Internal communications content governance: rights and wrongs

TLDR: Internal communications content governance fails in two directions at once – material is signed off by people with no authority to grant the rights involved, and material that needs no approval waits three weeks for it. Copyright, image consent and licence terms are separate questions from editorial sign-off, and merging them slows everything down. What changes the outcome is writing down who decides what, once, and distinguishing rights from opinion.

A site manager sends in a photograph of a team receiving a safety award. It is a good picture. It goes into the newsletter, onto the intranet, into a recruitment post, and eventually onto a printed banner at a trade event.

Somewhere in that sequence, three questions went unasked. Who took the photograph, and did they transfer the copyright. Did the people in it agree to appear, and did they agree to appear in recruitment advertising. Was the contractor in the background covered by anything at all.

None of this is usually anyone’s oversight in particular. It is what happens when an approval process exists to check tone and accuracy but was never designed to check rights, and when the people asked to approve are chosen by seniority rather than by what they can actually authorise.

The reverse problem runs alongside it. A one-line canteen closure notice sits in a queue for eleven days because the approval route makes no distinction between a canteen notice and a restructure announcement.

Both failures have the same root. Internal communications content governance in most large organisations was designed around a single question – is this alright to send – when at least four separate questions are in play.

Internal communications content governance is the set of rules covering who owns the material, who may appear in it, who decides whether it goes out, and how long any of those answers hold. It is a slightly dry term for something that becomes very concrete the moment a photograph turns up on a recruitment billboard.

What does internal communications content governance cover?

Internal communications content governance exists to answer four distinct questions, which are usually collapsed into one meeting.

Is it accurate? A factual check, best done by whoever owns the subject matter.

Is it appropriate? An editorial and tone check, best done by communications.

Is it legally sound? Rights, consent, licensing, regulatory obligation, employment law implications. Best done by whoever holds that responsibility, which is rarely the same person.

Is it agreed? A decision check – has the underlying decision been made and by whom. This is the one that most often turns out not to have happened.

Collapsing these into a single approval step means every item gets the slowest possible route, and the legal question tends to be the one quietly skipped because the person in the room is not qualified to answer it.

Who owns content produced at work?

The default position in UK law is more favourable to employers than many people assume, and it is worth knowing precisely because the exceptions are where the risk sits.

Copyright arises automatically when a work is created, with no registration required. Where a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work is made by an employee in the course of their employment, the employer is the first owner of copyright unless there is an agreement to the contrary.

That covers the internal newsletter written by a communications officer. It does not automatically cover several things that routinely appear in internal communications.

Work by contractors and freelancers. A freelance photographer, designer or writer owns the copyright in what they produce unless the contract assigns it. A licence to use an image in a newsletter is not a licence to use it on a recruitment billboard. This is the most common gap in practice.

Agency work. Same principle. Check what the contract assigns and what it merely licenses, and check whether the licence is limited by medium, territory or time.

Employee photographs taken personally. A picture a supervisor took on their own phone at a work event is a grey area that turns on whether it was taken in the course of employment. Asking permission is faster than resolving the question.

Stock and licensed material. Licences differ by use, and internal use is not always covered by the cheapest tier. Extended use for recruitment marketing frequently is not.

Music and video. The most commonly overlooked. A soundtrack on an internal video needs a licence, and “it’s only internal” is not an exemption.

Third-party content quoted or reproduced. Research reports, articles and images from elsewhere. A link is safe. A reproduction may not be.

Copyright duration varies by work type and is generally around 70 years after the death of the author for the main categories, so “it’s old” is rarely a defence for anything in a modern archive.

This is general information rather than legal advice, and anything material should go to whoever provides that in your organisation.

Consent is a separate question from copyright

Owning the copyright in a photograph does not mean you may use it however you like. The person in it has interests too, and in the UK those are handled largely through data protection rather than image rights.

