Planning Newsroom Cover Over Christmas: A Festive Rota Checklist

Christmas in a newsroom is odd. Sources disappear, committees stop meeting, and the diary that looked full in November resembles a blank exercise book. Then, at four o'clock on 28 December, something happens and you need three reporters, a photographer and a decision about whether to lead the website with it. Festive cover isn't about surviving a quiet week. It's about being genuinely ready for the one day that isn't quiet.

Here's a checklist to work through before the office empties.

Start with the calendar, not the rota

Before anyone argues about who did last year, map the days you're actually covering. In England and Wales, 25 and 26 December and New Year's Day are bank holidays; Scotland adds 2 January. If any of those fall at a weekend, the substitute days shift, so check the official list rather than assuming.

Then separate the two very different kinds of day.

• True bank holidays. Skeleton cover only — but not zero. One person on, one person reachable, one editor able to make a call.
• The in-between days. 27 to 31 December are ordinary working days in law and near-dead in practice. This is where editors get caught out: a single reporter on a Tuesday that looks empty, and no plan for the fact that a serious incident on that Tuesday is still a serious incident.
• Return days. 2 January onwards needs more people than you think, because councils, courts and press offices all restart at once.

Also check the deadlines that quietly move: council papers, court lists, planning committee agendas and anything that normally lands on a Monday. A little time spent with the calendar saves a lot of shouting later.

Build the rota in one sitting, with people in the room

Rota-by-email in December produces resentment and gaps. Do it once, in person or on a call, and finish it.

1. Ask for preferences first. Some people want Christmas Day off; others would happily swap it for New Year. You will fill more shifts by asking than by imposing.
2. Be honest about last year's rota. Whoever worked the difficult days then should get first refusal on the easier ones now.
3. Name three roles for every day: who is on, who is the backup, and who must not be called unless the building is on fire.
4. Set the rules on time off in lieu and overtime before the rota is published, not after. If you're unsure what your contracts and policies allow, take advice from HR or your professional body.
5. Publish it early — mid-November if you can. People plan travel around it, and a rota published on 20 December is a rota people resent.

Write handover notes that someone can actually use

The festive period is a relay race, and most batons get dropped in handover. Keep one shared document, updated daily, with a short entry per shift. It should answer three questions: what's half-finished, what's expected, and what would go wrong if nobody touched it.

Include the story list with a status against each item — running, waiting on a response, ready to publish, dead. Note the name of the person who owns it and when they're next on. Any good handover note reads like a message to a competent colleague who has been off for a fortnight, not like a cryptic diary entry.

Bank the copy you can, and check the embargoes you can't

Here's the one real advantage of the quiet weeks: you can write ahead. Plan for it.

• Longer features and interviews that don't hinge on news.
• Year-in-review pieces and look-ahead material.
• Data-led or archive-led stories that can be built slowly.
• Prepared obituaries for figures already covered by national outlets — and never speculative pieces about living people.
• Evergreen explainers that earn their place in search traffic every January.

Embargoes need more care than usual. Read the date, the time and the time zone. Check whether the embargo lifts on a bank holiday, and whether the person who issued it will be contactable if it breaks early. If the answer to either is no, either move the publication date or flag it to whoever is on that day, with the source's out-of-hours number attached.

One firm rule: nothing publishes over the holidays on a schedule alone. Everything queued for automatic publication should be seen by a named human being on the day. Little damages a newsroom's credibility faster than a story that goes live onto an empty site with no one watching the comments.

Keep the emergency contacts on one page

Not in a folder, not in someone's inbox — one page, printed and pinned, and shared with everyone on the rota.

It should carry the duty editor's mobile, the newsdesk number, out-of-hours press lines for police forces, fire services, ambulance trusts, hospital communications teams and the local authority duty officer. Add whoever can approve a legal read, whoever holds the social media passwords, and whoever can get into the content management system if a login fails.

Test the numbers before you rely on them. A press office line that rings out on 27 December is worse than no number at all, because it makes people think help exists.

And be explicit about escalation. If a story is big, whoever is on calls the editor. Nobody should be sitting alone in a quiet office at eleven at night wondering whether a fatal fire is "big enough" to disturb anyone. Say it plainly in advance and you remove the doubt.

Freelancers, wires and the stories that always happen

Book freelancers by early December. Agree the commission, the deadline and what happens if the story falls over — a kill fee agreed in advance is a much easier conversation than one had on 30 December. Confirm who is around for quotes and fact-checks, since a freelance piece with an unanswered query is not a piece you can publish.

Assume the wire will be thin on 25 and 26 December, and that the Boxing Day football programme will generate more copy than the rest of the week combined. Assume, too, that the most likely festive story is weather or travel: a cold snap, surface flooding, a rail closure, an airport queue. Have a plan for covering one of those at half-staff, and know in advance who you'd call.

The last working day: five minutes that save the fortnight

Gather whoever is still in the building on the final afternoon. Read the rota aloud. Confirm who has which phone, which logins and which phone numbers. Walk through the banked copy and the pending stories. Ask each person to say out loud what they're expecting to happen while they're off, then agree what would make them call someone senior.

Then stop. The point of planning festive cover properly is that most nights nothing happens at all — and the newsroom is quiet because it's genuinely quiet, not because nobody is watching. Get the calendar, the rota, the copy and the contacts straight, hand the phone to someone competent, and let yourself have the day off too.

Photo: Daisymupp / Pixabay