Great. I’m just looking through the attendee list and I see some new faces are new to our webinars, some folks that I know, but haven’t seen on the webinars before, and some folks that I haven’t seen in a while. So it’s great to have everybody today. I am talking to you live from our Freelance Travel Writing Boot Camp where this morning, we have been talking about how to speedily put together pitches using a specific format. And it’s funny because somehow, this boot camp, we have ended up using Delta Sky as the example for everything under the soon. Delta SkyMagazine has got a lot of sections that are open to freelancers that are very easy to pitch, because their city guides and other type of things that have a very specific format. So when you look at it, it’s very easy to imagine how a pitch could fit into that.
So as we were looking at it throughout the boot camp, I realized that a lot of things I have in the front of the book are round-ups. So it just happens that, courtesy of the boot camp people who can’t stop pitching Delta Sky, we’re gonna look at Delta Sky today for exercises. And I’ve included some screenshots of the articles we’re gonna look at on the slides. But a lot of times I’ll also switch over to the PDF, even though we’ve got the slides going today, so that I can zoom in so that you guys can read those a little bit better.
This is the past issue of Delta Sky. And I pulled all the pieces for today out of the January ’18 issue. I pulled three front-of-book round-ups from one issue of this magazine, and there were several other ones.
So today, we’re talking about front-of-book round-ups, okay? So two important words in here that might be new to some of you. This is why I keep checking in the call so I know what the background is. Two words that might not be super familiar to all of you are “front-of-book” and “round-up.” So if you aren’t familiar with those, bear with me. I’m just gonna explain them for a second to folks who aren’t so familiar. And as other people are joining us in the chat box, let us know in the chat box so I have a sense of where you guys are coming from. How many of you are familiar with a round-up in a magazine? Some of you might be familiar with round-ups from blog posts; that’s okay, too. Let me know that. But let me know how familiar you are with round-ups in a magazine or in a blog post in the chat box. And for those of you who are learning about writing and haven’t been published yet, it can also be that you’re familiar from reading them. There’s a lot of round-ups online, and magazine ones are different, and that’s something that we’re gonna talk about quite in-depth today. So let me know in the chat box if you are familiar with magazine round-ups or blog round-ups.
So what do I mean by round-ups if you are not familiar? So a round-up…I’ve got several slides on this, but just in brief, a round-up is an article which talks about several different places in a manner in which they highlight each of them individually. Sometimes, it’s places; this is more travel-specific. Sometimes, it’s topics. Many of you have probably seen, even if you haven’t written, blog posts where they have subheads. And so, for instance, you know, it might be something almost like a city or destination guide where they say, you know, where to eat, where to stay, where to sleep. And then in each of those sections of the round-up, they give you lots of different options for hotels and apartments and different things like that. Or for, you know, street food versus restaurants, versus cafes in the “Where to Eat” section, okay? So round-ups can be that each section is a profile of a specific thing, or profile around a specific topic, okay?
So what do I mean when I say “front-of-book” for those of you who haven’t worked so much with magazines in the past? So a front-of-book section, or the front of the book, is…comes from magazine editors use the word “book” to describe the magazine. So they mean the sections of the magazine that are at the beginning of their book or magazine. But it has more connotations than that.
So the front of the book tends to include things that are quite a bit shorter. So last week, for instance, we looked at news briefs, right?
So news briefs are very, very short pieces; they’re about 100 words. Other things in the front of the magazine or the front of the book are also short, but sometimes, they’re 250; sometimes, they’re 300 words; sometimes, they’re 400 words. And then you get into a section of the magazine which is referred to as the “departments.” And the departments are things that are more like 700 words, 500 words, sometimes up to 1,000 words, sometimes even past 1,000 words, okay? And the departments tend to be very, very specific. You’re gonna see when we look at Delta Sky, and I mentioned that a lot of people here in the boot camp are using it for this reason, that there’s a lot of things in the front-of-book that have very specific formats.
So Delta Sky has very short departments. So this is something that you’ll see is that sometimes, the line is blurred because what is the front of book shorts. So sometimes, those are only 100 or 150 words, they don’t even go up to 300 or 400 words, and the departments. So in the case of Delta, their departments tend to be about 500 to 700 words, and they also have short features; they keep everything short, and they have lots and lots of articles as a result.
Another magazine that I was gonna look at today and then I decided to just use Delta that has a lot of front-of-book round-ups…as well as front-of-book shorts, but really a lot of front-of-book round-ups that you can look at and that you can also find online is easyJet Traveller. We have looked in a past…and I’m gonna put the link in there where you can find the full issue online. If you caught our webinar on what type of articles you should be pitching, we went through a whole issue of easyJet Traveller and looked through the different articles in there, because they have so many different pieces, especially in the front of their magazine, that they go through all of the different article types.
