The Brady group sells signage and safety equipment under three brands: Seton, Signals and Securimed. Their category pages had been created over the years, with no common logic. The three brands ended up competing with each other for the same Google searches.
We rewrote their content on a common model: a three-level hierarchy, one template per level and per brand, a voice specific to each brand. The engagement grew brand by brand, then into translation: three years, three brands, three languages, more than 3,500 product references. That work is editorial engineering.
What editorial engineering is
Editorial engineering is the discipline that treats an organisation’s speech as a system. It means deciding what the organisation says, writing that down as rules, equipping teams and AI assistants to apply them, then measuring the result.
The word “engineering” refers to the method. Every decision is written down. Everyone who produces uses the same tools. The rules are corrected against measured results.
Where the principle comes from
We did not invent this vocabulary. In digital publishing, the editorial chain is the sequence of operations that turns an author’s text into a published document, by separating substance from form. We described that principle in 2019, in an article on decoupling in the digital editorial chain. In English, the neighbouring term, content engineering, mostly refers to modelling and managing content inside software. Editorial engineering is not that: it governs what a brand says, not how a CMS stores it.
We apply the principle to a brand’s discourse. The organisation decides what it says before any writing, once, for all its texts. The employee, the supplier or the AI assistant who writes a text then starts from those decisions.
The five decisions, in order
1. The offer
The first decision is the offer: what the organisation sells, to whom, and what sets it apart from its competitors. Working on the brand voice does not correct an offer that has not been decided. We handle this decision with the Clear Offer Framework.
2. The voice
The second decision is the voice: the brand’s vocabulary, its registers, the wordings it rules out. It is written into a charter that teams and AI assistants apply. That is the purpose of the Brand Voice Framework.
3. The structure of the content
The third decision is the structure of the content: the page templates, the metadata and the classification (the taxonomy). At Brady, each piece of content was given a level: authority, subject structuring or product detail. Each level has its own template.
4. The production chain
The fourth decision is the production chain: who writes, with which templates, who approves and at what point. An editorial template sets out in advance what each text must contain.
AI assistants enter this chain on the same terms as writers. At Rossel, each title’s brand rules were turned into instructions. They feed a central campaign generation system and an AI environment specific to each title: see the case study.
5. Governance and measurement
The fifth decision is governance and measurement: who holds the system over time, with which approval routes and which indicators. Without an editorial framework, every article is argued over again at approval, sometimes twelve times.
The indicators serve to correct the rules. On our own site, five articles carried the phrase “editorial line”: 46,769 impressions in Google results and 51 clicks in a year. We designated one cornerstone article. The rule has applied to the whole site since: only one article owns a term, and the others point to it.
The tool that steers that editorial framework is the Content Operating System. Our article on editorial debt sets out the cost of having no system.
Editorial engineering and content strategy
Content strategy sets the objectives, the audiences and the subjects. Editorial engineering builds the rules and the tools that put that strategy into practice as the number of authors, channels and pieces of content grows.
An organisation can have a clear content strategy and no rule for applying it. Each author then decides again, text by text, what the organisation says. Twelve writers, the same tools, three usable texts: shared rules were missing.
The editorial engineer’s profession
An editorial engineer brings together several skills: language, information architecture, search optimisation, project management and, with generative models, the configuration of AI assistants. They write texts. They also write the rules, the templates and the approval routes that allow others to write them.
In 2020, we devoted a podcast episode to this profession, with two project managers. One was a philologist by training who had specialised in editorial steering. The other worked on content strategy and on search optimisation.
Where to start
If your offer has not been decided, start there: the voice and the tools depend on it. That is the starting point of our Clarity engagements. If the offer and the voice are written down, the work is on the production chain: those are our Growth engagements. Our Elite engagements cover editorial governance.
Frequently asked questions
What is editorial engineering?
Editorial engineering is the discipline that treats an organisation’s speech as a system. It means deciding what the organisation says, writing that down as rules, equipping teams and AI assistants to apply them, then measuring the result.
What is the difference between editorial engineering and content strategy?
Content strategy sets the objectives, the audiences and the subjects. Editorial engineering builds the rules, the templates and the production chain that put that strategy into practice over time.
What does an editorial engineer do?
An editorial engineer writes the rules that allow others to produce the texts: the voice charter, the templates, the approval routes, the instructions given to AI assistants. The profession brings together language, information architecture, search optimisation and project management.
To situate your own organisation, contact us.