Story Budget Planner — Reporter Hours and Workload, Not Costs
Story budget here means the newsroom sense of the phrase — the list of stories planned for a week or an edition — not a financial budget. The hard part it addresses is that overallocation only becomes visible once you add up one reporter across every story on the list.
Last reviewed: Next review due:
Story Budget Calculator
Track weekly story assignments and spot reporter overallocation. Data is saved in your browser.
Reporter workload this week
Enter reporter names above to see workload.
Total budgeted hours0.0hStories in budget1
How it works
- Despite the name, there is no money in this tool at all. It has no rate, fee, expense or currency field anywhere in the component.
- You add rows, each with a story description, a reporter name, estimated hours and a priority of high, medium or low. Rows are saved to browser localStorage under ukjh-story-budget.
- It sums estimated hours per reporter name and prints a per-reporter workload list, alongside total budgeted hours and the number of stories on the list.
- Any reporter allocated more than 35 hours is shown in red with an (overloaded) label, and an amber capacity warning appears below the totals.
When to use it
- Planning a week of assignments across a small team and wanting to see who is carrying too much before the week starts.
- Checking whether a proposed investigation actually fits alongside everything else already assigned to that reporter.
- Running a news conference where the argument is about capacity rather than about which stories are good.
- As a freelance juggling several commissions, using your own name for every row to see your committed hours in one place.
What it does not do
- There is no expense input and no cost output, despite the name. If you want to price a job, use the Day Rate Quote Builder.
- The 35-hour overload threshold is hardcoded and cannot be changed, so it does not fit part-time contracts, four-day weeks or shift patterns.
- Reporter names are grouped case- and whitespace-insensitively, so Jane Smith and jane smith tally as one person. But it is still a string match, not an identity match — Jane Smith and J Smith are different strings and will still tally as two different people, and a genuine typo will still split someone’s workload in half.
- Priority is recorded but never used — it does not sort, weight or affect any total.
- Everything lives in one browser on one device, with no export and no sharing. It is a personal planning aid, not a newsroom system of record.
More tools
This is one of the free tools on UK JournoHub. See the full tools index for the rest.