An editorial calendar is used by bloggers, publishers, businesses, and groups to control publication of content across different media, for example, newspaper, magazine, blog, email newsletters, and social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook fan pages. They are an extremely efficient way to control publication of content across diverse media outlets over time.
Publishers also extract some of their editorial calendar data and make the data publicly available to attract advertisers. Public relations professionals also use these abbreviated editorial calendars to try to place stories for their clients. However, the primary purpose of editorial calendars is to control the publication of content to ensure regular appearance of content that interests readers and advertisers.
Traditional print publishers have used editorial calendars in some form for centuries to manage the publication of books, magazines, and newspapers. The internet has dramatically increased the number of publishers who also need to organize content and ensure content is published at regular intervals. These publishers have discovered editorial calendars solve a difficult problem: how to ensure content can be published consistently over time in different media. Without a calendar, publishing can be erratic and possess little interest to readers and advertisers.
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Editorial calendars are used to define and control the process of creating content, from idea through writing and publication. An individual or small business might have this publishing process:
A larger group might have this publishing process:
Whether the publishing process is simple or complex, the movement is forward and iterative. Publishers encounter and cross a number of hurdles before a piece of content appears in print, on a website or blog, or in a social media outlet like Twitter or Facebook.
The details included and tracked in an editorial calendar depends upon the steps involved in publishing content for a publication, as well as what is useful to track. Too little or too much data make editorial calendars difficult to maintain and use. Some amount of tweaking of editorial calendar elements, while using the calendar to publish content, is required before they can be truly useful.
In addition to the editorial process, each type of content has its own creation process an editorial calendar must accommodate. The steps and effort to conduct, write, and publish an interview are different from those needed to publish an editorial. Understanding the different creation processes involved help to set realistic dates in an editorial calendar.
Content ideas usually are created through brainstorming, based on current events, and other sources. Publications often group story ideas to be published on specific days of the week, for example, an environmental news site might publish research articles on Mondays and interviews with industry leaders on Thursdays. Grouping content helps train readers to return at regular intervals and makes it easier to organize advertising around these themes.
Tools used to create an editorial calendar vary from paper to standalone tracking software integrated into publishing tools. There are at least four types of technology used to create an editorial calendar:
Each of these technologies have their strengths and weaknesses. Most editorial calendars are spreadsheets or can be exported as a spreadsheet for review. The spreadsheet has tabs that reflect the publishing process, for example, a tab for story ideas, a tab for stories currently being written and edited, and a tab for published stories. There might be additional tabs to track editorial style decisions and scheduled changes to the blog that might impact publishing. Within each spreadsheet tab, there might be columns to track the name of the published piece, the assigned author, the publication destination, micro content (for example, sub headings and HTML alt and title tags to be used in links to the piece of content) and other useful information to track.
Some editorial calendars also track the responses to each piece of content, for example, the number of tweets, Facebook likes, and links to the content from third party websites. This performance data allows the publisher to identify content that appeals most to their readers and larger audience. These results, in turn, can be used to generate new story ideas and, if appropriate, attract advertisers.
Whether the publisher uses a paper calendar, a spreadsheet, or software integrated with their publishing tool, the calendar usually tracks publishing activities grouped into these sections:
Content then moves from one section to the next, from story idea to published content. The glossary and style decisions section contains details editors and authors need to ensure the publication retains a consistent style and tone. If a spreadsheet is used for an editorial calendar, each section would be a tab. If paper is used to track publication, a page for each section in a file folder with notes about style decisions and glossary might work.
Within each section of an editorial calendar, these elements might be tracked:
There also might be columns to check off whether or not micro-content has been created, for example, story blurbs, sub headings, and search optimized descriptions for HTML links and tags. Or there might be columns to check off whether or not a legal review has been passed, images have been created for the story, or other parts of the actual publishing process.
Finally, when using a spreadsheet for an editorial calendar, it is important to use the same column order and titles to track elements across tabs. For example, the first three columns in all tabs of a spreadsheet calendar might be Story Title, Author, and Publication Date. Ordering columns consistently makes it easy to copy and paste rows of entries from one spreadsheet tab to another without having to update the column order on a specific tab.
These resources describe the editorial calendar process in greater detail, as well as additional insights into how editorial calendars can be used effectively.