Situation

Although lesson content was considered central to the design process at my former organization, other types of content weren’t getting the same attention. A factor in this problem was that the editors—who were also in charge of content management, clarity, consistency, and cross-product continuity—were being left out of workflows because people didn’t understand the full breadth of what they did or why it was critical. This meant that one-off decisions were being made about content without looking at the bigger ecosystem, which was leading to client confusion.

Task and Actions

Making the argument that content was an interrelated system meant, in part, making the case for editorial. I needed to show the full extent of what the editorial team was tasked with, but let’s face it—most non-editors think editing is either checking for stray commas or flat-out boring. I opted for “informative but silly” with my PowerPoint.

The films Barbie and Oppenheimer had just come out, and people were seeing the two films together and calling it Barbenheimer. This editorial presentation is a riff on that. Before I made the PowerPoint, I had no idea that Pinterest is chock full of Barbie dioramas, so I added that little fact to the long list of “random, unrelated, and occasionally weird things I’ve learned while editing.”

BarbenEditor Presentation PDF (contact me for password)

Results

The product unit became more aware of what their editors were doing, which also made it clearer that there were standards for content that needed to be met and that tasks to ensure those standards needed to be added to workflows.