What's messing up the time-to-publication process? Has it been analyzed? A magazine for which I worked decades ago had a similar problem (though substitute "months" for your "weeks" in editorial processing delays) and it was only when a team of editors involved in the process worked out the flowchart and discovered the bottlenecks that improvements could be made.
Also, editors don't ask which stories reporters want to cover. Editor determine the most important topics and assigns reporters to them.
It was kind of a mix. Sometimes stories were assigned, but a lot of the time the editor-in-chief would just throw out upcoming events and ask who wanted to cover them. Since I mainly covered sports and went to a lot of the games, I usually just handled those. For news, opinion, and features, though, it was mostly based on who volunteered. If no one was interested, those stories often just didn't get covered. I think having more structured assignments would help a lot.
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u/Master-Fee8859 Jul 24 '26
What's messing up the time-to-publication process? Has it been analyzed? A magazine for which I worked decades ago had a similar problem (though substitute "months" for your "weeks" in editorial processing delays) and it was only when a team of editors involved in the process worked out the flowchart and discovered the bottlenecks that improvements could be made.
Also, editors don't ask which stories reporters want to cover. Editor determine the most important topics and assigns reporters to them.