: Re: How do you handle editors who materially change your writing after publication? I'm a staff writer on a site that puts lots of emphasis on SEO. To that end, they have an SEO editor come back

@Berumen699

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You don't have many options open to you—and some options are rather extreme.

Write your articles and let them make the changes they want.
Write your articles and correct any revisions that annoy you too much.
Continue to express to your concerns and hope the situation improves.
Drum up support on social media, or elsewhere (perhaps among other authors who feel similarly), in order to lend objective voices to your own.
Post your articles in parallel to a blog of your own—one that retains your original content. Your own blog would contain "authoritative" copies of your work.
Stop submitting articles, on the grounds that they are making substantive changes of which you don't approve. (E.g., break your contract, or otherwise renegotiate it.)

Several of those options would depend on the actual details of your contract—what you, or they, are or are not allowed to do. And not all of the options are are mutually exclusive.

It feels like I have to write the piece, do all the detail involved in
publishing, monitor and respond to comments (all part of my contract),
and then monitor the changes to make sure they communicate the same
message I wrote and maintain the integrity of my style, error-free.

It sounds like you can manage to have things as you want them—but it takes a lot of your time and energy in order to do so.

You will have to ask yourself what your priorities are, how you weigh the importance of the job and its work relations versus the integrity of your work and name, and what amount of energy is worthwhile for you to expend in order to come up with an acceptable balance.

Also, these changes often create glaring grammatical errors (including one error where a word was only half-written).

This specific point is more disturbing. It's not so much about policy but about appropriate procedures and competence. However, aside from trying to make friendly inquiries into how that happened, and offering positive suggestions about changes to prevent it in the future, there is little you can do.

I have been in the shoes of your editor. I would have been mortified if I had made such mistakes, or if I hadn't done the best I could to balance the company's requirements with the needs of submitting authors.

Interestingly, after I'd copyedited text and started to deal with SEO, SEO-specific changes all happened before the "final click" to publish an article. (I would often create drafts, keeping them from the public.) And if something in the text itself did need to be changed for the purpose of SEO, the article could not be published until the author approved of those changes.

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