Editorial Interpretations
Check out this interesting predicament (said with the same style that John Travolta said in the 1997 movie, Face Off):
The more we communicate with our members, the more they get mad at us for not being consistent.
1) Start with the premise that our article reviewers & quality control team members are not allowed to personally communicate with any members.
2) A year ago we had 17 templates that our editors could email notify a member when his or her article needed a quick adjustment to become approved.
3) Today, we have 31 problem article templates including the new capability to send one custom generated template email with up to 3 different problems listed at a time to be fixed.
4) The number of editors on our team has doubled over same time last year. Getting everyone on the same page including memorization of a few hundred guideline issues has been a real challenge.
There is some weird law at work here that states the more you communicate, the more consistent your members expect you to be…and perhaps rightfully so.
Statement: We intend to run an operationally efficient website that includes delivering a consistent article review, rejection & approval process with a high level of accuracy, speed and communication.
It will take us weeks and months to develop our current internal training program that is becoming modularized including benchmarks (frequent knowledge review quizzes). During this scaling transition time, we’re making more editorial interpretation review mistakes than I’d care to admit.
Platinum members may have noticed that we’re running behind by about double our normal (still 2-4x faster than basic level membership) review speed and this is largely because of an increased internal pressure to QC 100% of every article approval after the fact by a 2nd person.
One of our goals with our QC (Quality Control) team is to reach a point where their jobs are boring…ie: Our front line editors are not making mistakes…because it’s egg on our face when we have to reject an article a day or so after it was accepted. There is a buffered difference where our QC team can fix common mistakes (mis-spellings, href code errors, lack of or too many paragraph breaks, and other mechanical/format issues)… but in a handful of cases we’re having to hard reject an article after it was accepted because it should not have been accepted by the first editor.
Another 3 job offers were sent this week, so hopefully we’ll be adding another 2-pack of editors to the team in a week or so… and we know it takes about 6 weeks to bring editors up to speed.
Thanks for listening to many of thoughts on my/our minds this month. We don’t want to offer excuses, but thought it’s good to share the struggle we’re in to deliver the consistent experience you’re looking for from us as members.
Perhaps there is no weird law at work here and that the increased communication options our team has doesn’t have any connection to the anger a few handfuls of members have with us for being inconsistent…because the inconsistency has to do with the complexity of rejection options that now exist…which ironically are designed to IMPROVE the acceptance rate.
You guys do a great job and I have no complaints even if it does take a few days to get my article approved. So what? It’s going to be online for years bringing me traffic – what’s a few days in that context?
The reason you’re growing is because you’re successful. You’re successful because people know you are a great place to post articles. Because of that I want to keep using you.
I’ll bet the people who get angry are the ones who a) haven’t read the guidelines, b) only have a handful of articles and therefore think that every one is critical and c) would probably complain if their cornflakes had too much milk in the mornings.
This is an amazing FREE service and I’m grateful for it.
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