Problem Article Process Overhaul
We received some feedback from our authors through various sources that our problem status emails needed some work so we took a look and found that we had room for improvement.
…So the Editorial Team and I dedicated some intense hours over the last few weeks and re-wrote the problem article emails that are generated to our authors.
Every article that we review receives one of 2 actionable statuses – Approved or Problem status.
Problem status means there is something in that article that did not adhere to one of our Editorial Guidelines, and it must be fixed in order for us to look at it again so an email is generated to better explain what needs to happen.
What we did:
- Re-wrote each Problem Article status. This means that the guts of every email that is generated from a problem status is now even more specific to the problem so that our authors will understand what we are looking for and what they will need to do to get their article approved. We also offered some examples in these to further explain what we found to be erroneous in the article.
- Cleaned up what wasn’t needed and removed “repeated” directives. This was fun :)
We took 71 status’ and condensed them into 40 status’ that offer more information more clearly.
We have changed internal processes since the last re-write and we found that the efficiencies that we built internally enabled us to use far less status’ than we had. Removing them will provide the editors with more consistency and our authors with clearer directives.
Because this change affected many structural changes internally, we must roll this out in 4 phases that will be finalized in approximately 10 days.
The end goal is that you’ll spend less time in determining what is wrong with the article and more time doing what you’re good at – Article Writing!
Thanks for investing the time to do this. Though it doesn’t happen often, I do get a rejected article once in a while. Knowing EXACTLY what needs to be fixed is great :)
Now…since we’re speaking of rejected articles, one item that I don’t quite understand, one of my articles was rejected because I used my first name in an example I offered.
I did change the name to “Chris” which really had no impact on the article, resubmitted and it was fine.
Maybe that rule could allow us to use our name one time??? Ok…if that opens you up to more spam than you want, I’ll just use the name “Chris” when I’m offering examples of what to say or what not to say.
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