Creating a Content Editorial Calendar
A content editorial calendar is a tool that aligns your editorial calendar with the needs of your publishing business. It is an essential tool that helps you better understand how you and those who work for you can strategically meet your organization’s goals. These goals are in line with journalistic principles. It is often seen as time-consuming and not worth the effort when seen as only another task on many to-do lists. Jordan Sudberg believes that this calendar should be a simple, visual tool that helps editors and writers create a content editorial calendar. An editor or writer uses the calendar to give project information and time frames for its completion. Once a calendar has been completed, it helps editors to manage their work and gives writers an outline of deadlines they can meet.
How To Create A Content Editorial Calendar
1. Consider the goals of your business.
Sudberg’s Content Editorial Calendar is a content editorial calendar created for journalism and publishing organizations that want to accomplish specific journalistic tasks clearly and concisely. Creating this kind of tool will help editors and writers meet these goals.
2. Conduct research about the goals you have for your organization.
These are the things you want to accomplish and any steps that will help you reach these goals. It is essential to consider what you want for your organization and what you need. By studying other organizations that succeed in business and journalism, you will be able to learn about successful strategies that you might not know about.
3. Create a timeline for your organization’s goals.
It can be done by charting an idea from the beginning to the end of completion. It will help you see where there are gaps in the process and see if something is missing or if a step is missing entirely.
4. List the activities that will accomplish your goals or assist in reaching your goals.
It is what a content editorial calendar will include, as well as all aspects of a project and its deadlines. It would help if you consisted of all the steps in the editing and publishing process, from writing to editing to publishing. All of these terms are used interchangeably throughout this guide.
5. List your goals, activities, and employees chronologically with timelines.
It is important to note that these timelines need not be exact or even always the same length; as long as each task has an allotted time for completion, it is a successful content editorial calendar.
Jordan Sudberg stresses that the content editorial calendar helps an editor keep track of the progress and completion of each project. The calendar also allows editors to manage their time and exercise control over their staff. Because the calendar keeps everyone informed of what is going on at any given moment, problems can be quickly addressed and immediately resolved.
In addition, the editorial calendar works well with other print production tools, such as a press schedule, which is a tool used by printing organizations that include publishers, marketers, or printers to keep close tabs on when jobs will go to press or run through the printer. A press schedule will show how long it takes to start a career and what kind of time frame they have for printing itself.