So that being said…okay, so we’re all on the same page now about front-of-book and round-up, what are we doing with this Article Nuts and Bolts series? So if you saw in the main newsletter, or in the blog post, our newsletter specifically about the webinar today, what we’re doing in the two series is that we’re talking about the structure about how you put your articles together. And I love to talk about structure in writing because it’s not necessarily that I love it or I structure all of my pieces, but I love to talk about it to you guys because I find that one of the biggest holdups in getting your pitches out, getting your pieces written, is how long it takes to. And then this makes you not want to do so many, or feel like you can’t do so many, or feel like it’s not a feasible profession for you because you can’t do enough to make the time work out in terms of time and money, okay?
So part of doing things faster isn’t just telling you how to do it. A lot of it is helping you to not overthink things. And so, one of the reasons I really like to give these formulas and talk about structure is so that you can get in and get out and get the piece written and know “This is how it’s supposed to be done. There’s nothing else to add here. This is exactly what this sentence should say,” so that you don’t spend four hours laboring over that one sentence. Because we are not writing the next great American novel. We are writing pieces for pay as professional writers, okay?
So let’s get into what we’re gonna talk about more specifically today in the arena of the front-of-book round-up if I can get my slides to move forward.
So like I said, today we are talking a lot about round-ups, and I gave you a little bit of a definition of what “round-up” means, but I want to talk more about how you compose a round-up, okay? Because I think especially if you come from…not necessarily a blogging background, exactly, but from writing these types of round-ups where each section is a different topic and you’re covering a lot of things. It can be easy to lose sight of why magazines use round-ups and what they accomplish, okay?
Then we’re gonna look at the types of articles that exist as round-ups at the front-of-book setting of the magazine. Do you remember I said earlier that easyJet Traveller has about 17 to 21 front-of-book articles and that many of them are round-ups? You’re gonna see, when we look at Delta Sky later, I’m gonna pull up the magazine and flip through a few that we’re not featuring today directly. You’ll see when we look at Delta Sky that there’s magazines as round-ups that are absolutely not what you would think of doing as a round-up, and this is really common. Magazines use round-ups to give people a lot of different things to jump around between if they’re not so interest or they’re not yet attached or reading through the magazine. So they’re designed visually that there’s a lot of different stuff going on, a lot of places you can look, okay?
Then we’re gonna look at the structure of a typical round-up in the front-of-book setting. And this is a bit different than a round-up that would be a feature, and we’re gonna talk about that. And then we’re gonna look at these three examples that I pulled up for you from Delta Sky.
So let’s get into what we’re talking about today, guys. So front-of-book round-ups. What is a round-up, really? I gave you a brief description of it, but how many of you heard me talk about the basket of kittens before? Who’s heard me talk about basket of kittens? Let me know in the chat box.
So a round-up, like I said, on the most simplistic description, is an article that is composed of sections focusing on specific things. So it’s almost like an article that has many articles within it, right? So you’ve got, you know, an introduction that explains how all of these different things tie together, and then you have sections that are on…you know, it can be what to eat, where to stay. It can be profiling five different places to visit in an area. It can be profiling five different destinations around the world. There’s a lot of different things that can go into the subsection…of those subsections of that round-up. But what a lot of people forget is that it needs to be a basket of kittens.
So this is something that I actually picked up from somebody who…I believe she’s back to freelancing now. But she was a freelancer in a very major New York magazine. Her friend became the editor and so wanted her…this person that I know to join the magazine that she created a position for her. So she’s a really sought after freelancer. She’s been an editor at really major newsstand magazines. And she was the first one that clued me on to this idea of the basket of kittens.
So why do we call it a “basket of kittens”? Why do we want to think of a round-up as a basket of kittens? So when you look at a basket of kittens, unless you hate cats, okay? If you hate cats, then please pull up a picture of a basket of puppies along the side, or if you just hate all animals, then perhaps your children all put together in the back seat of the car, okay?
So anytime…there’s actually a psychological basis for this. Anytime you see small things with big eyes, there is a psychological hormonal response that makes you want to take care of those things. That’s why we say, “Aww,” when we see cute babies and cute kittens, all of those things. So we are trained that this big-eyed small person/small thing set up makes us, you know, go all gooey inside, okay?
So a basket of kittens or puppies or whatever floats your boat should be irresistible, okay? It should be irresistible. That is one of the things about a basket of kittens. The past irresistibility, what makes it irresistible? Is it just the big eyes and the small, you know, the small persons or small animals? No. The concept, journalistically, of a basket of kittens…and that’s why I’m showing you guys this specific basket of kittens, is that these are all cats. Cats as opposed to dogs, as opposed to foxes, etc. These are all kittens as opposed to adolescent or adult cats. But those things being equal…and they’re all in the same basket, okay? Those things being equal, each of these kittens looks different, okay? Each of these kittens has different coloring, their eyes are slightly wider or closer together or bigger, okay? Each of these kittens looks different. But it’s still a kitten, it’s still in this basket, it’s still a cat, okay? Let me know in the chat box…I’m gonna switch over to something else that I want to show you alongside this. Let me know in the chat box if any of you have ever heard of the card game called “Set.” I’ve got it pulled up on the screen over here.
