What is an Editorial Calendar?

An editorial calendar is an arrangement and listing of pre-planned themes and associated content used by bloggers, businesses, publishers and other groups of people for the purpose of managing publication in media outlets. These include blogs, newspapers, magazines, email newsletters and almost all social media outlets.

The main purpose of editorial calendars is to enable systematic and regular publications of content that interest readers and advertisers.

Many traditional print publishers have for a long time used editorial calendars to manage the publication of magazines, books, and newspapers. The internet today has also increased the need and number of businesses that need to organize their ideas and content for regular publications.

Editorial calendars are used to control and define content from the point of creation, brainstorming, editorial reviews, and collaboration, all the way to the point of publishing your writing at the different publishing channels or distributions points (traditional, digital or social media).

The editorial calendar process and coordination ranges from fairly simple for a sole-proprietor to quite complex in larger companies. It can involves brainstorming, assigning content based on the schedule of publication, writing content, review of first draft, making of revisions or acceptance of content, performing of final editing, submitting content to legal team, making legal changes to the content if any, presenting content to the layout team, publishing your content to a test server and making necessary final changes before publishing the content on a company’s preferred media outlet.

Publishing the wrong piece of information, or the right piece of information at the wrong time can be devastating.

As simple or complex the publishing process might look to you, know that content always passes through many iterative and forward stages before publication. Publishers undergo a lot of challenges before they publish the content you see in papers, magazines, books, journals, on blogs or even on social media. An editorial calendar makes this process easy and make sure it flows smoothly.

The most details tracked and found in an editorial calendar depend on the type of content to be published and the general process of publication. A lot of data or too little information can make an editorial calendar extremely hard to use or maintain. There are however, some elements and data that are required in an editorial calendar so as to be fully functional.

Some of the information that is required in an editorial calendar include the title of the content, date, target audience, the department responsible for the creation of content if any and the completion time. An editorial calendar also includes officers in charge for the project and their leader or leaders.