Ask ten people in content marketing what “editorial” means and you’ll get ten answers that are all, in some way, wrong.
Most of them will describe it as a synonym for content. “Our editorial calendar.” “Our editorial team.” “Editorial content” as distinct from advertising content. The word has drifted so far from its original function that it now means roughly what “content” means, which means it has stopped meaning anything useful at all.
This matters more than it might seem, because when you call content “editorial” without understanding what editorial actually is, you lose the thing that makes editorial worth having.
What content is.
Content is material produced to achieve a distribution goal. It exists on a channel. It targets an audience. It is measured by reach, engagement, conversion, and ranking. It is planned in a calendar and executed by a production process. It is managed by a content manager and reviewed by a CMO.
This is not a criticism. These are just its actual properties. Content is the production layer. It is how you get things made and out the door.
What editorial is.
Editorial is the judgment layer above production. It is the function that decides what is worth making, evaluates whether what has been made is good enough, and maintains the standard that makes a body of work coherent over time.
Editorial is not a role or a team. It is a function — a specific kind of authority, applied to a specific kind of decision. The editorial function asks: Is this worth a reader’s time? Does it say something they couldn’t find elsewhere? Is it as good as we can make it? Should we publish it at all?
These questions are different in kind from the questions content management asks. Content management asks: Is this ready? Is it the right length? Does it have the keywords? Is the CTA in the right place?
Both sets of questions matter. Neither replaces the other. The problem is that most organizations have the content management questions covered and the editorial questions answered by nobody. The gate nobody’s keeping is not the production gate. It’s the judgment gate.
How the confusion happens.
The conflation of content and editorial is partly historical. When digital media was young, the people doing editorial work were also doing content work — writers published directly, there weren’t yet layers of specialized management, and the editorial function was embedded in individual practitioners rather than in organizational structure.
As content operations scaled, the production layer grew enormous, and the editorial layer didn’t scale with it. You ended up with content managers, content strategists, SEO managers, and social managers — all production and distribution functions — and no equivalent scaling of the editorial function. The organization forgot that the editorial function was a distinct thing because the word had drifted, and nobody was tracking it.
What gets lost when editorial disappears.
Without an editorial function, content operations produce to the brief and the calendar. What they don’t produce is judgment about whether the brief was the right brief, or whether the calendar is building toward something, or whether the body of work is becoming more authoritative over time or just accumulating.
This is the content technical debt problem in its most fundamental form: years of production without editorial judgment produces an archive that is large, diffuse, and weak — lots of pages, no coherence, no compounding authority.
It also produces voice problems. A content operation without editorial oversight produces content that sounds like the brief — which sounds like the brand guidelines — which sounds like every other brand’s guidelines, because brand guidelines are written by committee for maximum inoffensiveness.
Voice requires an editorial ear. Not a style guide. Not a keyword list. A person who reads the content before it ships and knows what it should sound like and can tell the difference between content that has the voice and content that is imitating it.
The editorial function in practice.
Editorial is not a job title, though it can be held by a person with a title. It is a function that needs to be explicitly assigned, resourced, and protected. Explicitly: someone has to know it’s their job to ask whether the content is good, not just whether it’s done. Resourced: they need time to actually read things, not just approve formats. Protected: their judgment has to have authority over the revision process, or the function is nominal.
This is what a managing editor does. Not content management. Not strategy alone. The editorial function: maintaining the standard, protecting the voice, asking whether what’s been made is worth publishing.
Most content operations have never had this function, which is why most content operations have the same set of problems — quality plateau, voice inconsistency, an archive that doesn’t compound — and address them with the same set of solutions that don’t work: more keywords, better briefs, updated style guides.
The problem is editorial. The solution is editorial. They’re not the same as content, and they never were.
Jacob Clifton is the principal at Clifton Creative.