Editorial Standards

Published 4 Nov, 2022 Modified 7 Nov, 2022 Read in 9m 16s Viewed 212 times

At Digital Setups, our editorial team dedicates itself to ensuring authenticity, usefulness, and good impact of the content published on our digital properties. We believe in mutual support for mutual growth, therefore, accessibility to the right knowledge is significant. We understand the significance of your time and trust in our content, therefore, our editorial standards […]

Disclaimer

We understand the significance of your time and trust in our content, therefore, our editorial standards are set that bind our content research, creation, and publication teams to provide right, authentic, useful, easy-to-understand, and well-reviewed content.

Since our founder values a trustworthy relationship between the reader and the creator, therefore, she developed editorial standards for our Digital Setups’ properties. All standards are implemented via an organized process that is followed throughout the content research, production, publication, revision, and sharing stages.

Committed to help
Maintaining Trust
Ensuring Transparency
Staying up-to-date
Incorporating Safe-search
Collective Efforts to Support Editorial Process

Below are our upright editorial standards that we commit to our readers: –

Committed to helping, rather drive a business

One thing that is clearly important for us is to deliver complete, easy-to-understand, and useful content. In the digital business niche, we find tons of content pieces that are mainly designed/published to drive sales or referrals. Being so, they hide the important information most of the time and leave the user with either a forced purchase of consultancy, a product, or another service.

Contrary to the sale-driving content approach, our approach is to help people so that they could grow with ease. Since efforts never go unrewarded, somehow, from somewhere, we will be rewarded back for the work/help we are continuously doing for everyone. With empathy and real care in our hearts for everyone around us, we do get the real care back. We do get that care from our readers and clients. Many of them are now our regular donors, some our regular readers, some recommend us to their colleagues or teams, and many pay a big thanks for helping them. We love all these rewards and this builds our peace of mind.

Educating each other shouldn’t be costly. It’s our right to each other to educate with what we know, however, if someone needs the whole thing done for them – we can ask for a reasonable fee. That’s how we all can mutually grow. With these thoughts in mind, our founder started Digital Setups to actually help people, not to make everyone a DS-Client.

To ensure we are satisfying our ‘being helpful’ commitment, our editorial team verifies the content is free from referral links, sale-driving callouts, difficult statements that end up readers looking for consultancy always, or similar. Additionally, you’ll notice our tone is collaborative (mostly) and direct (for the technical guides). Learn more about our content language approach. We also add jump-to links with clear context to let our readers easily jump to the information they were looking for. We do not want you to go through thousands of words when you already know them.

Maintaining Trust & Confidence

The reader’s time and trust in our content are valuable, therefore, maintaining trust and confidence in our content is a top priority.

To ensure that we are helping ourselves in building readers’ trust, the editorial team ensures that the content being created is coming through only verified and trustworthy sources at first. We do not rely on just anything on the web. All the information must come from relevant authorities directly or from verified sources.

Our teams, in the background, keep an eye on trustworthy information sources and publish the source for authors. Our authors are bound to research from only those verified list of sources, however, if the author finds a better or equivalent or new authorized source on the way, it is also considered for trustworthiness and added to the list after the trust-check review by the editorial leads. Learn more about our source selection approach.

Within our content, readers can easily differentiate a verified or trusted source by seeing a ‘blue checkmark’ with the link. Hovering over that link shows the details of that trusted source. All the other links which might be popular are cited below the content. No unverified third-party link is placed within the content by authors and editors.

Later the content is checked for accuracy of the information, acknowledgment of the last update, citations, and several other readability tests. All trust-assurance goals are combined to deliver trustworthy, authentic, accurate, clear, and the right information to achieve readers’ trust, confidence, and encouraging thoughts for our authors.

Transparency is a challenge, we take it.

Besides providing information from verified sources and ensuring usefulness, we bravely keep transparency in our content. There are many cases where transparency is prioritized more than anything we take care of in the content. Though it’s hard to blow a whistle about a shady, scam, or fraudulent business, person, or service, we still take the challenge to share what ‘exactly’ we know about it – based on the shreds of evidence we collected.

At Digital Setups, we do our best to be truthful, clear, and unambiguous with our readers – no matter what it takes. We understand this risk and trust the readership’s support. One thing to clear about us is that we are not building another news industry that just shuffles the scam score based on what they get from the shady businesses.

