Editorial calendar templates: your quick-start guide

Editorial calendars are the lifeblood of any content creation team. They help content creators, content marketers, and their stakeholders track the status of each asset, when it’s scheduled to publish, and where.

Whether you’re starting from scratch or improving an existing production process, an editorial calendar can help ramp up your team’s productivity, and map your work back to your marketing strategy. To help you create your new calendar—or revamp the one you already have—we’ve put together seven templates.

It’s worth noting that these templates are meant to inspire, not instruct. Choose the one that best suits your team, and then customize the calendar to make it your own. Or if you’re ready to get building, feel free to skip straight to the template you’re most interested in.

The right format for your editorial calendar 

Editorial calendars are unique to the team they serve. The content strategy for a global publishing company, for example, will look different from that of an org focused on TV and live events.

Editorial calendars help all kinds of teams create high-quality content with less painful coordination. But when you have an eclectic group of stakeholders—editors, writer, designers, execs—it’s tough to keep track of each step of the production process without overwhelming your calendar with excess information. 

If you've created your calendar in Airtable, you can customize information for different teammates with views. Views are a set, specified way to look at the information in your Airtable base. Creating new views doesn't add to, or augment the information in your base. Instead, views help you reconfigure, filter, and group your data in the way that’s most helpful to you. You and your team members can have as many (or as few) views as you like. No matter how many you create, every view pulls from the same pool of information—so you’ll be able to personalize your view while maintaining a single source of truth.

For example, if you’re a blog editor, you might want to see blog posts in a calendar view, filtered down to show only posts going live. But if you’re a content producer creating content for all channels, you might want a detailed Kanban view that shows content by production stage, or a grid view of assets that are behind track.

Here’s a quick recap of the most popular views for editorial calendars, and how most creators use them:

• Calendar: The calendar view is probably the most intuitive for those moving their calendar from tools like Google Calendar or Outlook. It shows upcoming deliverables at a glance, mapped to their respective due dates.

• Grid: If you’re used to creating editorial calendars in a spreadsheet, this view is the quickest to get used to. This view shows your information in a simple grid, letting you see tons of details at a glance. You can also filter or group information in your grid view to make it easier to read and absorb.

• Kanban: The kanban view is most popular for those that like a visual approach to their workflow. For example, most use it to bucket projects by status, with sections for each stage of the production process (e.g. writing or reviews).

• Image gallery: The image gallery is great for comparing and contrasting visual assets in your content. For example, you might use the image gallery to see all of your hero images at once, so you can check for visual variety and cohesion.

Editorial calendar templates

Choosing the right template starts with defining the way you want to use it. Do you want a calendar that deep-dives on a specific channel, like as a blog, or do you need one that spans a wider set of channels, content types, and initiatives? Check out these templates to see which approach works best for you.

Template: Editorial calendar

This content calendar template helps you track the publication and production schedule of your content: from initial idea through publication. It helps you quickly see what content is scheduled, who owns each piece, and the campaigns they’re tied to.

Team members focused on production—like writers and designers—can use the "content pipeline" table to map out details like status, title, headline, and thumbnail for each piece. Meanwhile, editors can use the "campaigns" table to organize budget and plan content themes.

Template: Social media calendar

The social media calendar template is great for planning and tracking content across multiple social channels. Gallery views—like the one pictured above—can help social media managers plan the visual look and feel of their social campaigns. The "dates to remember" table, on the other hand, maps out important days and holidays to make sure your content is topical and timely.

This template is especially powerful for social media managers looking to organize and visualize their content feed. With a calendar view of all upcoming content, it’s also great for giving stakeholders a peek at what’s coming down the pipeline (before it goes live).

Template: Print editorial calendar 

Brands that publish both in print and online will appreciate this calendar. Meant to coordinate your print schedule with your online publishing schedule, the print editorial calendar template gives a bird’s eye view of content by issue.

This calendar is especially helpful for editors and managers fleshing out content themes across multiple channels. The "issues" table, on one hand, maps out the issue theme, number of pages, and the individual pieces that’ll appear in the issue. The "online schedule" and "print schedule" tables, on the other hand, help to make sure both channels are publishing coordinated, on-theme content at any given moment.

Template: Blog editorial calendar

Sometimes, when it comes to editorial calendars, less is more. This template is distilled down to only need-to-know information around your publication schedule. With details like story title, publish date, author, and editorial notes, it’s a streamlined way to coordinate your team’s calendar.

If you’re just getting your team started with an editorial calendar—or if your stakeholders already have their own workflows and processes for tracking content—this is a good place to start. It provides a simplified source of truth to rally your team around—and plenty of flexibility for customization and additions down the line.

Template: Podcast editorial calendar

This podcast-focused calendar is perfect for managing podcast guests, episode content, and sponsorships. The "episodes" table helps map out content for each upcoming episode, while the "guests and sponsorships" tables lay important logistic details (like your guest’s job title and your sponsor’s ad scripts).

While this template is great for planning podcast content, it’s equally useful for managing it. With space for ad offerings, transcriptions, and more, it organizes all the details you need to run and publish your podcast.

Template: Internal communications editorial calendar

Internal communications teams producing content for employees will find this template especially useful. With tables for organizing online communications, plus in-person events, this template maps every effort to a team objective. 

Using this template, internal communications managers can quickly review their objectives, plus the individual online and in-person initiatives supporting them. With a grid view that sorts content by channel, the "online/digital" table is great for those working with distributed teams.

Template: Content idea tracking

Content marketers need to create interesting and engaging content for their target audience—and do it at scale. This template helps teams get inspired by capturing content examples from across the web that you can use to brainstorm new pieces of content.

The content idea tracking template uses the Airtable web clipper app to pull details from your example page into a record in the base. It’s great for content writers and editors looking to crowdsource fresh ideas for their editorial calendar.

Build your perfect editorial calendar 

A collaborative editorial calendar gives content teams the transparency they need to stay on track throughout the production and publication process. These templates are a great starting point, but customizing your calendar will make even more impactful for your team.

With an intuitive, easy-to-use interface, Airtable is a great fit for editors, writers, and designers alike. You can customize your base with multiple, tailored views to help your team visualize your editorial pipeline in the way they prefer (whether it be a calendar view, a Kanban view, a spreadsheet-like grid, or something else). And with over 1,000 integrations, it’s easy to integrate with your existing tools.