Editorial standards

The rules

1. 01

   The grey area

   A hands-on take on something new can be either; it depends how deep it goes.

   • News: a quick first test right after a release. “I tried it on my workflow, and here's what I saw.”
   • Article: a thorough evaluation weeks later. “How it changed our SEO audits: the setup and the results.”

   Still unsure? If the headline needs a version number to make sense, it's news.

2. 02

   How a news post is built

   1. The story. Every post belongs to a story (Meta Muse, Google Search…), and the story line at the top links its other posts.
   2. At a glance. The key facts in a few lines: what, who it’s for, where, price, when.
   3. Why it matters for marketers. Our angle: what it changes for people who build marketing systems. Without this part it’s a rewrite of the announcement, and we don’t publish those.
   4. What happened. The facts in full, in our own words, with the version and the date.
   5. What to check. The next step in your own setup.
   6. Questions. The two to four questions people actually search, each answered in a sentence or two.
   7. Sources. Every source, the company’s own page first, with what each one backs up.

   We publish at a pace we can keep: two good news posts a week beats seven thin ones.

   A post’s date is the day it went up here. When a post covers news from earlier, it says when that news happened, and we never backdate a post.

3. 03

   How an article is built

   • It starts from something we actually built, ran or tested, not from a press release.
   • It shows the work: the setup, the steps, the result, and what broke along the way.
   • It stays current: when a tool changes, we update it in place and show the date, instead of publishing a new one.
4. 04

   How they connect

   News brings readers in. Articles are what they stay for.

   • Every news post links its story, and the story’s page lists every post on it.
   • When an article goes deeper, the news post links to it.
   • When a story keeps mattering, we write the article and link it from the news post.
   • In the weekly email, an article leads and the week's news follows as a short roundup.
5. 05

   Accuracy and sources

   • Facts come from primary sources: the company’s own announcement, release notes, documentation, pricing pages, and our own runs.
   • Every news post is checked against the company’s own page before it goes up. If we can’t check it there, it waits.
   • A company’s claim is written as theirs (“Meta says”), and reporting by another outlet is named and marked as reporting.
   • We write in our own words and don’t copy other outlets’ copy.
   • Every number is checked against its source, and every news post names the version and the date.
   • Every news post ends with its sources, and what each one backs up.
   • When we tested something ourselves, we say what we tested it on and how.
6. 06

   Corrections and updates

   When we get something wrong, we fix it and note at the end what changed and when. We don't quietly rewrite. Updates that aren't corrections show an “Updated” date. Spotted a mistake? Email zev@esy.com.

7. 07

   How we use AI

   We write about AI tools, and we use them: for research, first drafts and images, mostly through Esy's own workflows and Claude. A person reviews, tests and signs off every piece, and AI images say so in their captions. News covers aren't AI images: they're cards we draw from the post's own facts. We never have AI draw a company's logo.

8. 08

   Our own products

   Esy, clip.art and SEOPage are ours. When a piece is about one of them, or uses one as the example, we say so. We don't take payment to cover a product or to rank it. The companies we cover don't sponsor, review or approve what we write. Their logos appear only as their own files, unchanged, where their brand terms allow news use; otherwise we just use their name.

9. 09

   Style

   • Plain words. Say what a tool does and what it did for us, without hype.
   • Write for the reader: what they can do after reading.
   • American spelling, and one idea per sentence where we can.