Our goal is to be transparent and that’s it. If we find something on the web which can hurt people financially and ethically, we research it and publish the findings. These findings are published by our founder’s direct responsibility. We clearly do not change them until the situation is ‘actually’ fixed – no matter how many removal requests we receive.

Why so? Look, this is a short life and we need each other’s goodness, support, and guidance to pass by. We do want to leave the right impressions on each other. Right? We do want to grow. Right? Then there is simply no purpose to supporting bad or short-cut lover worms among us. We’re sure, by the time, these worms will not be powerful enough since positivity and gratitude always drive the real power for survival and growth. So, let it be.

Updates are important, hence they should be informed

Once the content is published, it definitely needs a revision whenever there is an update. We do our best to not be lazy in updating content. We do update on an immediate basis wherever the update is critical such as law side, algorithmic rule, or a situation where the application of previous advice, solution, or approach can lead to severe damage. Though in our niche, severe loss is rare, however, we make sure that we are posting updates and revising the content timely.

Since updating the content is a part of our goal to provide accurate information, therefore, our content review team takes the responsibility for monitoring content. Whenever a content/article is published, it is analyzed for expected update timing too. Based on that expected timing, the review team reviews the content and updates it (if necessary).

We make the updates clear by publishing the published date, last reviewed date, last updated date, or additives such as the expired date. All these dates have a different meaning and it’s given below:

Published Date: when the content was published by the author on our website for the first time
Last Reviewed Date: when the content was last time checked by our domain experts for accuracy, facts, and contextual correctness.
Last Updated Date: when the content was last-time updated by the author or editor with either new information, readability improvements, enhanced visuals, or related.
Expired Date: when the content was expired or marked for no longer being updated, reviewed, or valid for application. There are cases when updating a particular content is useless, such as if a product came into the market but no longer exists – there is no reason to monitor updates for it, so we just mark it expired.

There are several activities that trigger an update in our content. These activities are monitored by the review team, authors themselves, and even by our readers.

Based on a particular activity, an article becomes eligible for an update. Such as:

Standard Revision Activity: Whenever an article is reviewed based on its expected update time, it is updated if revisions are expected.
Trend Change Activity: Whenever a trend change is seen on social media and authorized sources for a trend-driven topic such as tax rates.
Trusted Source Review Activity: Whenever a piece of new information is added to the existing source or reviewed again for persistency-check, the source information is also updated within articles. Generally, this change automatically reflects all articles, however, there are cases when we update the article manually for source removal or addition of a better source or when the source link is moved to a new link by the source authority.
Feedback Review Activity: When the editorial team reviews feedback for particular content, an article might be updated based on the reader’s suggestion, request, claim, or information-shared.

Incorporating safe-search for our content

Coming from well-researched, transparent, up-to-date, and right information sources is just not enough for us. We take care of additional factors that are important to ensure our content is safe for everyone.

We maintain a content rating of 3+. Just as per our advertising standards, we ensure that our content is not dangerous, deceptive, harassing, hateful, manipulated, terror-driven, sexually explicit, violent, vulgar, and discrimination-favored. In addition to these, we also ensure that our content is not just-another spam, misleading, financially harmful/risky, plagiarized or infringed, or related.

Collective efforts to make our content reliable

Building quality content is not a clicking task. It takes collective efforts, mutual support, patience, passion to help, understanding of the domain, willingness to improve, and a lot more. To ensure that our standards are going to be followed and respected, we have: –

training sessions
meetups with founder
honest-opinion rounds

We train our new and existing content creation, publication, and sharing teams often. We all revise the standards in a fun way, helping everyone to memorize and respect our standards at all levels (idea generation, creation, research, publication, review, sharing, revision).

Since most standards are driven by our founder herself, it’s always best to take an understanding or explanation directly from her. Therefore, our editorial team is given special time with the founder just to know and understand the importance, meaning, and passion behind every point of a standards list.

Honest opinions from our teams, readers, partners, and everyone around us make us even better. We not only improve our content but also standards whenever we feel there is a space for improvement to strengthen our relationship with our readership.

After all this, we respect digital journalism ethics under our content and advertising standards. From content creation, reviews, and publication, to source-vetting, revisions, and sharing, we train, help, and practice together – making Digital Setups a home of digital business support.

Should we improve?

Your confidence and trust in ‘Digital Setups’ are all that matters. If you have any questions, suggestions, or related concerns, do let us know by contacting us.