A workable practical standard:

• Get written consent for identifiable images of employees, recording what uses are covered
• Distinguish internal use from external and recruitment use – consent for one is not consent for the other
• Record when consent was given and set a review point, because roles and willingness change
• Have a documented route for someone to withdraw consent, and a realistic process for honouring it, including for printed material already displayed
• Take extra care with anything showing an incident, an injury, a disciplinary context or a person who has since left

The awkward case is the group photograph where one person later objects. This is much easier to handle if consent was collected individually at the time than if it was assumed from the fact that people stood still.

How should internal communications content governance be structured?

The aim is fewer approvers on more items, not more approvers on everything. Internal communications content governance works best when the route is set by risk rather than by hierarchy, and when the tiers are published so requesters know what to expect.

1. Tier content by risk, not by importance

Three tiers is usually enough.

• Tier 1 – routine. Operational notices, event reminders, rota changes, canteen and facilities information. One approver, the person who owns the information. Same-day turnaround. Most internal communications approvals should sit here.
• Tier 2 – standard. Campaigns, newsletters, policy explanations, benefits communications. Subject-matter check plus communications check. Two to five days.
• Tier 3 – sensitive. Restructures, incidents, results, anything with legal, regulatory or employment implications. Named approvers including legal or HR, agreed in advance, with a route that works out of hours.

Most organisations run everything at Tier 2 or above, which is why Tier 1 content is slow and Tier 3 content occasionally bypasses the process entirely because there was no time. Tiering is the single change that does most to make internal communications content governance workable.

2. Name roles, not people

Approver by role means the process survives holidays, illness and resignation. Every role needs a named deputy with real authority to decide, not simply to relay.

3. Set default timescales and a default outcome

Publish the turnaround for each tier and state what happens if it passes without response. A documented default – escalate to a named person, or proceed for Tier 1 only – prevents silence functioning as a veto.

4. Separate the rights check from the editorial check

A short rights checklist, run by whoever manages the asset library rather than by an approver in a meeting:

• Do we own or license this image, and does the licence cover this use?
• Is there consent for every identifiable person, covering this use?
• Is any music, video or third-party material licensed for this?
• Is any external quotation attributed and within fair-dealing limits?
• If this is going external later, does everything above still hold?

Running this at the point content enters the library rather than at the point it leaves is materially faster, and it is one of the practical arguments for managing internal comms assets as a system. It also removes the rights question from the critical path of every campaign, which matters most for integrated internal communications campaigns running across several channels at once.

The boundary between the two is worth stating plainly, because they are easily conflated. Internal communications content governance decides who owns the material, who may appear in it and who signs it off. Asset management decides where the file lives and which version is current. Governance sets the rules; the library enforces them.

5. Record the approval with the asset

The approval should live with the file, not in an email thread. Two years later, the question will be whether this image was cleared, and the answer needs to be findable in seconds.

7. Review the process when it is not under pressure

Ask, once a year: which items took longest, which approvers were bottlenecks, which content skipped the process, and what happened as a result.

Common questions about internal communications content governance

A working checklist

Run these against your own internal communications content governance:

• Content tiered by risk, with published turnaround times per tier
• Approvers named by role, each with an empowered deputy
• A documented default when an approval deadline passes
• Rights checklist run at the point of asset ingestion, not at publication
• Written consent for identifiable images, recording the uses covered
• Contractor and agency contracts checked for assignment versus licence
• Music, video and stock licences confirmed for internal use
• Approval status stored with the asset itself
• A withdrawal route for consent, including for printed material
• An annual review of what the process actually cost in time

The structural point

Internal communications content governance tends to grow by accretion rather than design. Someone is added to the approval route after an incident, nobody is ever removed, and within three years a routine notice requires the same route as a redundancy announcement. Meanwhile the questions that carry real exposure – who owns this image, who agreed to appear in it, what did the licence actually cover – are not on anyone’s checklist because they were never assigned.

Both problems are solved by the same short piece of work: writing down who decides what, separating rights from opinion, and calibrating the route to the risk. Internal communications content governance is not a policy document so much as a handful of decisions made once and written where people can find them. If that structure is currently held in individual memory, it might be a good time to speak to CommsKit.