Page 19 was born in October of last year from the fingers and brains of approximately two-point-five people. When in February we finally came up for air, leaving our little tunnels of writing, design tweaking, reading, research, and publishing, and my editor said, “Maybe you should start thinking about doing a content audit,” I froze. I balked. I was not pleased.

Audit is a horrible word.

Audit summons visions of taxes and suits and paperwork for days, to say nothing of the swirling sense of dread and guilt. So sue me: as a lady of letters, I’m sensitive to the word “audit,”—which may be one of the reasons we never use it when we talk about our review process at Page19.

Personal preferences aside, the more important reason that “audit” is inadequate has much more to do with its rigidity. Audit feels passive and stringent. It implies fact-checking and excavation, but not much in the way of rebuilding a foundation. In an age of scrums and iterative processes galore (including our publishing and writing process), “audit” didn’t quite get the job done for Page19. Befitting an age of emojis and acronyms, we passed on the vast descriptive role of an entire word to two very adequate letters: QA.

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