This is a special time of the year for a monthly magazine. We plan for the 12 issues that will be published in the coming year with great care. There are many very important considerations that affect the yearly editorial calendar.
With regard to Hydraulics & Pneumatics, we first and foremost consider our audience, the readers. We must fill every issue with content that they find both interesting and useful and we use several criteria for that set of decisions.
Our readers want information about components and how they work and we call this tutorials. We produce at least one tutorial article per month. The topic might be mobile hydraulic cylinders or air valves and we discuss how they work and which component works best for various applications.
We also cover application stories across all markets with the larger markets being Construction Equipment, Agricultural Equipment, and Mining. Industrial applications are important too like machine tools and material handling.
Of course we balance our hydraulic coverage with pneumatic. We offer staff written content plus a great deal of expert content submitted by fluid power specialists. Then we offer columns by our own experts, Jack Johnson and Bob Sheaf.
What we put on our annual editorial calendar does not limit what we produce in our magazine. Every month we print our Ideas & Applications section along with product and literature reviews. These columns include all of the above variations.
This is a tough balancing act because we only announce four feature articles per month. So, we need to fit everything we want to cover in just 48 articles. Of course, we want to publish content that will attract our advertisers to advertise too.
Alan Hitchcox and I have worked on many editorial calendars together over the years. This year we employed the help of our Regional Sales Manager, Ron Klimko. I think that we now have it finalized. Ron and I will be presenting it to our advertisers soon.