Weekend Update: Should You Publish Every Day?

Weekend Update: Should You Publish Every Day?

“I think that really saved the magazine,” said Tracy Schmidt, director of social media at Crain Communications and an independent social media consultant, who worked at Time during the change. So it was a recap of the week behind and a look at the week coming up.” The way people interact with media and social media today affects publishing schedules. Legacy publishers like The New York Times post breaking news pieces online before they hit print. Refinery29, a website for “smart, creative, and stylish women,” regularly posts new stories about beauty and lifestyle topics on Saturdays and Sundays. “People are online and news is breaking and people want to be entertained and inspired and informed twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.” “The world doesn’t stop turning.” Over the last few years, people were visiting the site regularly during work hours, but Gandhi began seeing an uptick in readership on nights and weekends. It’s not about just publishing new content on the weekends—editors have to consider when and how to promote content at all times. About one-third of Condé Nast Traveler’s stories published Monday through Friday cover travel trends and news stories; the rest of the publishing schedule is reserved for feature stories. Because of that insight, Condé Nast Traveler posts only one new featured story each weekend day. For others, posting a few pieces of pre-planned content on Saturday and Sunday is enough to engage readers. At Crain, Schmidt has found that publishing a newsletter about the latest social media news on Sunday nights between 6 and 7:30 p.m. is very effective in getting her audience of business professionals to pay attention.

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In 2006, Time magazine realized its readers were too busy during the week to flip through each issue. When they finally could devote enough time to read the articles, the news was already old. So Richard Stengel, the magazine’s former editor-in-chief, made a drastic move. The publication would hit newsstands on Friday instead of Monday morning.

“I think that really saved the magazine,” said Tracy Schmidt, director of social media at Crain Communications and an independent social media consultant, who worked at Time during the change. “It was then redesigned for a weekend experience. So it was a recap of the week behind and a look at the week coming up.”

The way people interact with media and social media today affects publishing schedules. In the early days of the internet, most people accessed information at work, so publishers adjusted accordingly, posting most of their online content between nine and five. Now, though, there’s a need to be active all the time. Legacy publishers like The New York Times post breaking news pieces online before they hit print. And now many digital-first publications have weekend editors who are hired to stay ahead of everything that happens on Saturday and Sunday.

“It ultimately comes down to understanding who your users are, when they are online, and when they’re in a mindset to be interested in what you’re doing,” said Rich Gordon, professor and director of digital innovation at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. “I think that really varies widely on who’s doing the publishing.”

Inspiring and entertaining, seven days a week

The weekend publishing push isn’t just a phenomenon for traditional news outlets. Refinery29, a website for “smart, creative, and stylish women,” regularly posts new stories about beauty and lifestyle topics on Saturdays and Sundays. But that wasn’t always the case, at least until the editorial team started getting more sophisticated data on its readers.

“On all of our platforms, we’re thinking about user behavior,” said Neha Gandhi, SVP of content strategy and innovation at Refinery29. “People are online and news is breaking and people want to be entertained and inspired and informed twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.”

“The world doesn’t stop turning.”

Over the last few years, people were visiting the site regularly during work hours, but Gandhi began seeing an uptick in readership on nights and weekends. In response, Refinery29 created evening and weekend teams to produce content for those busier times.

The site now plans out stories focused…

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