The Everywhere blog

Now that the complete pdf of Issue 02 is available online, it's easy for members of the Everywhere community to see how the magazine — and your contributions — came together. And while the pdf pales in comparison to the print version, we're glad to know that it's already making a splash. Check out this comment we received today, from a reader who (for obvious reasons) must remain anonymous:

"I'm so in love with this magazine -- in the valley-girl-cum-90s-boy-band type way. Just tucked in with Issue 2 and it is absolutely fabulous."

This, like, TOTALLY made our day.

Everywhere Issue 2 has arrived! Alright! In the next few weeks the issue will be hitting the newsstands and finding its way into mailboxes around the world.

In this issue of Everywhere, we search for the soul of Los Angeles, explore the crossroads of historic Turkey, rediscover Places Reborn, and introduce some Hotel Bars that get the mix right. We also check out murals in Barcelona, learn how to get a haircut in India, trek through the Canadian backwoods, and marvel at some of America's oddball roadside attractions. All this and more!

Want to check it out? You can flip through Issue 02 online or download a full-color pdf of the issue (it's a 17.2mb download).

The whole magazine online for free? Yep, we want you guys to be able to see the magazine you helped create. Plus, we think once you see it on the computer screen, you'll want to get your hands on the real thing! So check it out, and if you like what you see, subscribe and get all best places, trips, travel photos, and stories delivered to you.

A few weeks ago, I was contacted by Steve Black, the host of an Internet program called Periodical Radio that's produced by The College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York. Steve wanted to talk about Everywhere — why we created it, how we designed it, how we work with our community (in other words, you!) to produce it, and where we want the magazine to go as it evolves.

The conversation was recorded, and it's now online, available as both as a podcast (er, Toddcast?) and as a text transcript. Although it feels odd to quote myself, here's how I summarized our progress thus far:

"It’s an ongoing experiment. [The Everywhere] community is relatively new, and the kind of submissions we’re getting are completely encouraging. We shipped the second issue largely with user submitted content, and that was fantastic, also very encouraging. We’re just very excited to see where it’s going to go. The job here is to be more of an orchestrator than to really lead the community. We’re excited to see where people are going to take us, what kind of places they want to go, what kind of places they’re going to discover. The opportunity to put those stories into print is pretty exciting."

Alas, I fear I may have set a new record for the number of times one person can use variations of the word "excited" in one paragraph. Hopefully you get the idea. But if you want to learn more about how we create Everywhere, and the philosophy behind it, by all means check out the Toddcast podcast and transcript at Periodical Radio.

We're getting a lot of great submissions for Everywhere Issue 03, but if you've got anything that you'd like to contribute about our featured places -- Miami and Copenhagen -- it's time to get going: The deadline for Issue 03 submissions is Thursday, March 13, 2008.

That's right... there are just two weeks remaining until we close these themes, and we need your help. Been to stylish Copenhagen? Had fun in the sun in MIami? Submit your articles and photos (with detailed captions), and they could end up in print as Issue 03 goes into production.

HINTS:
We'd love to receive an article about fun places to visit along Calle Ocho in Miami, as well as some recommendations for good hotels both in Miami proper and South Beach.

In Copenhagen, a guide to some of the city's best design shops would be fabulous, as would articles and photos about the Christiania free town.

And don't forget to look at our tips on how to take travel photos for publication and how to write for Everywhere.

Remember, the deadline is March 13. That's soon! As in, "Ladies and gentlemen, Issue 03 of Everywhere is now boarding; passengers should proceed immediately to the contribution departure gates."

(IMAGE: South Beach, Miami, by Flavio Matangrano.)

Last week Paul offered some tips on how to get your travel photos published in Everywhere, so this week I thought I'd follow up with some thoughts on what works best on the prose side of the equation — in other words, what you can do to make it more likely that your stories will get published.

TIP 1: Observe Magazine Architecture 101
When it comes to selecting which pieces to publish in a magazine -- any magazine -- all stories are not created equal. If you look closely at the structure of most magazines (including Everywhere), you'll notice that they actually consist of several different sections, each of which tells different kinds of stories in different kinds of ways. The front section, for example, is often about shorter pieces that are easy to skim. The middle of the magazine is usually reserved for longer, feature-length pieces. And so on.

