Jeff Herring - The Article Guy writes:

Hi Chris

Nope. Did not notice any delay here. You have an awesome machine, one to be admired.

As I said on our teleseminar last week, you guys are a great example of constant and never ending improvement.

Jeff

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Ed Howes writes:

Hey Chris,

It seems to me this will be a recurring problem as growth cycles may not be predictable enough to have new staff trained and ready. Why not have an alternative message for your submission acknowledging auto responder to alert basic members of the temporarily extended turn around time, since they will not likely see this blog post?

I like to read – when the content is of interest to me. Yet, even if I could check only content of interest to me, I can’t imagine doing this editing job more than four hours per day or for more than a few months. Is there a lot of turnover in the editorial staff? Do senior editors train new staff or have additional options to give them a break? I have been curious about this for many months.

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Christopher M. Knight writes:

Ed,

I personally reviewed the first 30,000+ articles and never got bored of reviewing them…so I don’t think that is an issue for most.

The editors are scanning the article for mechanics (does the article meet the 5.5 pages of editorial guidelines or not) as that consumes a high majority of their article approval attention.

It’s not like they are grabbing a coffee and sitting down to read every word of every article slow enough to comprehend the content as there isn’t time for that. Between checking the content for originality and exclusivity of license (ie: Can the article be found anywhere else under someone else’s name) and reviewing the HTML code syntax and sentence structure and briefly the content, they are on to the next article.

There isn’t a lot of turn over, so that hasn’t become a problem.

Yes, editors who have been with us longer do assist in the training of newbie editors.

We have an internal training system (that’s documented) that continually gets updated and added to in addition to daily internal communications to keep everyone on top.

In terms of breaks, there are many duties that editors perform beyond the basic article review and approval… from re-reviews of edited articles that need to be approved again to Platinum upgrade requests, new membership registrations to review, new alternate authors to review, new photos uploaded to eyeball, making notes on an authors account, manually adding/reviewing articles in batches based on bulk submissions from approved authors, new extended author bio’s to review, new comments on articles to approve or reject, quality control review of approved articles, and the list goes on for at least another dozen items or more.

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Ed Howes writes:

Chris,

Thank you for the most complete and satisfying responses I have ever received on the internet. :-)

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Edward Weiss writes:

Here’s an idea…. speed reading! I used to write abstracts and had to be able to quickly go through entire journal articles to glean significant info fast. Might be worth it to teach your team how to speed read.

And what they say about higher retention rates is true! When you know how to skip and skim for specific information, it really helps.

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