Managing an editorial operation requires a lot of juggling: managing writers, editing and assigning content, and developing ideas for future content. As someone who has previously worked at magazines and newspapers, I’m used to a world of desks piled high with papers and old-fashioned editors who use paper calendars for editorial planning. But in managing content for a marketing agency, I’ve learned more about web-based tools that help keep my editorial management more efficient and organized. Whether you’re managing print media or an online content operation, it would behoove any editor to incorporate some of these tools to manage your blogging editorial.
Editorial Planning and Collaboration
Google Drive/Docs. This one may be ubiquitous, but it’s still one of the best ways to plan and collaborate on content. Drive makes it easy to share and store photos, videos, and other large files to be used for posts. I also use it for uploading my editorial calendar for others to view. Docs is a great collaborative tool for writing; features include the ability to comment on a doc, to add a suggestion to a doc, and easily share the doc with collaborators.
WordPress Edit Flow. If you use WordPress and want to keep your planning within the site, the blogging platform has several plugins for editorial management. One of the most popular free ones is EditFlow, which allows users to create an editorial calendar within your WordPress site, communicate with authors privately about posts, assign custom statuses to posts (“draft,” “pending review,” “pitch”) for easy organization.
Slack. If you want to communicate in real-time with your editorial team without cluttering your inbox or using your personal chat, Slack might be a good option. With Slack, you can create searchable chats organized by category, so you can easily refer to previous conversations about a specific project. There is also direct messaging and the ability to create various channels according to different teams or projects. Slack also has a beautiful interface, and perhaps the best feature of all (or most silly, depending on how you look at it)? Slack teamed up with Giphy to implement animated gif integration in chats. This is truly the collaborative tool for the modern worker. Also, Slack is free.
Task Management
Wrike. Another way to take editorial conversations out of email is through Wrike, a task-management system that is ideal for assigning blog posts to writers. Assigning a task is as simple as tagging someone on Twitter, and from there you can include specifics of the assignment and create a deadline. Wrike also creates daily to-do lists for users consisting of assigned tasks – so if you have trouble staying on-task, you can assign projects to yourself and be periodically reminding looming deadlines.
Generating and Organizing Content Ideas
Evernote. Part of editorial management and content creation is developing ideas. My favorite tool for saving things from all over the web that inspire me is Evernote. There are many “read later” apps out there – Pocket is my favorite for that – but what I like about Evernote is that besides just saving articles you can also clip images and other thing from around the web and save them in notebooks themed around a specific project, as well as create notes yourself. For example, if you are working on a holiday gift guide for your blog and want to keep track of other gift guides that inspire you, Evernote can help you by keeping your links, images, and notes in one place. I also use Evernote for taking and keeping track of notes from editorial meetings and creating to-do lists (the notes function includes a check-box feature).