How the Wall Street Journal’s New Calendars Help Readers Plan for the News
By: Cory Schouten
Tags: Insights, Product Development, Journalism

We update the events with news, analysis and links to our coverage to help our readers stay informed and get ahead. The thinking was that calendars — like inboxes — are a productivity tool that help us integrate our work and personal lives, keeping both in order amid the chaos.

We include only the most important events and avoid monopolizing big blocks of calendar time to show appropriate respect to the other events that we share the space with. These aren’t meant to be destination calendars with a comprehensive list of events, but rather a curated, integrated experience.

A sample calendar event from the WSJ Economics Calendar

The Pilot

A few months after the Idea Portal submission by editor Brian Fitzgerald (who had discussed the idea with fellow editor and calendar enthusiast Jim Winston), we launched our pilot calendar in partnership with the Economics team. We kept it simple: A free public Google Calendar fed with important events and maintained by Jeff Sparshott, the author of the Real Time Economics newsletter, and Economics Editor (now Strategy Editor) Becky Bowers.

We promoted the calendar primarily to newsletter readers, who generally embraced the new feature and sent several notes of thanks and appreciation.

Promotion in WSJ newsletters encouraged readers to add the calendar

Our initial users told us they appreciated having useful, actionable information easily at hand in their calendars. But they also pointed to drawbacks, namely that our Economics calendar didn’t integrate well with Apple and Outlook calendars.

Internally, we lacked meaningful performance data from the initial beta test. We tracked clicks on links within our calendar entries, but had no way of counting active subscribers, sources of signups or engagement with the calendar entries themselves.

Phase Two

We’ve since started the next phase of the project using a content-management solution for calendars that tracks engagement and works across various calendars. We see a lot of potential for experimentation around delivering newsworthy events using a scalable tool.

An overview page for the Real Time Economics calendar showing upcoming events

Our first two calendars are Real Time Economics, managed by our Economics team and aligned with our daily newsletter of the same name; and Election 2020, curated by the Politics team that delivers the daily Capital Journal newsletter.

We now have room to expand into other categories and test new approaches. For instance, each calendar we make gets a landing page, where potential subscribers can preview the kinds of events they’ll start getting in their own calendars. This means we can test people’s appetite for calendars on a number of other topics.

Ongoing Strategy

We are closely tracking performance and using what we learn to inform and adjust our strategy. We now have a real-time view into:

How many users have added our calendars and how they discovered them.

How often users engage with a given calendar entry, including when they open a calendar alert.

The traffic volume to WSJ.com from links within our calendars, including to our live coverage pages for the Democratic debates.

We are pleased with the number of people who have signed up since we launched our first two calendars in October 2019. We have sent hundreds of thousands of calendar reminders, and so far, our calendars have a very low rate of churn.

We’re now working on two new calendars, each with a slightly different approach, modified to reflect what we’ve learned.

Cory Schouten is New Formats Editor at The Wall Street Journal.