Readers know this intuitively: It's how you know what you're looking at as you casually flip through the pages of a magazine. Nevertheless, it's astonishing how often writers (both amateurs and the pros) forget this most basic fact of magazine design. Yes yes, everyone wants to write feature stories. But there are relatively few feature pieces in any given magazine, so competition for these coveted slots tends to be more intense. On the other hand, there are literally dozens of publication opportunities scattered throughout the other sections of a magazine, and those slots often go begging because writers don't give them enough attention. To get published, it helps to notice how a magazine is structured, and to tailor your piece to fit within a specific section.

TIP 2: Write for Specific Sections of Everywhere
There's no other travel magazine in the world like Everywhere, because Everywhere is made from community contributions submitted on this website. It's pretty radical, actually. Yet the architecture of the magazine itself is relatively conventional. (If you haven't seen the print version, be sure check out the pdf of Issue 01.) Here's a quick overview of the sections in each issue, and what they're all about:

Points of Interest: Short pieces about specific places, accompanied by lots of photos. Almost any short article about a specific place will work here, and if you've ever written a blog post, you probably have what it takes to crank out a a Points of Interest story. Notice that there are also some recurring themes within Points of Interest, including Hotel Window (window views from the world's most interesting hotels), Local Flavor (sampling local cuisine), Jet Set Weekend (exotic weekend getaways), and Grand Openings (Brand-new destinations, hotels, restaurants, or attractions).

Postcards: These are "travel photos with a story to tell." Basically, this is a section of fun travel snapshots, each of which must include an extended caption telling the story of what's going on in the photo. To write for this section, be sure to include a detailed caption with your photo, describing your experience at the place shown.

Trips: These are loose itineraries of five or six specific destinations within a place or region, all of which are united by a common theme, and each of which includes a photo. So, for example, "Ghost Towns in Arizona" could be a Trip, if you'd visited five or six ghost towns there, and taken a photo of each. Or, "Flea Markets of Paris" could be a Trip. So could "Cliffdiving Spots in Acapulco." The basic structure of a Trip is: One paragraph introduction, plus five or six destinations within the region, with a paragraph on each telling us what it's all about and why we should visit. Once again, it's essential to include a photograph of each of your five or six destinations.

Features: Every issue of Everywhere includes four features: Two featured places, and two featured themes. (For issue 03, for example, the featured places are Copenhagen and Miami, while the featured themes are Art Tourism and Slow Travel.) Almost anything can work in an Everywhere feature -- a great photo with a detailed caption, long-form essays, shorter comments (in the form of Postcards submitted to specific Places on the everywheremag.com website), photo essays, and so on. Basically, when we do a feature, we look at all the material that's been submitted, pick the best, and then figure out a way to make it all work together -- sort of like a mosaic. From that mosaic, we seek to create a representation of a place or a theme.

My Obsession: This page is devoted to the particular things one notices while traveling, and the ways in which we document those things. On page 82 of Issue 01, for example, Esther Dyson wrote about her obsession with swimming, and how that leads her into hotel pools all over the world. Do you like taking photos of taxis all around the world? Are you fascinated by the graphics found on magnetic hotel key cards? Do you like to sample convenience store snack foods in distant foreign lands? This is the place to let your personal travel enthusiasms run wild.

Essentials: This is an open-ended category devoted to how-to travel articles (loosely defined). Truth is, everyone is an expert about something, and this is the place to share you unique expertise. HINT: Essentials pieces often work well as bulleted lists, step-by-step directions, or annotated graphics. (See below for more tips on how to think graphically when writing a how-to article.)

Tried and True: Do you have favorite tools, services, tunes, books, or pieces of technology that make traveling more enjoyable? This is the place to tell us about them. These aren't reviews, really -- we only want endorsements of things things that you already own and already love. Your personal enthusiasm is the most important part of a Tried and True piece.

TIP 3: Focus on the Particular
As a general rule, we prefer pieces that focus in on a particular aspect of a place, rather than survey-type pieces that provide a broad overview of a destination. The particulars are always more interesting, and they provide a more useful (and colorful) perspective for understanding a place. After all, that's how most of us describe our travels when we talk about them with friends or family; instead of speaking in broad generalizations, we often focus in on one particular place, or story, or experience as a way of conveying what the place a whole was like. Travel writing works much the same way. Start from the particular -- the unique way the citizens of Tokyo give directions, or the simple pleasures of driving in Los Angeles, or the oh-so-French way the man at the coffee shop in Paris held his cigarette -- and then use those particulars to convey the overall character of a place.

TIP 4: Think Graphically
As if to prove the old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words, readers love big, graphic stories with small text annotations explaining what's going on in the picture. For example, I've gotten lots of comments about the "What's Inside Dan Gilmore's Gadget Bag" piece that appeared on page 88 of Everywhere 01. Likewise, Yusuf Özkızıl submitted a fabulous article for Issue 02 about how to make sense of the various ingredients that go into a typical Turkish breakfast. (As you'll see, it looks super on the printed page.) We love stories like that, so if your piece is about a topic that's better seen than described, go for it: Let your photo do the talking, and then use small bits of text to provide additional detail about what's going on in the photo.

TIP 5: Tell Us More, Not Less
If you've always wanted to be a travel writer, you've come to the right place. Don't be intimidated. Don't feel like you need to emulate Rudyard Kipling, Ian Buruma, John McPhee, or Pico Iyer; instead, just relax and let your natural voice come out. Everywhere is about passion and authenticity, and we're confident you have lots of that. The most important thing is to provide plenty of detail in your articles, essays, and photo captions, so that we can get a sense of *all* the insight and experience you have -- rather than trying to fill in the blanks on our own. That's another way of saying, we'd rather have you write pieces that are too long rather than too short. It's easy for us to shorten a story if it's too long, but if you don't provide sufficient detail, we may never know why your story deserves to be published in the first place.

Okay, hope that helps. If you have any other questions about writing for Everywhere, just ask. (If you're logged in to Everywhere, feel free to send me a message here.) I'm happy to help, and I like nothing more than giving you the opportunity to see your name in print.

Issue 2 has just come off the press and will be coming to subscribers in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime we have a little sneak peek of what's coming just for you. With features like "How We Learned to Love Los Angeles", "Buenos Aires in Style", "The Murals of Barcelona", "Historic Turkey", "Favorite Hotel Bars" and tons more, this issue has so much packed into it's 120 pages we could barely fit it all in!

So download the PDF (2.3mb) and check it out. Like what you see? You can use this special $10 off coupon to subscribe today

Over at Flickr, John Mueller has created a nice montage celebrating the publication of his fabulous photo of Shibuya Crossing as a two-page spread in the debut issue of Everywhere. John writes:

A little while ago, I was contacted by someone at this start-up magazine they were going to call Everywhere Magazine,which, like JPG Magazine, is composed of ordinary people going to slightly extraordinary places and photo documenting them. They found me and wanted to use my photo of Shibuya crossing in the magazine. They even said they would pay me for using it in advance which is great, not because of how much, but because they are a legitimate publication that pays for the photos of it's contributors.

Thanks John! I love seeing things like this, because giving talented writers and photographers the opportunity to see their stuff in print is one of those perks that makes it fun to come to work each day. You can be next of course... all you have to do is contribute.

It's no secret that we here at Everywhere have a soft spot for postcards -- We use them as a travel metaphor both on the everywheremag.com website (where they function like comments about places) and in the magazine (where there's a whole section devoted to "travel snapshots with a story to tell"). We know that postcards -- the literal kind -- have become a bit archaic, but we didn't realize that they're on the brink of extinction. Check out this article from last weekend's San Francisco Chronicle:

The postcard, that cheap and venerable souvenir for the last 120 years, is slowly but inexorably fading from the scene.

Blame it on the surging popularity of digital photos, text messages and those 5,000-word dispatches e-mailed to weary friends and family from Internet cafes the world over.

Also encroaching on postcards' erstwhile territory are souvenir shot glasses, key chains and commemorative magnets - not to mention Planet Hollywood T-shirts and Hard Rock Cafe baseball caps.

The slow demise of the postcard can be traced in the evolving name of one trade association: In the 1970s it was founded as the Post Card Distributors Association of North America. But by the late 1990s, postcard sales accounted for only 27.5 percent of members' global sales. By 2003, the number had slipped to just 12 percent, and the group's name had become the Post Card & Souvenir Distributors Association. Today the organization's president, Steve King, said he wouldn't be surprised if postcard sales are less than 10 percent.

At their annual convention last September, members voted to drop "Post Card" from the name entirely. It will now be known as Souvenir Wholesale Distributors.

"That couldn't have happened even five years ago," King says. "Postcards were considered a common bond among the members."

At Smith Novelty Company in San Francisco, the largest West Coast distributor of postcards and souvenirs, Brett Rankin, senior vice president of sales and marketing, offers a couple of reasons for the postcard's waning popularity.

