(Reading time: 6 – 9 minutes)
If you want to publish a lot of articles on your blog, you need an editorial policy to:
- Develop guidelines for how articles are published
- Develop guidelines for when articles may be modified, including reasons for the modification: fixing errors, rewriting for clarity, adding notes to an ongoing conversation with the reader, etc.
- Establish revision control policy to keep track of changes.
- Show these editorial policy and publication guidelines to your readers.
We’re going to take a look at these aspects of publishing in more depth shortly, but first, let’s back up and examine where your blog stands in the publishing universe.
What does “publication” mean anyway?
The meaning of the words “publishing” and “publication” are changing.
Before the internet, a publications such as books, magazines or newspapers took on a final, canonical form once they rolled off the printing press. These days, documents that live electronically on the internet, such as the articles on Website In A Weekend, can be infinitely replicated for fractions of a penny each, and propagated anywhere in the world in an instant.
In the real world, changing a document is expensive, requiring more paper, and the old paper doesn’t go away. In cyberspace, the source document, perhaps this article, could be extensively modified on a regular basis, and few humans would know about it. Automated tools such as search engines can store the revisions they find when they crawl the site, but who looks back through the cached copies? Given that the nature of electronic publication seems so much different, does having clear guidelines really matter?
Publication guidelines matter
Having guidelines for publishing articles on blogs matters as much as having guidelines for printing on paper.
But for a different reason.
In paper publishing, the cost is in the printing and distribution. Controlling these costs requires evaluating the potential return on the writing. For web delivery, the cost is in the author’s time… and the reader’s time. You need a solid set of guidelines for publishing on your own blog so that your readers can instantly understand the value they derive from spending their time reading your writing.
How you publish articles
I use the word article because I don’t make a sharp distinction between “posts” and “pages.” Both are articles, each with different characteristics. What’s more interesting to me are these other characteristics, which influence how I publish articles. In some cases, posts may turn into pages, posts may be removed, or modified to limit readership according various permissions or to published in a different form such as a downloadable PDF.
The key is to publish according to your purpose. If you want to make money publishing, you can’t give away all of your words. That’s a contradiction in terms.
Modifying: updating and editing
As you write more and more articles, you will find that you will want to change at least some articles. Some of the reasons may include:
- Material that goes out of date should be deleted or the reader otherwise alerted to it’s expiration.
- Correcting factually incorrect material
- Continuing a conversation with the reader at a future date. RSS example
- Correcting poor grammar or diction, other wordsmithing chores. Some might say this is not allowed. I don’t really care because I have a tendency to write “telegraphically,” with apparent non-sequiturs making perfect sense to me while confusing readers. I have no compunction against honing such articles when rewording or reorganizing increases the article’s readability.
- Modifying post structure to provide a teaser, requiring the reader to “turn the page” (click through) to read the entire article. If you’re going to use teasers, it’s better to write them into the article from the beginning, but it usually isn’t that difficult to “retrofit” a teaser onto a published article.
Establishing revision control
WordPress has the capability to save all of your draft versions and all versions for each time you edit after publication. For long posts developed over a long period of time, this puts quite a burden on your database, as WordPress saves the entire revision, and not just the differences between revisions. You can turn off revisions completely, but then you run the risk of accidentally destroying an article if you make an ill-advised cut and paste, then navigate away from your page without saving it.
That sounds stupid, but at least one person reading this article has had the cat or the dog walk across the keyboard at least once. These things happen.
Watch for a future post detailing your options for revision control, which will recommend installing a revision control plugin to set a certain limit on your revision history (Website In A Weekend keeps 5 revisions at this time).
In the meantime, if you’re just starting out, allow saving revisions and plan to dig deeper in the future.
Showing guidelines to readers
On the one hand, readers should feel comfortable they are getting honest, accurate information, and telling readers explicitly what, when, why and how your editorial policy operates should engender trust. For example, one interesting concept I learned this morning from a marketing newsletter is that author’s notion of “evergreen” content. Evergreen content doesn’t expire; it retains it’s validity over time and space. On Website In A Weekend, articles on creating pillar or flagship content are evergreen (although embedded links may expire and need to be replaced or removed). In this case, such content could be tagged as “Evergreen,” allowing the reader yet another perspective on your body of work.
On the other hand, there is always some noisy person who takes unction at the drop of a hat. That is, tell people you modify an article, if you have enough readers someone is going to take offense.
When this post was published, I did not find (via web search) much relevant material on editorial policy for websites. In one notable exception, Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture has an explicit statement on his editorial policy. In his words, if you don’t like what he writes, “Get your own damned blog.” That’s pretty good advice!
The beauty, power and elegance of evolving conversations
When you make changes in the articles, should those changes be shown to the reader directly? Good question. My rule of thumb is: only when it doesn’t interrupt the narrative. If it adds to the conversation, by all means, annotate your article. Changing and modifying is part and parcel of the web… the web’s inventor, Tim Berners Lee designed the web specifically as a read-write system.
Remember, in the end it’s your content. You have the freedom and control do with it whatever you choose… just as readers have the freedom choice whether to read or not.
Update: Here’s an Jeff Jarvis discussing “Product versus process journalism.” The adversaries are bloggers on the one hand, and the New York Times on the other! How does it go? First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.
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