Have any of you ever heard of the card game called “Set”? This is what the board looks like. They have it…you can play it on your phone, I think, but they also have it as a card game, okay? So this is what the cards look like. But the rules are why I’m talking to you about this in the context of the round-up.
So in “Set,” you want to pick three cards, okay? So you’re rounding up three cards. And they need to be either all the same or all different for each criteria, and they have four different criteria, okay? They are the color, the symbol…it can be diamonds, squiggles, or these, like, long ovals, the number of items on there, and the shading. It can be full, it can be partial, or it can be empty.
So the way that this game works is that you look at the board and you look for a set. So this one and this one and this one are all shaded, but they’re different colors, and they’re different sizes, and they’re different numbers. But they’re similar in that one way. So I don’t want to take too much time on this “Set” example; you can look it up online very easily. Nobody’s heard of it? Oh, wow. Okay, so if you haven’t heard of it, check this out.
Because this is what we want to aim for…let me get the slides back up in one second. This is what we want to aim for when we are putting together our round-ups, okay? We want to aim for things that are all either uniformly in one destination and uniformly hipster, but are different in terms of where to stay, where to eat, what to do, and where to shop, okay? Or they can be all over the world, but they’re all food trucks, and they’re all doing a fusion mashup of different cuisines. So we want, in our round-ups, for all things in the round-up to be the same in a certain way, whether that’s geography or what they do or what’s unique about them, and completely different in other ways. If that doesn’t make sense to anybody, let me know.
So another example…I just gave this food truck one that they could be all over the world. Right now, somebody is workshopping in the pitches that we were working on this morning in the Freelance Travel Writing Boot Camp. Somebody has a feature article idea that they’re working on around different wine grapes in New York or the Hudson Valley, she hasn’t quite decided yet, and why they are putting New York on the map in terms of having world-class wines. As opposed to a lot of cold weather places in America; they buy their grapes from other areas, from other states, maybe from California, and they make wine with grapes that aren’t their own. Here, people are using grapes from all over New York state to create varietals that you either wouldn’t see outside of America, or interesting expressions of French varietals.
So when she was looking at which wine grapes to include, all of the wine grapes….they need to be New York wine grapes, right? And because of the angle of her piece, they all need to be wines that have, you know, a lot of expression. She’s trying to say that they’re not necessarily your run-of-the-mill wines, they’re really unique. So it’s not necessarily she’s focusing on the wines being great, because she’s talking about the grapes, specifically. So it’s less about the quality of the wine, and she’s definitely not talking about wineries, okay?
So she’s looking at five different grapes that all are from New York state and that are different. So she put up a couple, and she put up Cabernet Sauvignon, which I’m sure most of you heard, Cab Sav; Cabernet Franc, which some of you guys might not have heard of, and…but some people may have heard of, and then Traminette, which I bet a lot of people haven’t heard of. And I told her, “Let’s make these grape types more similar in their unknownness, or in their less knownness. So let’s, rather than Traminette, let’s pick these ones like Baco noir…” again, you’re not gonna know any of these names, but that’s the point. “Like, Baco noir or Frontenac, or maybe Vidal blanc or something like this, or Arctic Riesling, that people really wouldn’t see anywhere else but here.” Because before, her set had some that were the same and some that were different, and that’s not how a successful round-up works, okay?
One more thing about the composition of a successful round-up in a magazine setting is that you have to make sure that you take your audience into account with the geographic breadth of your round-up. I see a lot of people that want to pitch something like…let’s take this New York state wines or Hudson Valley wines piece. She’s working on that for Wine Magazine, so that works. If she was pitching this to “Every Day with Rachael Ray,” it needs to be national, okay? She needs to talk about wines from all over the country for it to make sense for Rachael Ray. Because round-ups that are geographically specific for national markets just won’t fly with those editors, okay? The only way you can get away with that is a city guide, which is a type of round-up that we’re gonna look at.
So in a second, I’m gonna talk about the different type of expressions of the round-up that you see specifically in the front-of-book sections of magazines. But first, let’s talk for a second about how a round-up is different in this short space, is different in the front of the book, rather than in the feature well or on a blog, okay?
So when you have round-ups in any sort of online setting, first of all, word count is much less of an issue than it would be in print, even if you’re looking at a feature, okay? So online round-ups versus feature round-ups can be similar in some ways, but different in other ways, all right? So you can definitely have round-up features. A lot of features are round-ups, especially for magazines…like, I was talking about Rachael Ray. That’s a national magazine where they need to make sure they…as in the editors of that magazine, need to make sure they are covering the bases of the interests of their audience when they put together those feature selections, okay? So unless it is…we’ll continue with Rachael Ray for a second. Unless it something service-y, which means “how to,” that you can do matter where you live, if they’re gonna write something about, like, a trend of families visiting agri-tours and places on the weekend because they something to do year-round; in the fall, it’s apple picking, and later on, it’s pumpkins, and then in the spring, you know, it could be picking flowers, and then they have the new baby animals that are being born in the petting zoos, and in the summer, they’ve got strawberry picking and so on and so forth. If they’re gonna talk about that as a trend in Rachael Ray, they can’t just highlight one farm in New York or Oregon or California or wherever it is. They have to highlight ones all over so that as many of their readers as possible have options. So you see a lot of feature-type round-ups for this reason; to give readers a lot of option.