"People are lazy. They don't write letters like our grandparents' generation did," he said. "It's a generational thing. It's easy to take a picture of yourself at the Golden Gate Bridge with your camera phone and e-mail it to a friend. In five seconds, it's done."

This is sad, of course. There's something iconic about sharing the representation of a place on the front of a postcard, and it's too bad that the medium is slowly dying out. But it's not fair to accuse the kids of being lazy just because they don't feel like going through all the hassle involved in writing, stamping, and mailing an actual printed postcard. The postcard may be dying, but as the Everywhere community has already demonstrated, the commitment to documenting and sharing the travel experience is alive and well.

Now that we've produced an issue of Everywhere based entirely on submissions from the community -- nice work gang! -- we've got a much better understanding of what kind of material works best in the magazine. Over the next few days, we plan to post a series of tips on how to improve your chances of getting published in the magazine. Today we'll start off with some thoughts on how to take pictures for Everywhere.

Now, you may be thinking, "I'm an excellent photographer! I don't need no stinking tips!" And that may be true. But shooting travel photos for publication is different than other forms of photography, so keep these suggestions in mind:

TIP 1: People Make Places Real
Of all the tips we have, this is the one we can't stress enough: Good travel photography is as much about people as it is about place, and a good travel pic needs to provide a sense of excitement and energy. The photos that are most likely to be published are ones that show people enjoying a place.

Not necessarily crowd photos, but photos that are like what you actually saw when you were there. So when you take a picture of the beautiful pool at your hotel, don't wait for it to be completely empty. Instead, wait for someone to dive in, or for a group of people to start having fun poolside. If you're taking a picture of a landmark, don't show us the tourist snapshot of your family standing in front of it. Instead, think of the story you want to tell people back home about this place, and take photos that support that story. Show us the tour guide, the monkey, the bus with people hanging off the roof, the super-chic air hostess on your private jet, whatever... show us real people really enjoying themselves.

TIP 2: Places Are More than Just Locations
Specific places are the first consideration in travel photography, and since we've already explained "why people matter," we can now talk about what works in terms of showing us an environment. Travel photos need to show context.

People need to have a rough understanding of what they are looking at -- what the overall setting is like, how the space feels, and what kind of "vibe" it has. If you're showing us a bar, for example, don't take an artistic shot that focuses on the composition of the chairs or the arrangement of glasses on the table. Give a sense of what the whole place is like. If small details are important, show them in the context of the whole bar, so we know what we're looking at and how the elements fit together. The best travel photos aren't just an overview; they capture a moment and provide a feel for a place.

TIP 3: Magazines Are Vertical Creatures
A lot of us are used to shooting travel shots for the Internet and for our own personal uses, but magazines have some unique qualities that are important remember.

The most notable of these is that magazines are predominantly vertical in orientation. Sure, we love to run big, horizontal, two-page spreads, but there only a few of those in each issue. By and large, we mostly need good vertical images that can run on one full page. That doesn't mean you should *always* shoot vertically. But when you're shooting travel pictures, take as many shots as you can, and make 'em both vertical and horizontal. Shooting verticals has another advantage as well: Our cover is vertical, and it's very difficult for us to make horizontal images work on the cover.

TIP 4: Leave Room for Text
Another good compositional tip for magazine photography is to shoot for negative space -- for example, lots of sky, water, street, or surfaces of similar color.

To make photos more integral to a story, our designers look for photos that have strong negative space so that they can be used as openers to articles, sections, or features. Negative space provides a nice, clean area for headlines and other display text, but text is hard to read when it runs over backgrounds that are complex or busy. We don't run text over every photo, of course, so there's no need to do include tons of negative space in all of your images. But if you find yourself saying, "Wow! This looks so good it should be on the cover of a travel magazine!" then you should definitely try to include some space for text. (Magazine covers have to accommodate a good deal of text.)

TIP 5: Look at All the Colors!
The world is a colorful place, and we want Everywhere to inspire people to go explore it. That's why we designed the magazine and optimized the papers, finishes, and printing process to highlight the impact of color. We love black and white photography in general, but we will almost never run it in Everywhere. We don't forbid black and white pictures, but we don't encourage them either. Put simply, black and white photos don't play nicely in the sandbox with others. Either a magazine layout is all black and white, or it has none at all. There's really no in between. If you have great black and white images that you want to share, remember we also publish JPG Magazine, and they love black and white images.

