7 Steps to Strategic Planning for Editors

by Danita Allen, University of Missouri School of Journalism, allend@missouri.edu, 573-882-4710

Guidelines:

• Get away from the office.

• Follow rules of effective brainstorming.

  • Volume is the goal. 

  • Build on others' ideas.

  • Don't shoot.

• Quantify and qualify 

1. Analyze change in your industry, field or area.

• Collect data

• Discuss trends and changes.

• Ask yourself series of 3 questions

1. What new things should you do?
2. What should you stop doing?
3. What should continue but improve?

2. Evaluate audience trends.

• Circulation trends

• Audience profile, demographics, psychographics, research

• Anecdotal evidence

• Ask yourself series of 3 questions:

1. What new things should you do?
2. What should you stop doing?
3. What should continue but improve?

3. Analyze competition or else similar magazines.

1. Compare basic business information.

2. Obtain media kit. Compare demographics.

3. Compare Standard Rate and Data Service information or audit reports.

4. List and compare advertising categories.

5. Count pages/issue and average number of pages/year. Calculate ad/edit ratio/issue and /year.

6. Identify subjects, topics, or general categories of subjects and number of editorial paged devoted to each. (See sample table in article at end of handout.)

7. Calculate editorial mix by percentage of categories and compare to your own.

8. Pin up covers and identify cover philosophy and strategies.

9. Check the web site contents and strategies.

10. Define each competitor's apparent mission and positioning

11. Itemize each competitor's strengths and weaknesses.

12. Articulate precisely how your magazine differs or is similar, and your own strengths and weaknesses.

13. Ask yourself series of 3 questions

1. What new things should you do?
2. What should you stop doing?
3. What should continue but improve?

4. Track important editorial factors.

• Review and update your mission statement.

• Track important statistics: freelance cost/issue corrections cost/issue cost of separations/issue or /page photo cost/issue geographic distribution of stories or sources # items/page on departmental pages average story length # stories/issue # stories/staff editor # pages/staff editor % freelance vs. % staff-written pages/editor etc. (whatever is most important to you)

• Ask yourself series of 3 questions

1. What new things should you do? 
2. What should you stop doing?
3. What should continue but improve?

5. Review the content and the journalism.

• Review the covers.

  • sales, if applicable

  • mission

  • personality or character (See article at end for exercise)

• Evaluation Scorecard.

• Review content.

  • What is key message?

  • Was it worth saying?

  • Was it said well?

  • Need story selection criteria?

  • Review design and story packaging

  • Review use of reader-friendly editing techniques (See Evaluation Scorecard in handouts)

• Ask yourself series of 3 questions

  1. What new things should you do?
  2. What should you stop doing?
  3. What should continue but improve?

6. Set achievable goals that can be measured.

• Write general goals.

• Rewrite to make more specific and concrete.

• Add how you will measure success to the goal.

7. Make your action plan.

• Assign what will be done, by whom, and when?

Download: 7 Steps to Strategic Planning for Editors (Word Doc, 33KB)