The Everywhere blog

When 8020 Publishing asked me to edit the first issue of Everywhere, I immediately headed to the local newsstand to see what the existing crop of travel magazines had to offer. One thing quickly became obvious: Judging from the covers I saw arrayed before me, today's travel mags seemed to assume that I either wanted to read the Ultimate Guide to 31 Getaways in Tuscany, or that I was gearing up for an arduous backpacking trip in the Alaskan wilderness.

That struck me as an absurd distinction. In the course of a typical year, many people do both—they indulge themselves with high-end luxury vacations, but they also enjoy leaving it all behind to follow a few roads less traveled. It's not a question of money, really; globe-trotters of modest means are usually resourceful enough to figure out how to get a slice of the high life, while many affluent travelers figured out long ago that there's not necessary a correlation between how much you spend on your vacation and how much you enjoy it. In the end, what matters most is the quality of the experience and how well it matched up with your expectations.

It makes perfect sense for Everywhere to be the magazine that will resolve the schizophrenia I noticed at the newsstand. This magazine will be made by its readers, so it stands to reason that our readers will have a full range of travel tales to tell. That explains why you'll find our cover story on cosmopolitan Tokyo running right alongside our photo essay on the awkward intimacy of going home for the holidays. It also explains why you'll find Esther Dyson's tour of the world's best hotel pools bumping up against Gary McLaughlin's tips on how to behave if you're stuck in a snow cave. The juxtapositions may seem extreme at first, but I suspect they reflect different facets of the trips you'll take in the course of a typical year—OK, minus the snow cave bit, perhaps.

The first issue of Everywhere is actually a prototype. Naturally, our goal is to introduce ourselves to readers and advertisers. But even more, we really want you to see what we're trying to do—how we display photos, how we tell stories, and what kind of stories we want to tell. That way, we hope you'll understand how you can contribute to future issues of Everywhere by joining our community at everywheremag.com.

Every great travel tale has to start somewhere, and our journey is just beginning. Welcome aboard!

Todd Lappin
Editor
Everywhere magazine