editorial-calendar-planner

Editorial Calendar Planner

What This Skill Does

Generates a structured editorial calendar for a publication — mapping content across weeks or months, balancing evergreen and timely pieces, tracking production stages, and aligning coverage with external events.

When To Use This Skill

• You are planning the next quarter's coverage and need a skeleton calendar before assigning stories
• Your publication has a seasonal peak (awards season, festival coverage, holiday gift guides) and you need to reverse-engineer the production timeline from the publish dates
• You have recently expanded or shrunk your team and need to redistribute workload across writers
• An editor-in-chief is onboarding and wants to see the full pipeline visualised in one document
• You are launching a new publication or section and need to build the first production schedule from scratch
• You need to coordinate coverage across multiple beats that share the same production bottleneck (a single photographer, one copy editor, a shared designer)
• You want to stress-test an existing rough plan: you have a list of stories you want to run but have not mapped them against the calendar to check for bottlenecks, workload peaks, or deadline conflicts
• You are preparing a planning document for a stakeholder meeting (editorial board, publisher, funder) and need to show what the team will produce over the next period

What You Need To Provide

Required:

• Publication type and frequency (weekly, biweekly, monthly, daily digital)
• Team size — how many writers, editors, and other production staff
• Beat coverage — which subjects your publication covers
• Planning period — the timespan you want the calendar to cover (4–12 weeks)

Optional:

• Upcoming external events relevant to your beats (festivals, elections, legislative sessions, industry conferences, awareness weeks, holidays)
• Existing recurring content (regular columns, series, reviews sections)
• Any hard editorial commitments already on the schedule (commissioned features, pre-sold advertorial adjacencies, special issues)
• Preferred content mix (e.g., "we want more long-form features and fewer news recaps")
• Historical patterns — which types of content perform best, which weeks are slow for readership
• Production bottleneck information — does photography take longer than writing? Is the copy desk a single person?
• Writer availability notes — part-time schedules, planned leave, other commitments
• Whether you want the calendar to include web/digital slots alongside print, or print only