The Editorial Calendar

By Henry Dubroff
September 17, 2008

The editorial calendar drives every successful business journal.

At its best, the calendar represents a unique way to deliver richer content about local business, build networks of business professionals and have plenty of space for more in-depth reporting.

But the editorial calendar also serves an additional purpose. Its combination of focus sections, special reports and Top 25 lists represents a key source of revenue.

Indeed, the economics of the weekly business journal are devilishly simple—if you make money on every week, you will have a profit when the year grinds to an end.

Let’s take a closer look.

At my company, the Pacific Coast Business Times, we start planning for the New Year right around Labor Day. Even though we are just in our eighth year of publication, it amazes me how many fixed positions there already are in our annual lineup.

What exactly constitutes the editorial calendar?

At the bottom rung of the ladder are the Top 25 lists. Each year we plot out 52 lists, one to be published each week, with additional lists added to round out our Top 25 Book of Lists, which publishes the last week of the year and is a real money maker.

The Top 25 lists are produced by our research director, using an outsourced database called “DataJoe” that allows us to receive and update the list online and with relative ease.

We try to publish each list in a way that makes sense for the time of year and the special report or focus section for that week. When we can, we sell advertising adjacent to the list. Lists that are likely revenue drivers, i.e. commercial real estate firms or law firms, have a fixed space on the editorial calendar year after year.

Next up are the focus sections.

Each week, we have a four-to-six page focus section tucked inside our main news section. This provides space for a couple of feature or trend stories and a briefs column on a specific topic.

Topics include small business and technology, two important corridors in our widely dispersed area, and more recently “green business” has also become a focus. We list these on the editorial calendar in a monthly rotation. Week one of every month is “green” or “tech.” Week two and four is “small business.” Week three is a “corridor report” and if there is a fifth Friday in the month that issue becomes a “nonprofits” focus.

Then there are the special reports. We publish roughly 24 special reports during the year and they range from a fairly straightforward mid-year economic update to the 101 One Hundred, a massive research project that is our effort to produce a Fortune 500 for our region.

Our special reports are pull-out sections that typically are labeled “Section B” in the newspaper. Four of our very large special reports have glossy covers, which means getting cover art to the printer a week early. All Section B reports go to our printer a day early, i.e. Tuesday for Friday publication, and significantly, we do not provide this content online.

The meat and potatoes of our special report calendar are the so-called “Who’s Who” sections. Some business journals have moved on to rebranded sections that are a little fancier but the social-business networking value of these sections seems to be getting more, not less, important. We profile top guns in banking, commercial real estate, law/cpas and health/insurance services. These sections are extremely popular and highly profitable.

Six of our sections are accompanied by events—Family Business Awards, Top 50 Women, 101 One Hundred, Spirit of Small Business, Fastest Growing Companies and 40 Under 40 were our events this year. Events are enough to drive an editor crazy—they take a lot of time, and cross communication between the news department and the advertising department is essential to make sure that honorees and award winners are going to attend.

But again, the networking value of events to the company and to the attendees is significant, so they have become a bigger and bigger part of our company. It turns out that some companies who will not place print advertising in our journal on a regular basis will, however, pay a small fortune to get some podium time in front of a group of sales prospects.

Which is why the editorial calendar, typically printed out on one sheet of paper and pasted on the wall above my monitor, becomes such a big deal in the life of a business journal editor. The special reports and events—in a larger metro business journal there would be 50 or more reports and perhaps a dozen events—take up a lot of mental bandwidth and space. Further, editorial enterprise projects generally have to fit into time slots that aren’t crammed with a big project like 101 One Hundred.

The editorial calendar’s special reports and events are also very strongly linked to the company’s overall budget for the year—mainly in terms of revenue but also in terms of research, freelance and other expenses that might be involved.

Indeed, once the editorial calendar is pretty much etched in stone for the year, it gets tied back to the budget for each month to see if the P&L will pencil out to some basic profit targets. That means special reports and/or events are hard to move and almost impossible to kill—unless advertising revenue falls so short of projections that the special report/event is no longer economical.

In any given year, a business journal might give up one or two weak reports and add one or two new ones.

But as time goes on and special reports find an audience, there’s less room for change. This year, George, our publisher, and I sat down in late August to scope out next year’s editorial calendar.

We looked at the week-by-week lineup of lists, focus sections, special reports and events we planned to face in 2009 - and had a good laugh.

Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism