Director, Content Standards & Pipeline Quality

The Director, Content Standards & Pipeline Quality acts as the guardian of McClatchy's Content Scaling Agent (CSA) and the broader content pipeline that drives the company's digital growth. This role operates at the intersection of editorial expertise and operational precision, defining benchmarks for both automated and human-generated content, establishing robust testing frameworks, and serving as the primary liaison between the Programming and Product & Tech teams.

The Director is responsible for setting editorial standards for the content pipeline, designing comprehensive quality frameworks and escalation protocols that encompass editorial, commerce, and emerging formats. Rather than functioning as a bottleneck for every quality decision, the Director collaborates with functional leads who manage day-to-day quality control within their areas.

The main duties include defining standards, building effective systems, and ensuring consistency throughout the operation. This role requires the ability to translate technical possibilities into editorial opportunities and to champion features that prioritize quality, while articulating editorial nuance in a manner that leads to actionable standards and operational excellence.

The anticipated base pay range for this position is between 120k and 160k annually. Individual base pay may vary within that range, depending on job-related knowledge, skills, experience, relevant education, departmental equity, training, geography, and local wage and hour laws.

ESSENTIAL DUTIES/RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Own editorial standards and voice guidelines for the Content Scaling Agent and content pipeline, translating editorial principles into documentation that guides both human teams and AI agents in producing on-brand, high-quality content across formats and platforms.
• Design and manage comprehensive testing protocols for new content types, formats, and automated workflows, establishing quality benchmarks before launch and maintaining ongoing QC processes that catch issues before they reach audiences.
• Serve as the primary product liaison between the Programming team and Product/Tech teams, ensuring seamless integration of the CSA into editorial workflows, translating technical capabilities into editorial opportunities, and advocating for quality-focused features and safeguards.
• Develop and deliver quality and performance metrics for the CSA program, creating dashboards and reporting frameworks that provide visibility into content quality, compliance adherence, and operational efficiency across the content supply chain.
• Conduct quality assurance testing for Editorial and Commerce content operations, applying the same rigor to commercial content, ensuring affiliate content meets brand standards, disclosure requirements, and audience expectations.
• Establish compliance frameworks that ensure all content—whether human-generated or AI-assisted—meets legal, ethical, and platform-specific requirements, including disclosure standards, accessibility guidelines, and brand safety protocols.
• Partner with editorial leadership to identify quality trends, surface systemic issues, and recommend process improvements that strengthen content quality while maintaining production velocity.
• Other duties as assigned by management
• McClatchy Media’s employees are encouraged to take advantage of opportunities to ethically harness and leverage artificial intelligence and other automation to enhance and elevate their work and to find efficiencies that free them to focus on source-building and high-quality, deeply reported journalism.
  

REQUIRED KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS AND ABILITIES:

• Demonstrated experience establishing editorial standards, style guides, or quality frameworks that have been adopted across teams
• Technical fluency working alongside product and engineering teams, understanding how AI agents function, and translating between editorial needs and technical requirements
• Editorial judgment with operational discipline—an understanding of what makes content compelling and trustworthy, ability to translate that understanding into repeatable standards and measurable quality criteria
• Working understanding of Content Management Systems (CMS), Asset Management systems, tagging, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Metadata, etc.
• Analytical rigor with comfort building metrics frameworks, interpreting performance data, and using insights to drive decisions
• Strong written and verbal communication skills with ability to document complex processes clearly and advocate for quality standards in cross-functional settings
• Adaptability in ambiguous, evolving environments—energized by building new frameworks and comfortable making sound judgmen