Editorial-style 'Story Budget' For BloggingIn most media organizations, content producing staff maintain something called a ’story budget.’ It’s a running tab of ideas that allows you to document and track content being prepped for your publishing pipeline.

Like major media organizations, blogs too can put a good story budget to use in organizing posts. Whether you’ve prepared eight paragraphs for an upcoming story or just have fleeting thoughts for your next 20 stories, a story budget can help put it all in order for you.


Tailoring a budget to your needs -big or small- is key. Media outlets with a large number of staff may see more benefit from a highly standardized budget where you have format polices, methods of vetting — from reporters up to managing editors, layout planning, story-related photographs, etc.

On a small blog effort [say, 1 to 3 writers] it may however be more suitable to ramp up just a basic budget for yourself — rather than a single budget for the team.

Starting up your story budget is simple. You can do this in Microsoft Word, Google Documents or even a basic text file.

Some formatting tips to remember are:

  1. Separate your ideas by some sort of horizontal line. Word and Google Docs both have ‘Insert horizontal line’ options built in that will give you a noticeable HTML line break. For text files – just add a few dashes. With these horizontal lines [or dashes] you’re then ready to separate and organize your ideas from top to bottom.
  2. You may also find it more intuitive to align your content with completed articles at the lower part of your budget and the ‘in-progress’ ideas towards the top.
  3. To keep track of when your content was published, try adding a ‘date published‘ blurb at the end of each article being tracked.
  4. Your budget is also a good place to make notes: websites of interest, related photography, investigative contacts or places to visit.

An example story budget could look like this:

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Story ONE About Anything

The story reads like this with the following references. Publishing is a breeze and organization is easy! Get your blog started to day and syndicate!

websites: TechMiso.com; Slashdot.com;
photography: none
investigative contacts: Scott; Rich
places to visit: Tokyo, Japan

//published: 20090225
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next story here
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Story THREE….
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Story budgets may not be the endgame solution for all bloggers. Some of us have the knack to manage content in our heads and some of us just write impromptu like a pro. But if you’re just starting out and maybe confused on how to ramp up a solid pipeline of content, an editorial-style budget story may be precisely what you’re looking for.

How do you plan and track your blog posts?