A second feature-type round-up that you see is, like, the guide. So how many of you guys have seen, particularly like on Conde Nast or Travel + Leisure things like that, “176 Places That You Want to Go This Summer”? Or “The Best 77 Beaches for Your Buck,” or something like this? New York Times puts together “52 Places to Go This Year.” So there’s often these round-up features that are many, many, many pages; sometimes, the entire magazine becomes a round-up feature. Saveur does the Saveur 100 every year where they…I think it’s the Saveur 100, where they round up 100 interesting food things or interesting utensils, or interesting destinations, or interesting trends; like, the most things that have stood out to them that year or coming down the pipeline, okay? So they can often have more things when they’re in the features section.
Now, in the front of the book, these features are beyond short, okay? Think about writing a city guide round-up in which each section of, you know, where to stay, eat, where to dine has four, five, maybe even six things mentioned, and doing that whole thing in 250 or 300 words? It’s insane, right? It’s like, how do you even have space to include the names for the different things you’re including in the round-up? So you barely have space for any more than that. And that is one the reasons that front-of-book round-ups are so different. You get in, you get out, you need to be incredibly choosy with your words and what you include to create the tone that you’re going for in this piece, in terms of why this neighborhood is up and coming. You have to show that through your selections very clearly because you don’t have time to explain it. Your selections have to speak for themselves; they have to show rather than tell. And the different things that you select often don’t even get their own paragraph, let alone sentence, okay? So we’re gonna look at some of these so that you can see exactly how it works.
But I just want to take a second…I’ll go back through and read the slide for you in a second. But I just want to look…kind of have us all together, some of you may have opened it already. But I just want to have us all take a little gander through that issue of Delta Sky that we’re gonna look at together in a minute. So I had pulled it up…there it is. Let me get it up here for you guys, there we go. Okay, great. So let me go back up a little bit.
So when you open any magazine, you’re going to have, you know, ads and ads and ads, and then you’re going to have the table of contents, right? So typically, the table of contents has one which is oriented towards the features, and then they have one where they talk about all of the small sections.
So you’ll see here, right here…hopefully, that’s highlighting for you guys as well…let me make sure, yeah, great, okay. So you’ll see here on the table of contents, “Wheels Up” is the name of the front-of-book section in Delta. So here, they talk about all these different little things they have. They’ve got this “Trending,” “My Bag,” “Time Out.” Let’s take a look at those. Some of those, we’re gonna look at in more depth. Of course, after we get through the ads and the masthead, and then they have some information that’s specifically about the airline and the letter to the editor.
So now as we enter this “Wheels Up…” here it is, which is the front-of-book section, you’ll notice that right away, the very first page, we’ve already got round-ups. So would you think of this as a round-up? Maybe not, but it is, okay? So this by the numbers, as they talk about something, and then their round-up is actually four different fun facts that revolve around a specific number about that piece or that topic, okay?
This is kind of an interesting standout that can be done as a round-up that’s not…this is a section they have called “Trending,” which is about a specific neighborhood. And then, here we go. “What’s in my bag?” Okay? Some of you might even know this person. So they have a small profile about the individual, and then a round-up of the different things that are in her bag. And down here…let me zoom in a little bit. Hopefully, you can at least kind of see it. Okay, you can’t see the text, I don’t think, unless it’s really big on your screen.
So down here, they have numbers that correspond to each of the things that are in her bag. And they actually have…for many of those, they have a quote from the person profiled here. Sometimes, they just explain what the thing is. But most of these actually have a quote. So this is a nine-item round-up with maybe a 100-word introduction and maybe 60, 75 words here. So this is 165-170 words, full-page piece which is a round-up around what this person packs, okay?
Here’s another one they have called “Time Out.” We’re gonna look at this one in depth, okay? This is a city guide to Mexico City and it has the standards. It’s got where to shop, where to eat, where to drink, and where to go for a walk, and an intro here at the beginning.
Then this one…I had to kind of glance at it twice, because it’s obviously a round-up when you just set eyes on it, because it’s got all these tiny different things. And it’s kind of a meta round-up, and you see these pretty frequently in front of book sections, where they divide things into three different sections, and then within each of those sections, they have short round-ups. So in this case, they’ve taken a profile of Tom Hanks…I’m not sure they interviewed him, I think it’s just a profile. They’ve taken a profile of Tom Hanks and turned it into a round-up by showing who he is related to. This section is called “The Network.” So who he crosses paths with, okay? So they have “Friends & Family,” “Business,” and then “Miscellaneous,” okay?
