I have written several times about the technologies and processes that enable collaboration (talking about the former here for SiliconAngle in 2023 and appropriate tools here for Biznology’s blog in 2021). My reason for writing about this now is having known and worked around and for Dylan Tweeny for many decades, I was interested in a report he released today about the state of editorial content. In my SiliconAngle post, I describe some of the more successful collaboration efforts down through history, including those working as codebreakers at Bletchley Park WWII and the team behind the 2015 Ford Mustang redesign.
A large part of Dylan’s report deals with the collaborative effort that is involved in producing content in this AI era, based on a self-selected survey of 169 respondents.
In my many years creating content, I have seen plenty of situations where great content is edited into some uninteresting pablum by a group assigned to review my content. Now, I am not a member of “every word out of my word processor is precious” school. But I often cringe when an editor – or a gaggle of them – start reducing the value of my content rather than adding to it.
Part of the problem here is understanding where and when the “collaboration” actually begins: is it at the first light of an assignment where 15 stakeholders weigh in on a Zoom call what their first draft will be? That is unworkable, as many of Dylan’s respondents say with the “too many cooks” comments. Or when someone in the workflow wants to back up and start from another POV that wasn’t recognized initially.
Many people characterize collaboration as a team sport. However, the analogy breaks down when we look more closely. In sports, you have definite rules of play, which is mostly missing in content creation. You also have well defined roles — also MIA. You have leaders that delegate specific tasks (at least the better ones do), but this often is hard to define in the content creation biz. So yes, you need a team. But the idea that “everyone thinks they are an editor, and thinks they are good at it” is just wrong-headed. Eventually, the ref must blow the whistle and play resumes. A better analogy would be a “team of rivals” (apologies to Doris) that have to work together and make up the roles, rules, and who is in charge as they go along.
I don’t think all collaboration all the time is necessary at all stages of the creation of content. At some point, an individual author needs to synthesize all the (often conflicting) points and produce something which tells the story and connects with the eventual audience. This is why AI in its current incarnation is a total fail. In writing my stories I have had interviews of my sources that directly contradict each other, or at least at first blush. Dive deeper, and the devil is in the details. That is what makes my experience valuable — yes, you can assign a 20-something to do the initial interviews, but they would probably miss these details. So finding sources and knowing the questions to ask are key ways I collaborate,
Certainly, we need to adopt better project management tools and use them more effectively. Dylan’s report shows that many content creators still use simple things such as GDocs, with a light seasoning of Grammerly. (A side ironic note: GDocs didn’t have real-time collaboration features when it was initially created, until Google purchased that technology and incorporated it into the service.) There is still plenty of content which is created by having serial edits being passed back and forth via email. That is still the most common PM method that I see being used in my clients. Maybe I have the wrong clients <G>.
Part of the challenge here is that having true editorial management is a lost art. Remember when our pubs had copy desks to manage their workflows? When was the last time a PR agency had something similar? Now that anyone can push a button and post something online, it means that managing this process involves saying “don’t push the publish button quite yet.” Most of the big b2b tech sites that I have worked for in the past couple of decades have a “post first, copy edit and fix later” philosophy. That is no way to manage anything. When I worked for ReadWrite back around 2012 and ran a bunch of their b2b websites, I had one writer who refused to acknowledge that he worked for me. He was a free agent, and damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead and how dare I mess with his golden prose? That was an impossible situation but was tolerated because he wrote (a lot of) good stuff.
Another challenge is relying on meetings as a collaboration path, either virtual or in place. That requires skill, something we don’t all have to bring the best collaboration forward from all participants.
Sharing is more than caring. And the real challenge is that collaboration usually carries what is called a “work tax” because the tools mentioned take the creator out of the context of creation and divert the heat of the creative workflow by adding an explicit sharing step. And it is ironic that the people who would know tech better are often the ones paying the highest tax.