that determine whether content works.FOR
inquiries: jacob@cliftoncreative.agency · cal.com/cliftoncreative