And look over here in “Miscellaneous,” they’ve got four different things, you might not be able to read it. One of them is Instagram; one of them is Head and Space, it’s about his work with the space agency; one of them is about working with wounded veterans, and one of them is about voiceover work, okay? So this is one, two, three…this is ten different, small bits in here, and they’re probably 6-point font, and that’s…you know, on Delta, that they’ve decided their readers can read 6-point font, because I know it’s very hard to read on the screen, but it also is hard in person. And each of these is maybe 30 words here. So this is actually a longer one, okay? Because this is 100 words, and then we’ve got ten of these that are maybe 30 words, and then they’ve got a couple other things going on here. So this is maybe a 300-word piece.
But look at how many sections. They’ve done a 300-word piece with ten round-up sections, okay? That’s a lot. They really pack it in. And we’re gonna look at how they do that in a minute.
So this also…even this one, they’re talking about these pictures, even this is a round-up. They’ve got the introduction. And then they speak specifically about three different features of these transparent speakers.
Then this one, actually, is also…this is “Five Minutes With…” this is an interview with a CEO who’s significant in the travel industry. Even this has been set up as a round-up, okay? And they have an interview. And then, rather than just go narratively through the round-up or ask questions, they’ve created a little sub-head for some different topics that came up in the interview, and they’ve broken out the interview, the quotes into these different sub-heads, okay?
This is another one that we’re gonna look at. This is called “Tools of the Trade.” And here, they have six round-up sections that are prefaced by about a 200-word profile of an artisanal producer at something. And so then, they kind of have two little round-ups…or you can call them sidebars that accompany it. This one is “Facts About Rice.” And then this one is about rice festivals and interpretations of rice, but this is all over the world. So remember, this speaks to what I was talking about about when you are doing something for a national…or in this case, rather, international magazine, you need to tie it in to all possible readers in as many ways as you can.
So I think there might be one more…all right, so this is another one we’re gonna look at. So this one is, again, starts with a little bit here, and has two different sections. So there’s…this is…like I said, we’re gonna talk about this one in more detail. But this is how a certain individual would recommend that you experience his neighborhood, okay?
So you’ve seen as we’ve gone by, even this political section is set up like a round-up. Everything here is so short, there’s no introductions. There’s no tying anything together. It’s “Let’s make it short, and let’s make it skimmable.”
Here’s another one that’s kind of style-oriented, like that “What’s in My Bag” section that we looked at before. But it’s not just that they have these style products, and they’re telling you that they correspond with a trend or you should do this now. They take a certain city, in this case, Berlin, and they say, “This is what to pack,” or “This is what the look is in Berlin.” But the text is actually all about what to do there. So they…again, where to stay, where to eat and shop, and what to do. So this is like a 100-word city guide round-up accompanying this style piece here, okay? And I think that that…yeah, I think now, we’re starting to get longer.
So that is what the front-of-book looks like in Delta. It’s primarily composed of round-ups. But they’re just not round-ups where they’re giving you multiple options for where to see something, or where to eat something, or destinations to visit, okay? Sometimes, they’re city guides. Sometimes, like the part of that “Tools of the Trade” article that we saw and we’re gonna look at again, they can be similar things in different areas, like “Ways to Experience Rice Around the World.” Sometimes, they’re style-oriented round-ups, and sometimes, those style-oriented round-ups have something else going on, which is, in and of itself, you know, about a city.
And sometimes, they’re a combination of all of the above, like the two different ones that I told you. And as we saw with that Tom Hanks section, they can be mixed in with a profile. You can even have a front-of-book round-up profile. Which if you hadn’t just told that to me and you didn’t stick that in my face, I would say, “Really? That’s a little much. A front-of-book round-up profile?” But these days, with the front-of-book, they want it to be skimmable. So round-ups are everywhere, okay?
So what is the structure of the typical round-up? I breezed through Delta with you guys a little bit earlier so that you could see a little bit of this before talking about the structure, but we are gonna go back and go more in-depth into looking at three of the pieces from the Delta Sky that I just showed you.
So the structure, as you may have noticed, is that often, there is an intro. Sometimes, it’s at the top of the page, or in the case of that rice one that we’re gonna look at again, it was on the side. So the intro tends to be all one paragraph, okay? And that paragraph is usually 100 words; sometimes, a little longer, but it’s usually 100 words. And with the exception of round-ups that are profiling a person…like that “What’s in My Bag?” one where I told you, because it was really small at the bottom, that the…below, when they gave kind of the description of what each of those things was; rather than describe what it was, they just had a quote from her. They just had a quote from the woman who said that this was in her bag, okay?
So that is not uncommon at all, to have quotes in profile pieces in sections of the round-up where they’re talking about each of those items. But typically, if it’s a round-up where it’s about a city or something that’s not related to one person, you will only see quotes in that introduction section. There will be quotes for setting up the background and context of why the reader is reading about this today.
So in a feature-length round-up, each of those sections, each of those highlights of what’s included in the round-up, those sub-heads, if you will, they are basically a mini article. But in the front-of-book round-ups, they’re barely a snapshot. Like I said, each thing might not even get its own sentence, let alone paragraph.
