The Director Who Runs the Script: Content Director
One day, we were publishing about the same project across three channels at once. The blog carried a detailed article walking through the background, X (formerly Twitter) had a short quick update, and Note had a longer piece that dug into the context. When the drafts for each came in, something went wrong. The blog post said "still being tested," but the X post read as if it had already "worked." Different writers, working on the same event, framed it differently. Neither one was lying. But read side by side, they looked like they contradicted each other.
Our organization has a role that writes the drafts (Copywriter) and a role that adjusts the wording and tone (Brand Voice). Both take responsibility for the draft they're working on, but neither one is well positioned to see whether the story holds together once you look across multiple channels at the same time. Each individual draft can be accurate, and the whole set can still fail to add up. Content Director is the role we created to close that gap.
The Role That Sets the Order
In one word, the Content Director's job is orchestration (deciding the order and division of labor across multiple people and tasks so everything moves smoothly). Think of it as similar to a conductor leading an orchestra. The conductor doesn't play an instrument, but decides who plays which part, when, and how loud.
The Content Director works the same way and doesn't write drafts. They read what the Copywriter has written and decide questions like: does this content fit the blog better, or X? What order should we publish in this week? For the tone that Brand Voice has adjusted, they check it not just as a single draft, but alongside the other pieces published recently, to see whether anything feels off.
Why We Keep the Writer and the Director Separate
The person writing a draft is focused on that draft. Focus isn't a bad thing — it's actually necessary for writing a good draft. But that same focus tends to leave less attention for what else is being published elsewhere. In our organization, we split the roles on purpose: one role improves the quality of a single draft, and another checks whether things line up across channels.
If the same person tried to do both jobs, the energy going into the draft they're writing right now would win out every time. The result: content gets published without anyone noticing that it contradicts something published earlier. That's exactly what happened with the three mismatched drafts at the start of this story. No one was lying, but the overall picture shifted depending on who was looking at it. Since we added a step where the Content Director checks the lineup and order of drafts before publishing, these mismatches have gotten much easier to catch.
Just as a conductor doesn't play an instrument, the Content Director doesn't rewrite the text directly either. They run the script — deciding who publishes what, and in what order. Keeping the writer, the editor, and the coordinator as separate roles is a quiet but essential mechanism for keeping the story consistent while running multiple channels at once.
