When is it OK to Ask a Writer to Make an Edit to a Published Story?

Let's walk through common scenarios and how you should handle them to best serve your client while also maintaining a strong relationship with the journalist

Happy Thursday, Top Tier Community!

Were you able to join us for yesterday’s epic HGG workshop? If not, you can buy the recording for the price of one dinner entree — surely, landing just ONE more holiday gift guide inclusion for your clients is worth that :)

We discussed so many crucial aspects of pitching for the holidays, including:

• Examples of sample subject lines that were SO good, we opened those emails (and we receive 500-1,000 pitches a day)!

• A checklist of everything you should include in your HGG pitches

• Advice for how to make YOUR pitch stand out in a writer’s crowded inbox

• Tips for getting your SOURCES included in holiday gift guides (great for clients who don’t have products!)

• A discussion of what’s trending this year and what we’re seeing in terms of themes for holiday gift guides

• Examples of HGG pitches we’ve received that hit the mark — use these as your inspiration for format, content, etc.

• Subject lines to use that will help ensure your email gets opened (and which subject line emails get deleted right away)

Plus, we had a Q&A session, where we discussed:

• Which affiliate platforms editors prefer these days

• If PR should respond in Substacks, etc. or email writers directly

• How to pitch multiple products in one pitch

• If the election and 24/7 breaking news cycle is impacting holiday coverage

• How important are product samples for gift guide consideration?

• How to pitch children’s books, jewelry and other certain types of products

• How to handle luxury products

• How to cater a pitch to an individual writer vs. a mass pitching approach (and why this is essential)

• Are the same writers who wrote them updating gift guides annually?

• How to make a pitch look less spammy

• And more…

Cost: $29 Paid TTC Substack Subscribers; $49 Free TTC Subscribers
(you can always upgrade for the discount AND it’ll give you access to our weekly paid posts and monthly Top Tier Talks, too)

Ready to buy it? Send an email to info@toptierconsulting.NET and we’ll collect payment and send you the recording.

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Ok, now, let’s get to this week’s topic. “When is it OK to ask a writer to edit a published story?” is one of the questions we’re often asked in our consulting sessions, so we wanted to give our answer a wider audience.

You set a writer up with a client, schedule the interview, the story gets written and it goes live. What happens if:

• something is factually inaccurate?

• a link to the client’s website gets left off?

• your client wants to change the quote that they gave?

• there’s something not mentioned in the story that you’d like added in?

• your client’s quotes or brand got left out entirely?

• you didn’t send a pitch for the original article but have the PERFECT product or source for the story?

How do you handle these situations and is a writer able to work with you in any of these cases? Here’s what to know:

First thing’s first: There’s a difference between an error and marketing/brand phrasing preferences

• Yes, your pitch said the product was “brand-new, revolutionary, and innovative” but we didn’t include those exact words in our draft. This isn’t an error … our editors don’t allow over-used marketing terms that sound like an ad. We use the information you give us to craft our own original content that’s editorial, not advertorial, in nature.

• Yes, your pitch included a bio for an expert that was 4 paragraphs long and included 14 degrees, 12 associations they sit on the board of, 9 specialities and internships, 6 positions at various hospitals, 4 books they’ve written, 2 podcasts or TedTalks and all their social media channels and websites …. but we only included one short title. This isn’t an error … this is due to space restrictions and us focusing on the most relevant credentials/links for the particular story. In some (many) instances, we may have included more and our editors cut it down.

• There may be times when your source did an interview with us and they don’t like the quote that they gave us and want to change it. Or maybe there is something that your client forgot to tell us about a product or company they work with and want that information added back in. Or maybe you gave us a link to your client’s website and it wasn’t included in the story… When it comes to what we have the ability to change, it’s pretty much whittled down to situations that require factual corrections.

Please tell us about an ACTUAL error!

An actual ERROR is something we definitely want to be alerted to. If we spelled your client’s name wrong (unfortunately it happens from time to time), included an incorrect pronoun, used a wrong date or statistic, etc please tell us … we’re happy to alert our editors that those corrections need to be made ASAP.

But if you just don’t love the words we chose or would have phrased it differently yourself, then that’s not an error and there’s no need to notify us, as there is nothing that we (or an editor) will do about that. If you want to control the exact wording, you’ll have to buy an ad.

Other things we can’t change once a story is live

If we said we would link your source’s company and it got left off and everyone else who is featured has a link included, then shoot us a quick email. Something like that can be an easy fix to shoot over to an editor. But if you notice you didn’t get a link and neither did any of the other sources, that’s a call the editor made. Some publications pull links out, even when we put them in. They simply don’t include them. That’s just their policy.

We also can’t:

• Add a DO FOLLOW link

• Add a product into a story days, weeks or months after the story has gone live. We receive endless requests saying, “hey we saw your story on the top X products for X and would love if we could add this…” (And we IGNORE them!)

• We can’t link to your survey, press release or statistics that you think supports our article after the fact. We get lots of requests for this too.

• We can’t add a client’s 3 other vanity titles in.

• We can’t go back to an interview and add a branded mention if it wasn’t previously discussed during the interview phase.

• We can’t add in new additional links. If we linked to the company name when we quoted your source, we can’t go back in and link to specific website pages related to the products they mentioned as well.

A look behind the scenes: Here’s what happens when you request an update

You may not realize this, but freelancers typically don’t have access to the CMS (content management system) in order to make edits — so it’s not something we can simply “do” on our own.

Therefore, if an edit is necessary, a freelance writer needs to inform their editor and seek approval. Trust us, this process makes a writer CRINGE as you are basically having to email an editor admitting that you made a mistake (AHHHHH) and asking if they can take time away from the 500 other things they are doing (and all the stories they have moved on to assigning and editing once yours has gone live) to fix something in a published story.

If the editor approves the edit (and there’s a lot that goes into that decision), then here’s how the process works:

1. The writer will craft the update and send it to the editor.

2. The editor will review, edit, and send to the appropiate department … this might be the art department to select a new image or another department to upload the new copy (or both).

3. The article typically takes 24 hours or so to refresh in the system so that it will be visible (you may need to clear your cache to see it).

4. Some publications will actually issue a comment at the bottom of the article calling out that it was previously published with a factual error. Many won’t.

As you might imagine, this whole process could take some time … a few days or more than a week depending on how busy everyone is. And sometimes editors don’t write back right away on these requests.

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Does that help clear things up on this popular question? Is there anything else on this topic that we failed to mention or you’re still curious about? Our comment section is open and we ALWAYS reply!

Thanks again for being a part of this wonderful community we’re building. If you know a colleague who could benefit from this, please share this newsletter with them. We’re putting so much time and effort into these weekly articles and are thrilled to be able to get them in front of people who are benefiting from them. 

Jill & Nicole

PS: You can always email us with any questions or topic suggestions for future newsletters: info@toptierconsulting.NET

*Note: Our consulting sessions, workshops, Zooms and Substack newsletters are strictly educational. Signing up for anything has no bearing on landing coverage in any of our outlets. Our role is to fine-tune your approach and tactics so that you can apply these learnings when pitching other journalists.