So what that means is you can’t give a lot of detail. You can’t give a lot of examples. These articles are really functioning on the strength of their information, rather than the strength of their writing. I’m gonna say that again, because it’s so important. These articles focus on the strength of their information, rather than the strength of their writing. So what that means is if you do not feel very confident about the strength of your writing, you should be doing these, okay? This is what you should do to break into bigger magazines, to get those clips, to get your chops, to get used to writing for editors. Because you don’t have to worry about flowery or descriptive language, or putting together a narrative structure or any of those things; you just have to have good facts and put them together.
And if you have your own thing that you’ve done in the past, whether you’ve been a travel agent or perhaps you have a blog or something like that where you’re recommending things and a destination to people, you have that territorial sense. You’re used to recommending things. So this is a no-brainer for you.
Now, you’ll see as we go through that there’s a lot of adjectives and even adverbs, which people are often told not to use them. But in this space of time that we have in these 170 or 300-word pieces, you have to use adjectives and adverbs, because you’re not showing as much. You’re gonna have to tell. But what that means is you do show sometimes, but in limited quantities.
And so, there’s roughly, depending on the length of the piece, the longer ones, like 300 words, will have a little bit more of this; the shorter ones will be on the lower end of the spectrum. So you’ll have, like, a 1:3 or a 1:4 or a 1:5 ratio of glossing over versus description.
So let’s look at these, and I have a feeling it’s gonna be really, really small and hard for you to see.
So I’ve pulled it up here, I’m gonna try to zoom. I’m just not sure if the zoom will show up for you guys, even though now, we’re looking at it in the PDF. Great, okay. It looks like it’s working, great.
So this, like I said, this is the…Delta calls it “Time Out.” This is essentially how you would spend a day if you had time in the city. Let me make a little bigger. Okay, now I can’t read all of it. Okay, we’re gonna have to go down by one.
Okay, so…hopefully, many of you have downloaded it, or you’re just gonna listen to me read it, or you can successfully now read it on the screen. So like I said, this is a classic city guide round-up. So let’s look at how it starts.
“Mexico City as as many versions of itself as it does residents. Come looking for mariachis, street tacos, Frida Kahlo, and pilgrims crawling on their knees through the Basilica and you’ll find them–along with modern museums, high-rises, world-class jazz, Peruvian haute cuisine, and wine connoisseurs sipping Nebbiolo in urban vineyards. The contrasts and contradictions of this ancient metropolis give Latin America’s biggest capital its vibrancy but also can make it overwhelming for first-time visitors, especially as the city continues to rebuild after last year’s earthquakes. Digest it in small bites, taking time to appreciate the visible signs of its history while admiring all it has achieved in the present.”
So this lede, or this introduction to this round-up, seems quite general. It accomplishes, really, a lot. And it’s very easy to look at this, and because it does give you a lot of background and context, to feel like it is general. But there’s a lot of specific details in here, and so they’ve accomplished this very wide grounding in this subject without giving you the whole history, okay?
So for instance, they mention mariachi, street tacos, Frida Kahlo, and pilgrims crawling on their knees through the Basilica. I don’t know that I would think of pilgrims crawling on their knees through the Basilica when I think of Mexico City. I don’t know that I would think of that as a traditional thing. Some people might. Some people might think Frida Kahlo. Some people might think street tacos. Some people might think mariachis. I think they’ve put enough things in there that pretty much everyone will have some association, but these are going all over different periods of history and different types of culture and things like that.
But then they’ve mixed them with “modern museum, high-rises, world-class jazz, and Peruvian haute cuisine and wine connoisseurs sipping Nebbiolo in urban vineyards.” Do you remember before when I said that tends to be lists in one out of three or one out of four, one of the five of those things we expanded on? You can see that they’ve done that done here twice, okay? They’ve said, “Pilgrims crawling on their knees through the Basilica,” right? And then they’ve said, “Wine connoisseurs sipping Nebbiolo in urban vineyards.”
So even though those things are lists, they keep us from having list fatigue by expanding on one thing in each of these lists, okay? And you’ll see that in the list before the expansion, okay, one word, two words, two words, two words, one hyphenated word, hyphenated next word, three words. These are very, very, very, very short, okay? So they’ve chosen very carefully what they’re gonna say to get an image in your head quickly with the fewest words possible.
So then they go on to talk about the contrasts and contradictions. And they say, “This ancient metropolis…” I don’t know that everybody thinks of “ancient metropolis” when they think of Mexico City. So they’re influencing already again your perception of the place and its history. And they say “Latin America’s biggest capital,” so that gives us a sense of the size.
So like we talked about last week with the news briefs webinars, we talked about grounding people in the who, what, where, when, and why. So they’re grounding us now in history, they’re grounding us in the location, they’re grounding us in scale, and they’re grounding us in ambience as well, okay? So they’re creating a picture for us without using description. This is really important. So they’re doing a little bit of description, you know, with that “wine connoisseurs sipping Nebbiolo in urban vineyards.” But largely, they’re creating a picture just through the choice of what they include, okay? And this is really how these round-ups work.
