Most publishers I speak to have a content calendar. Far fewer have a content strategy, and I’ve started to think the gap between those two things is where a lot of wasted effort lives.
A calendar answers a scheduling question. What goes out on Tuesday, who is writing it, has the editor seen it. Useful, necessary, and completely silent on the question that actually matters: why are we making this at all, and who is it for?
I’ve been chewing on this at the city guide because we produce a genuinely large amount of content. Reviews, previews, event write-ups, guides to areas of the city. When you publish at that volume, the calendar becomes the strategy by default. The machine has to be fed, so you feed it, and the reasoning behind any individual piece gets lost in the sheer momentum of getting the week out.
The trouble with that is you stop being able to say no. Everything looks equally worth doing when your only measure is whether the slot is filled. A proper strategy gives you permission to leave slots empty, which sounds like a small thing and is actually the whole game.
For me a content strategy needs to answer three plain questions before anyone touches a keyboard. Who is this for, specifically, not “our readers” but a real person with a real reason to be on the page. What does it do that a hundred other sites don’t already do better. And how will we know, weeks later, whether it worked. If a piece can’t clear those three, it probably belongs in the “nice idea, not this quarter” pile.
There is a timing angle to this too. Google spent January talking openly about low-quality content and thin pages, and whatever comes of that, the direction is not subtle. Volume for its own sake is getting riskier. The publishers who survive the next couple of years will be the ones who can point at a page and explain, without flinching, why it deserves to exist.
I don’t have this fully worked out. We still publish plenty that I couldn’t defend under my own three questions, because the practical reality of running an editorial operation is messier than any framework. But I’ve started asking the questions in planning meetings, and it has already killed two or three projects that would have eaten a fortnight for nothing.
The immediate benefit, if you want one, is fewer pointless pages rather than more good ones; the good ones take longer and I’m not there yet. Next planning meeting is Thursday. I’ll find out then whether asking the awkward questions out loud makes me popular or not.
