Senior Editorial
Leadership
is one of those phrases that sounds authoritative and means almost nothing without specificity behind it.
It appears on websites, proposals, LinkedIn headlines. It gestures at something real and consequential. It rarely explains what the thing actually is.
So let me explain what it actually is. Specifically, what I actually do On a given Tuesday.
Before Anyone Else
Is Working
I read.
Not briefings or strategy documents or analytics dashboards — those come later. What I read is content that published this week, and what published last week, and occasionally something further back someone flagged or showed up in a search result as I was looking for something else.
I read as a reader first, not as a strategist. Is this good? Would I have kept reading if I’d encountered this cold? Is there something here that earns attention, or is this a participation trophy publication?
This reading informs everything after. You cannot make good editorial decisions about content you have not read.
This is obvious.
It is also violated constantly by people in positions of editorial responsibility who are literally too busy to engage with the work they’re overseeing.
That’s why there’s me.
The Morning
The first substantive thing I do is look at what’s in progress — the pieces in draft, in review, and scheduled to publish.
For anything in draft:
I read it and respond with editorial notes. not copy edits: They are structural and strategic observations. this argument assumes knowledge the reader doesn’t have; this section is doing the same work as the previous one; the conclusion undercuts the premise established in the introduction.
I am looking for whether the piece is doing what it wants to accomplish, and whether what it set out to accomplish was the right goal.
For anything in review:
I check whether the feedback given was actionable, and whether the revision addressed it. Bad feedback produces bad revisions, and one of the most consistent editorial problems I encounter is a revision cycle that has generated more heat than light — the piece has changed, repeatedly, without getting better.
For anything scheduled to publish:
I do a final read with fresh eyes. Does this meet the standard? Is this the piece we want representing the brand today, in this context, after everything else that has gone out recently?
Middle of the Day
A substantial portion of my time is spent in conversations that do not look like content work, but are.
A call with a client’s marketing director about why a campaign is performing below expectations.
This is not a reporting conversation, it’ i’s an editorial conversation about whether the content for the campaign was actually designed to work, or designed to satisfy an internal checklist. These are very different motivations with very different outcomes.
A message thread about whether to pursue a particular topic.
Someone has an idea. I need to decide whether the idea is good, whether we have something specific to say about it, whether we are the right voice to say it, and whether this is the moment to say it. These are decisions that look small individually but define the editorial identity of the brand, and thus the brand, over time.
An hour working on a content brief that is turning out to be harder to write than expected.
This usually indicates the strategy behind the brief is not yet clear enough to produce good content. A brief that’s hard to write is a gift: it is telling you something about the clarity of your thinking that is better to discover now than after the piece is drafted.
Editorial Review
Once a month — or quarter, depending on the engagement — I step back from the individual pieces and look at the body of work.
What did we publish? What performed? What didn’t? What are we saying, in aggregate, to the audience? Is the library building toward something, or are we producing isolated posts that don’t compound into authority?
This is the level of editorial work most content operations skip entirely, because it requires holding onto a lot of information at once and drawing conclusions that aren’t immediately actionable.
It is also the level that determines whether the content operation is building something durable, or just filling a calendar.
I come out of this review with observations and usually a few specific recommendations: a topic cluster that’s underrepresented, a high-performing piece that should have three follow-ons that haven’t been written yet, a category of content that’s generating traffic but not of the right audience.
What This Is Not
It is not content production.
I am not the one writing the posts, most of the time — though I sometimes do, and sometimes the most useful thing I can contribute is a piece that demonstrates, rather than describes, the standard.
It is not content management.
I am not running the calendar, or managing the workflow, or handling the logistics of the operation. Those things matter and someone needs to do them. It is not me.
It is editorial judgment, applied consistently, over time.
Which sounds less impressive than a list of deliverables. It is harder to scope, harder to invoice, harder to explain to a CFO reviewing the vendor budget.
It is also what determines whether the content operation produces work that matters or just that exists. I have yet to find a more efficient way to put this.
I write about content strategy, editorial leadership, and the mechanics of doing this work well.
For inquiries: jacob@cliftoncreative.agency · cal.com/cliftoncreative