So let’s look over here on the side, okay? Each of these things is barely 500 words. So let me blow it up a little bit more.
So like I said, all these small sections, all of these small sections clock in at around 50 words. So let’s just look, for example, at the “Shop” section. “Mexican designers are changing the meaning of ‘Hecho en Mexico…” and then they explain what that means, “Made in Mexico,” “from something produced in a border factory to an object handcrafted with excellence. Stop by Tenderete, the Happening concept store, or Fusion Casa de Diseñadores for local jewelry, clothes, and objets d’art. For something more traditional, try the San Angel weekend bazaar or…” ooh, I can’t pronounce this one for you very well. I’ll give it a try. “Taller Tlamaxcalli, one of the city’s last remaining toy workshops.”
So what have they done here? As you would do with a feature round-up, the first sentence of this section is introducing us to what they’re gonna talk about, okay? And they do that by saying that they’re changing the meaning of “Made in Mexico.” So they’ve created expectations around the different types of things they’re gonna include. So they don’t need to tell you details about so many of them. And then you’ll see exactly what I told you before. They say, “Tenderete, the Happening concept store, or Fusion Casa de Diseñadores,” and then they say what you can get there, okay? So they have three quick things, and then they expand. Again, here, they have two things, but then they expand on one of the city’s last remaining toy workshops.
For “Eat,” again, they start with a little bit of grounding and what type of food you can expect. “Get straight to eating conchas con nata (sweet rolls with clottted cream) or an ant roe omelet at the classic Restaurante El Cardenal.” I don’t know if I think about sweet rolls with clotted cream as the thing that you automatically want to eat first when you get to Mexico City. But they’ve told me that by saying “Get straight to eating.” They’ve done it so quickly with so few words. And you’ll see that in these front-of-book round-ups, the verbs are incredibly powerful and useful, and they tell you a lot. They include a lot of assumptions with those verbs, okay? “Or dig into rabbit stew with blue corn tortillas at chef Sofia Garcia Osorio’s unmarked restaurant attached to the Bosforo mescal bar.”
So by saying that it’s an unmarked restaurant and by choosing to include an unmarked restaurant, we immediately get a sense that there’s kind of this like this underground restaurant/speakeasy bar culture there. Okay, “Sleek gourmet markets such as Mercado Independencia provide various Mexican fare all in one place, but venturing out into the city is the only way to taste the city’s soul. Head to taquerias Super Taco Chupucabras or El Vilsito to get your sea legs.”
So you know, they mentioned early on when people think of Mexico City, they think of taco carts, they think of taco trucks. So you see that they have that at the end, but they don’t give you a lot of detail. Instead, they use this interesting turn of phase “to get your sea legs” to tell you that that’s where the seafood tacos or the fish tacos come from, without saying, “The city is known for its fish tacos and you’ll get the best ones at El Vilsito,” okay? So they’ve done that with a lot…with many fewer words, okay?
So let’s zoom back out for a second and look at these other two articles that I wanted to look at with you, but we’ll keep it on here so that we can zoom better, okay? So let’s look at this…I believe the next one is gonna be “Tools of the Trade,” okay? This is a really neat one.
So this is a profile, this particular section is a profile of somebody who works somehow with something that you know about. It could be rice, it could be pinewood. Something that you’re familiar with and is doing something neat with it. So let’s see what they have to say about Nick Kim, okay?
So “Nick Kim’s eyes shine like those of a schoolboy with a crush when he talks to us about Kinmemai white rice. Grown in Japan’s Nagano Prefecture, a region known for having clean mountain water and excellent terroir, the rice is polished using a radical process that leaves the sprout of each grain intact, vastly improving consistency and nutritional value.” Then the quote, “Texture is always key when making rice,” says Kim. “The beauty with Kinmemai is that it holds up. Texturally, it’s all there.”
“Kim and his partner, Jimmy Lau, long conspired to find the perfect rice to serve at Shuko, their omakase and kaesiki-style sushi restaurant in Union Square. The search engine when they discovered Kinmemai. Now, the challenge lies in learning the grain’s unique nuances. ‘We’re tasting the rice all the time. It’s really like a brand-new relationship. Right now, we’re still holding hands.’ But Kim is definitely smitten with Kinmemai. ‘In sushi restaurants, rice is king. We could have the best fish in the world, but if the rice isn’t good, it isn’t going to make sense.’”
Now, you’ll see next to this, I mentioned this before, they have…let me zoom in for a second. Then they have this geographic round-up of different places doing interesting things with rice, okay? They talk about a festival in Japan where oxen are decorated with flowers. They have a place in San Francisco, a sake brewery, that makes only pure varieties of sake with water, rice, and koji, a special type of fungus. So you know, they could have all things in Japan, but they’re trying to address that geographic issue.
