How To Become An Editorial Director: What It Is and Career Path

What is an editorial director and how to become one

Updated January 8, 2025

4 min read

An editorial director is in charge of all of the content that a publication, media organization, or website puts out. They can work for a high-profile legacy media magazine or a scrappy online blog. Wherever they work, the editorial director develops the overall plan for a company's publications, for example by choosing the specific theme for an issue or ensuring a cohesive organizational voice across all platforms.

Editorial directors are in charge of making sure that all individual content their organization publishes, from short stories in print to photo essays on a website, meets quality and editorial standards. Of course, editorial directors do not do all of this work by themselves. They supervise a whole team of editors that helps maintain a publication's editorial standards.

Editorial directors need considerable knowledge of media and writing in order to do their job. Most start off by getting a bachelor's degree in journalism or a related field. They also need many years of professional experience working as more junior editors. Once they earn the title of "director," editorial directors can also expect to earn an average salary of $100,050 a year.

ScoreEditorial DirectorUS Average

Salary

7.6

Avg. Salary $99,934

Avg. Salary $59,228

Stability level

6.7

Growth rate -5%

Growth rate 0.3%

Diversity

6.8

Race

American Indian and Alaska Native 0.27%

Asian 7.22%

Black or African American 3.57%

Hispanic or Latino 8.08%

Unknown 4.58%

White 76.29%

Gender

female 51.66%

male 48.34%

Age - 43

Race

American Indian and Alaska Native 3.00%

Asian 7.00%

Black or African American 14.00%

Hispanic or Latino 19.00%

White 57.00%

Gender

female 47.00%

male 53.00%

Age - 43

Stress level

6.7

Stress level is high

7.1 - high

Complexity level

9.0

Complexity level is advanced

7 - challenging

Work life balance

4.3

Work life balance is poor

6.4 - fair

Key steps to become an editorial director

Explore editorial director education requirements

Most common editorial director degrees

Bachelor's

80.2 %

Master's

14.0 %

Associate

2.3 %

Start to develop specific editorial director skills

Skills	Percentages
Editorial Content	8.82%
Web Content	7.50%
Editorial Strategy	6.02%
Content Strategy	5.54%
Content Development	5.33%

Complete relevant editorial director training and internships

Accountants spend an average of 6-12 months on post-employment, on-the-job training. New editorial directors learn the skills and techniques required for their job and employer during this time. The chart below shows how long it takes to gain competency as an editorial director based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data and data from real editorial director resumes.

Research editorial director duties and responsibilities

Lead triage of SEO issues.
Manage messaging priorities, and press comments for YouTube, Google, and Guggenheim.
Manage the reporting, video production, marketing, brand development and SEO of the brand s website and YouTube channel.
Manage the implementation of large-scale editorial systems at commercial publishing, legal publishing, and in-plant publishing organizations.

Get editorial director experience

Generally, it takes 2-4 years to become an editorial director. The most common roles before becoming an editorial director include editor, managing editor team lead and senior editor.

Prepare your editorial director resume

When your background is strong enough, you can start writing your editorial director resume.

You can use Zippia's AI resume builder to make the resume writing process easier while also making sure that you include key information that hiring managers expect to see on an editorial director resume. You'll find resume tips and examples of skills, responsibilities, and summaries, all provided by Zippi, your career sidekick.

Choose from 10+ customizable editorial director resume templates

Build a professional editorial director resume in minutes. Browse through our resume examples to identify the best way to word your resume. Then choose from 10+ resume templates to create your editorial director resume.

Apply for editorial director jobs

Now it's time to start searching for an editorial director job. Consider the tips below for a successful job search:

Browse job boards for relevant postings
Consult your professional network
Reach out to companies you're interested in working for directly
Watch out for job scams

How did you land your first editorial director job

Chris Rosenberg

Editorial Director

I started my career path with my last employer as a staff writer for Primary Care Optometry News. I spent about a year and a half with that publication, writing stories, getting to know many of the physician experts so that I could call on them again for future stories, covering sessions at live meetings and preparing diligently for interviews. I won several awards for stories I wrote, including two APEX Awards and an award from the Optometric Editor's Award. I was promoted to become a Project Manager for our sponsored editorial products group, where content was still generated independently and following our strict editorial guidelines. In this role, I took lengthy transcripts of interviews and roundtables and culled them to their essential messages both for space but also to ensure that our readers would benefit from a concise editorial product. After several years, I was promoted to Senior Project Manager, where I added managerial responsibilities in mentoring our younger Project Managers and further developing my editorial skills. When an Editorial Director position became available, I had established the journalistic instincts, writing prowess, editing skills and mentoring capabilities necessary to be successful in this position and I was approached and encouraged to apply. I was selected and put those skills to good use. I led weekly story pitch meetings among several teams where writers would suggest story ideas and I would work with them to develop those ideas, sometimes accepting their recommendations, rejecting others that didn't fit our audience and shifting others, such as what could have been a routine news item into a deeper feature story with more detail that would stand out from other platforms that just wrote from a press release or journal article. As my teams developed their stories, I was the primary content editor, ensuring that we were producing accurate, concise, engaging copy. I mentored my young teams by not just editing content, but explaining my rationale for the decisions I made to encourage them to think about how to approach their stories with an eye toward our overall mission for our readers. We had also entered into a more data-driven age, where we had more granular information about which stories performed better than others and I spent a great deal of time analyzing our readers' patterns and identified several new products that would benefit our readers by packaging content in different ways while also allowing our sales t

How do editorial directors rate their job?

-/5

5 stars

4 stars

3 stars

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1 star

Editorial director reviews

A zippia user wrote a review on May 2019

Pros

I love content and marketing overall. As a former journalist turned marketer, I love connecting with audiences and catering to what their interests may be, whether they know it or not yet. As a content director, I get involved in various departments like business development, finance, presidental level and others. Normally, most expect to only be involved in marketing efforts, but that simply isn't true.