TIP 6: Captions Make a Photo Stronger
While not strictly a photo tip, good captions significantly boost the chance that your photo will be published.

Full-length articles are great, but many of the stories in the first half of the magazine -- in the Points of Interest, Postcards, and Trips sections, for example -- are mostly just photos with great extended captions. That's intentional: We want to make it as easy as possible for you to contribute to the magazine. But we still need some words to work with. Think of this as a variation on Tip 2, "Places Are More than Just Locations," above. Context is important for travel photgraphy, and a good caption makes a photo more interesting and more useful. Members of the Everywhere community tend to vote for submissions that provide more and more useful information, and voting is how we understand what you like and want to see in the magazine. Conversely, good photos with no captions at all often fare poorly because they don't provide the information members of our community need to get excited about a place. (We'll talk about the prose side of things in more detail in an upcoming post about travel writing tips.)

TIP 7: Size Matters
Everywhere is an oversized magazine, so the bigger the better when it comes to filling our oversized pages. To run your photos as large as possible, we need you to submit your images in the largest format you have, without resizing them digitally. While we have a minimum size we can accept, if you only give us that size it restricts the ways we can use your image. Providing the largest version of the image that you have makes your photos more versatile and more likely to get published.

So there you have it. This isn't a definitive resource, but we hope it hits on the most important ways you can get a leg up on getting published in the next issue. You know what to do next: Get out there and start shooting!

Now that we've shipped Everywhere 02 off the printer, it's time to start thinking about our next issue. As you may have noticed, in each issue of Everywhere we include two featured places and two featured themes. So if you'd like to contribute, here's the lineup for Issue 03. The deadline for submissions is Monday, March 3, 2008:

FEATURED PLACES:
Miami: It's been called the "Capital of Latin America." From South Beach to Calle Ocho, Miami is one of the most vibrant and diverse cities in the US. Help us discover the city's hottest hot spots.

Copenhagen: The capital of Denmark combines hundreds of years of history with a laid-back atmosphere and a passion for contemporary design. Tell us about the texture of the city, from stylish Stroget to chaotic Christiania.

FEATURED THEMES:
Slow Travel: No highways, no jets, no bullet trains. Sometimes getting there isn't just half the fun — it's the point of the entire journey. Join us as we take the time to appreciate alternative transportation and the things you see when you're in no hurry to get from Point A to Point B.

Art Tourism: Are you a guru of the galleries? A maven of great museums? A connoisseur of cultural hotspots? Enlighten us with your expertise as we seek out the world's best destinations for art lovers.

So there you have it. How can you participate? The links above will take you directly to the respective theme pages. Create and comment upon your favorite places. Contribute your photos (with detailed captions, please). Submit your articles and stories. And if you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask: Your editor is standing by. You can email me using this Interweb address: todd*at*8020publishing.com. Onward!

(Photo above: Woman riding a bike on the Norregade, Copenhagen, Denmark. Photo by Everywhere contributor Christopher Boffoli.)

Everywhere contributor Johanna Stigter has discovered the key to our hearts. We love her. We adore her. We want to shower her with hugs. But what did she do to earn our undying affection? Here's the playbook:

STEP 1: Write a great article introducing us to Zalatimo's, a pastry shop in Amman, Jordan. Make the article a perfect fit for our Local Flavor page, which is all about unique regional cuisine.

STEP 2: Take some photos of the pastries at Zalatimo's that look so good they made us salivate.

STEP 3: After we contacted Johanna to tell her that we'd selected her story for publication, she politely thanked us for the opportunity. But behind the scenes, she had much bigger ideas in mind.

STEP 4: After we shipped Issue 02 to the printer, Johanna arranged to have a sampler from Zalatimo's sent to us here in San Francisco.

STEP 5: This morning our DHL courier delivered a fresh tin of Zalatimo pastries, and we opened it up after lunch. OMG! Johanna's pictures looked good, but now we know *exactly* what she meant when she wrote about "layers of thin pastry, pistachio nuts, and syrup that make you reach out for yet another piece. Crisp and crunchy with the right amount of syrup, it meets your taste buds as your mouth waters."

It's true! Every one of those words ring true! The sweets from Zalatimo's are every bit as sublime and magnificent as Johanna promised. So when you see her article in Issue 02, you can rest assured that we've verified just how good this stuff really is.

But what you may not see is how grateful we are to her -- both for her fantastic contribution and her generous thoughtfulness.

THANK YOU, Johanna! You made our week!