A quarterly content calendar: how to never run out of topics
Newsrooms rarely struggle with writing. The struggle starts on Monday morning, when someone has to decide what to write about - and that decision can be made once a quarter instead of thirteen times in a row.
A content calendar is not paperwork. It answers a single question: what goes out next week. Without it, topics get picked in a hurry, usually from whatever is lying on top, and after a year the site looks like a pile of coincidences. With it, the team writes about what it decided matters, and gives each piece the time it needs.
Where the empty weeks come from
Usually from too much ambition at the start. A year-long plan gets drafted in a week, lists forty entries and falls apart in March, because nobody accounted for vacations, outages and stories that arrived from outside. A quarter is shorter than a team's patience and longer than a single burst of energy - which is exactly why it works.