Monday this week, Karl Rove resigned as advisor to President Bush. Yesterday, The Atlantic unveiled its September edition, with a cover story about… Karl Rove. The article wasn’t of the type you can produce in a couple of days, so the Rove story must have been planned for quite some time.

Perfect timing of this kind isn’t possible to achieve very often, and timing in journalism certainly is no science. No art, either, maybe more like a craft. Sometimes it’s very straightforward — you don’t have to be a genius to know that you must plan the coverage of an election campaign that takes place every four years at the same time. But for other topics, you must be able to make informed guesses about what to concentrate on and present to the readers at what time. And this doesn’t apply only to magazine and long-form journalism.

I think there are basically two questions the editorial team can ask itself in the idea discussions: which issues do we want to report on in the coming months/year? And which issues do we assume that our readers want us to report on? If you don’t have any answer to the first question, you don’t have any publisistic will of your own and should probably be doing something else. The second question is trickier. Here you both need the team’s combined imagination and some facts. You could poll the readers, but you also want to surprise them and give them information and experiences they didn’t know they were looking for. The facts that help you guess can come from readers’ panels, focus groups, analysis of statistical data uncovering demographic and economic changes, etc. A discussion forum on your website could be very useful. Internal idea seminars where you bring in external experts on important topics could be extremely helpful. But I think the most useful tool is simply to involve the staff in a continous search for the best ideas, and give them some time to develop them, guided by the editors. Hence, the best tool is actually an intelligent recruitment policy and an open culture of idea sharing internally (journalists can be very protective of their ideas, so this is easier said than done).

Editors that combine this kind of semi-long time perspective with day-to-day improvisation will be more successful over time, at least I believe so. There’s nothing more gratifying than to see the story you have planned for half a year enter the public’s imagination at the right time — and then observe what the public debate adds to it.