Publication Planning

---
name: publication-planning
description: Plan an editorial publication pipeline across audience needs, themes, formats, cadence, contributors, dependencies, review capacity, distribution, maintenance, and measurable value without filling a calendar for its own sake.
---
# Publication Planning

Use when a content program needs coordinated recurring output rather than one isolated piece.

## Procedure
1. Define audiences, editorial goals, distribution channels, recurring questions, product or market moments, and available production capacity.
2. Build themes or coverage areas from audience needs and strategic relevance rather than arbitrary weekly topics.
3. Balance formats and time horizons such as timely news, evergreen guides, case studies, research, launches, opinion, and maintenance work as appropriate.
4. Estimate research, writing, design, review, legal or technical input, and distribution effort for each planned piece.
5. Sequence around real dependencies, launches, events, data availability, and contributor schedules without making dates more important than quality.
6. Maintain a healthy pipeline across idea, brief, research, draft, review, production, scheduled, published, and update states.
7. Reserve capacity for corrections, unexpected opportunities, and maintaining high-value existing content.
8. Review performance and editorial gaps periodically and adjust the plan based on audience value, not only publishing volume.

## Decision rules
- A full calendar is not evidence of a good editorial program.
- Evergreen maintenance can be more valuable than another new article.
- Cadence should follow audience and production capacity.
- Do not schedule pieces before required evidence or reviewers can realistically exist.

## Quality gate
The publication plan is ready when coverage maps to audience and editorial goals, capacity and dependencies are realistic, the pipeline exposes bottlenecks, maintenance and opportunistic work have room, and performance can change future priorities rather than merely confirm the calendar.