Editorial guidelines

What editorial guidelines are

Editorial guidelines are the written judgement calls behind your publishing. They say which subjects you cover and which you leave alone, what you are prepared to claim and what evidence a claim needs, how you refer to competitors and customers, what a contributor may write under your name, and who decides when two people disagree.

They are not a style guide. A style guide rules on how a word is spelled. Editorial guidelines rule on whether the sentence should be published at all.

The document they are most often confused with is content standards. The difference is worth holding on to. Guidelines decide whether a piece may exist and what it is permitted to assert. Standards decide whether this particular draft is finished. You can write something entirely within the guidelines that is not yet good enough, and you can write something excellent that the guidelines say you must not publish.

When you need one

Three situations. Someone other than the owner now writes in public, and every draft has to come back to the owner because nobody else knows where the lines are. You sell something where a careless sentence carries real consequence: health, money, safety, licensing, warranties. Or you take guest articles, work with an agency, or have staff posting under the company name.

If you publish rarely, write it yourself, and make no claim that could turn out to be wrong, you do not need this. A short definition of good enough to publish covers the ground for a fraction of the effort.

What goes in it

• Subjects in and out. The themes you cover, and the explicit list of ones you do not: politics, other people's disputes, anything outside your licence, anything you would not want read aloud to a customer.
• Claims and evidence. What may be stated as fact, what must be attributed, what must be softened, and the claims that are simply never made. This section earns the document on its own.
• Sources and attribution. What counts as a source, how it is cited, when a date must appear, and what to do when the only source is somebody's memory.
• People and companies. Naming competitors, quoting customers, using photographs of staff, and the permission needed before any of it appears.
• Contributors and disclosure. What a guest writer, a freelancer or a supplier may publish with you, what is disclosed, and what is never accepted regardless of the offer.
• Who decides. The named person with the final word, and the short list of pieces that must reach them before publishing rather than after.

What you get

The guidelines. Six to twelve pages in plain language, organised by the decision a writer is trying to make rather than by policy area. Each rule is followed by the reason for it, because a rule without a reason gets argued with.

The claims sheet. One page: the sentences you may write, the sentences you may write with evidence attached, and the sentences you never write. Writers use this more than the rest combined.

The refusal list. A short, blunt list of what you will not publish and the wording to decline it politely when someone asks.

A one-hour session. On video with everyone who writes or approves, working three real cases through the document until the boundary is clear.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A Kelowna company sells and installs home water-treatment systems. It publishes two articles a month, written by a part-time marketing coordinator and occasionally by a supplier who provides a product piece. The owner reads every draft because past copy drifted into suggesting the systems improved health, which the company cannot support and its industry association warns against.

The guidelines settle it in four decisions. Water quality and equipment are in scope; health outcomes are out entirely, with three replacement phrasings supplied. Test results may be quoted only with the laboratory named and the date shown. Competitors may be compared on specification and price, never on reputation. Supplier pieces are accepted only with the supplier named at the top. The owner still reads the quarterly ones and nothing else, because the coordinator can now tell which is which. The document runs to nine pages and the claims sheet to one.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What you publish now, what has gone wrong or nearly gone wrong, and what your trade or regulator expects. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Agreed before the work starts, based on how many channels and contributors are involved.
3. Reading and interviews. Your recent material, any complaints or corrections, and a conversation with whoever currently says no. Three to five working days.
4. The open questions. The genuinely contested calls come to you as a list before the document is written, so you decide them rather than inherit them.
5. The document and the session. Drafted, reviewed by you and by one of your writers, then delivered with the hour. Usually two to three weeks from the first call.

What it costs

Quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call, agreed in writing, and unchanged after that without your say-so. The size depends on how many people publish, how many channels they publish in, and whether your trade brings rules of its own. The pricing page shows the four ways I work so you know the shape before we speak.

What happens next

Guidelines say what may be published; they do not on their own say who gets it over the line. Most people add a named sign-off path so a contested piece has somewhere to go, and a quality bar so a permitted piece still has to be good. If the claims section turns out to be the hard part, claim-by-claim checking handles the pieces already published. None of that is assumed. The guidelines stand on their own from the day they are agreed.