7 Steps to Strategic Planning for Editors
by Danita Allen, University of Missouri School of Journalism, allend@missouri.edu, 573-882-4710
Guidelines:
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Get away from the office.
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Follow rules of effective brainstorming.
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Volume is the goal.
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Build on others' ideas.
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Don't shoot.
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Quantify and qualify
1. Analyze change in your industry, field or area.
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Collect data
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Discuss trends and changes.
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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.
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Circulation trends
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Audience profile, demographics, psychographics, research
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Anecdotal evidence
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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.
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Compare basic business information.
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Obtain media kit. Compare demographics.
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Compare Standard Rate and Data Service information or audit reports.
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List and compare advertising categories.
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Count pages/issue and average number of pages/year. Calculate ad/edit ratio/issue and /year.
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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.)
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Calculate editorial mix by percentage of categories and compare to your own.
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Pin up covers and identify cover philosophy and strategies.
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Check the web site contents and strategies.
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Define each competitor's apparent mission and positioning
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Itemize each competitor's strengths and weaknesses.
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Articulate precisely how your magazine differs or is similar, and your own strengths and weaknesses.
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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.
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Review and update your mission statement.
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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)
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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.
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Review the covers.
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sales, if applicable
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mission
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personality or character (See article at end for exercise)
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Evaluation Scorecard.
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Review content.
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What is key message?
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Was it worth saying?
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Was it said well?
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Need story selection criteria?
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Review design and story packaging
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Review use of reader-friendly editing techniques (See Evaluation Scorecard in handouts)
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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.
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Write general goals.
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Rewrite to make more specific and concrete.
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Add how you will measure success to the goal.
7. Make your action plan.
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Assign what will be done, by whom, and when?
Download: 7 Steps to Strategic Planning for Editors (Word Doc, 33KB)