Editorial Guidelines & Calendar

I have a background in traditional public relations and media and am very used to working with editorial calendars. When I was running my own PR Firm, a publisher’s editorial calendar was gold! In order to make things a little easier for you, the PR people I work with, I’ve decided to create the following to give you an idea of when things can be expected to appear.

MissManifesto can be best described as a “punk spiritual chick”. Aimed at women with attitude, who live their lives with more gusto than could be considered “average”, who could be said to have balls, MissManifesto doesn’t offer yet another vanilla sex tip.  She’s every woman’s best friend and every man’s fantasy – fantastic, blunt and wickedly smart.

MissManifesto is exceptionally PR friendly, but please take a moment to review the site before pitching. Things that don’t fit here:

• Celebrities wearing your client’s hats, shoes, sunglasses whatever.
• Experts who aren’t experts.
• Contests that require people to like your client on facebook, twitter, your blog and then stand on their head for a 1 in 52,000 chance to get a bottle of water, or better, a COUPON for a bottle of water!

Let me say again, I was in PR. I get it. In fact, I totally get that your boss is probably telling you this is a great pitch and I’d be a crazy fucking bitch to not think so. When I had clients who insisted I send out a dumb ass pitch (including the time my office sent a pitch about fudge to a fitness magazine. Yes, that happened. It was an accident, but it happened. See? I get it), I continued to ask myself “So What?” until I found a newsworthy nugget. Without finding that, my pitch didn’t go out. I encourage you to do the same.

The good news is, if you’ve got a good pitch and you’re smart about it, chances of me writing about your item/client/news/cool thing is really good.

One other thing to know? Typically if you want me to write about a product and I haven’t tried it myself, I’m not going to be writing about it. I need to be able to touch, feel, taste, experience your client’s stuff before I am willing to recommend it to anyone. People believe people. My readers believe and trust what I tell them – let’s work together to make sure I can tell them the cool, right stuff, k?

So, general editorial calendar

For the most part, under each category, I’ll be covering everything under the sun about that topic. it might be something that I find, that I’ve read, seen, experienced or whatever. Life can include relationships, sex, friendship, advice, home decor, gardening… whatever life entails.  Food could cover things we eat, non alcoholic beverages, kitchen tools, recipes, cookbooks etc. If you’ve got questions about whether something fits into a category, let me know. As much as I am against stupid pitches, I’d rather work with you and hear how you think something might fit rather than have you not send it at all.

One of my goals for 2012, along with the usuals (eat better, be fit, increase readership, publish a book) is to travel more. I’ve had some very successful fam trips in the past few years that I’m happy to tell you about (including the coverage I was able to land) and would like to increase my coverage of interesting and unusual vacation spots (maybe someplace unusual in a popular place? Somewhere that’s not top of a tourist’s bucket list but should be?). I’m an adventure girl – up for absolutely anything, anywhere, so please don’t hesitate to give me a call!

For specific demographic information, please contact colleen at missmanifesto dot com. To advertise on MissManifesto, please contact Federated Media.

Updated: November 1, 2011