Inside Scoop on Editorial Calendars and Story Refreshes

[00:10:29] BB: Okay, good to know. And then how about the approval process for a story? And I love when we have editors on here because you're usually up the food chain in determining that. Tell us more about that

[00:10:43] SS: So I think of our editorial calendar a little bit like an old school magazine editorial calendar. Like, again, we're thinking four to six weeks out and we build out the month like, you know, in one or two meetings. So, you know, again, know if you're pitching for October in October, you know, that calendar is set from there. It's a collaborative process. We work with a lot of freelancers to assign things out. So again, it really helps for us to work in advance, to have a lot of advance notice of what we're doing so we can communicate with our team of writers.

[00:11:20] BB: Okay, and you're saying team of writers. How many is this team? Pretty much.

[00:11:25] SS: We work with many freelancers, many writers, you know, at least a dozen, maybe two dozen people.

[00:11:34] BB: Oh, okay. So that's. Yeah, that's another chunk of people to manage. Okay, got it. Okay, so this is good to know. You know, four weeks, six weeks out in advance. You got to be thinking about that. And is it, Is it. Tell us a little bit more. Is there like a meeting held with you and other people or the whole team? Or like, how does that go down?

[00:11:53] SS: Sure. I meet with each of my editors. We often have our homepage editor in that meeting as well. And we're talking through, you know, what's happening next month. We've got inflation data coming out. Say it's October, Halloween, maybe we'll tie some Halloween stories to real estate or personal finance or careers and then what are some evergreen stories that we need to refresh? What's due to be updated, Refreshed, looked at again, I think people might not understand how much we go back to our old stories and see if they need to be updated.

[00:12:28] BB: I'm glad you touched on this. Someone from Wirecutter who was on was saying, hey, like, we update the reviews and stuff because the SEO value is so high. Tell us a little bit more about the

[00:12:39] SS: So it depends on the piece and what it needs. It could involve going back to former sources. It could involve going to new sources. It could involve putting in new data, new graphical or visual elements. It could be a light review, or we could be totally rewriting and adding whole new sections. So it's really, again, going to depend on the story. But it's great to sometimes have new sources to go to for those upda

[00:13:07] BB: Okay. And I'm thinking, just what's the volume of those stories that need updating? Is it like a tenth of all the stuff you work on, or is it like, oh, no, it's like 20% of our content. I don't know.

[00:13:24] BB: Oh, at least half. Wow. Oh, Never heard.

[00:13:28] SS: And again, that doesn't mean that there isn't any reporting, but it's worth, I think, noting that we're not always looking for new story ideas. We're looking for the data, the source, the analysis.

[00:13:37] BB: Yeah, this is good to know, I think, for publicist to go like, okay, could I have something to update to this piece and maybe you reference that in your pitch?

[00:13:49] SS: Sure. Although I have a caveat about that.

[00:13:49] BB: Oh, tell us. Tell us now.

[00:13:50] SS: One of my pet peeves is we write a story and somebody pitches us...

[00:13:54] BB: I know what you're gonna say.

[00:13:55] SS: "You just wrote this story. Write it again and quote me this time." And that's not how it's going to work. It's going to be, you know, six months or a year later when we would revisit it. 

Rapid Fire Pitching Preferences