So then they say, “At Goofy’s Candy Company in Disneyland,” right, of all places, “you can bedeck Mickey-shaped crisped rice treats with toppings.” These things seem super random, a super random assortment, and we noticed that in all of the “Tools of the Trade” ones that we looked at. But it’s because they’re trying to cover their bases. They’re trying to cover people who are interested in local-only food, they’re trying to cover family travelers. They’re trying to cover people who are interested in culture around the world, okay?
So they also, up here, have three facts more. “There are more than 40,000 varieties of rice cultivated on every continent except Antarctica. Rice has long been seen as a symbol of fertility, which is why it’s frequently showered over newlyweds. In Japanese, the word for ‘rice’ and for ‘meal’ is the same.”
Okay, so let’s look at what they did here in this piece. Like I said, this is longer in terms of the introduction for this sort of thing, it’s about 200 words. And it’s interesting because he doesn’t grow the rice, right? So he’s a chef who uses the rice. Could they have talked to somebody who grows the rice? Yes. But by talking to a chef, they bring it closer to the readers, and it seems like he…they don’t say this, but it seems like he is probably one of the first or one of the only folks in the U.S. that’s using this special rice.
So they start by setting the scene by talking about the person because this is a profile of a person. But then they immediately get into telling you what is so special about this rice. So remember last time, we talked about how you have the who, what, where, when, why sentence, and then immediately why it’s important afterwards. So they’ve done that here as well. So they tell you that it’s known for its clean mountain water and the terroir, and also, this very special process which they explain.
And then, they immediately get into the quotes. They use a lot of quotes in this section, and they use the quotes to explain things. So in this case, this guy is clearly very quotable. He talks about holding hands with his rice. He’s, like, highly quotable. If he wasn’t so quotable, they probably wouldn’t have as many quotes here. But they use this quote to move through…they talked about what’s special about the rice, and why he, as a restaurateur, why it’s important to him. They give the background of their quest to find this rice, and then they show you how it’s being used now and what the challenge is, and they wrap up with this nice little quote about “Rice is king,” right? So this is a very short “Get in, get out” piece where they’re profiling the rice and the person all in one.
So there was one last one, one last front-of-book round-up that I wanted to share with you guys, and that was this Jose Andres one.
So this is the title, “Jose Andres on Seventh Street NW in Washington, D.C.” So I actually love Jose Andres. I love all of his stuff, his Mexican food is great. But he also has things with a lot of different restaurants. And when I saw this, I was curious. So let’s look at the piece.
“In times of struggle, a hot meal can bring cheer. Enter chef Jose Andres. In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, he and the team from his nonprofit, World Central Kitchen, have established an operation in Puerto Rico that has served more than 2.9 million meals to date. ‘We set up kitchens around the island, and hundreds of volunteers, chefs, cooks, and drivers came together to prepare and distribute meals,’ says Andres. The Spanish chef, who has more than ten eateries in and around Washington, D.C. has been providing relief to disaster areas via his nonprofits since 2010. ‘To me, food is a community built around shared experience,’ he says. ‘This is a true comfort, knowing that we have each other, friends and family around us when we need them.’”
So this is another one of those super short and sweet maybe 120-word things, okay? So they start with, like, a very short sentence to bring you in, and then they give you the context, okay? So Chef Andres is supporting Puerto Rico after the hurricane. They give specific names of what’s going on, the number of meals to date, and they jump into that quote that tells you about the why. And then they step back and they give you more background. This is the first time he’s done it. He’s done this in ten eateries. And he’s done it since 2010. And then they have that wrap-up quote from him about why this is important to the bigger picture.
Now, what did they do here with the round-up, okay? These…the point of this article is for a chef to tell you his favorite street. So this intro was to tell you why we’re hearing from Jose Andres in the first place, but the article is really about his favorite street in D.C. In this case, it’s Seventh Street where several of his restaurants are located, okay?
So he tells you other things that are there on that street that he loves. So he’s got this China Chilcano, this CityCenterDC, this Pitango Gelato, and the National Archives. And just like that my bag, “What’s in My Bag?” piece that I told you, each of the parts of this round-up is illustrated exclusively by a quote from the person being profiled. The writer, the editor has added no additional information explaining what this place is. Entirely just the words of the chef. So that means that the words of the person being profiled need to be telling you why it’s important, and what you get there all in one go.
So let’s look at a couple of these. So the newest addition to my “Penn Quarter restaurants, we tell the story of Peru by serving dishes from Peruvian Criollo, Chinese Chifa, and Japanese Nikkei traditions.” Okay, then CityCenterDC. “This development shows how quickly the neighborhood is changing and expanding. Twenty-five years ago when we opened Jaleo, there was just a parking lot. Now, it’s an urban paradise.” But he doesn’t tell you so much about what CityCenterDC is, and that’s in part because it’s a really major venue for shows, and I think they assume that people might know what that is.
So Pitango Gelato. “This is my favorite place for a macchiato. It’s just around the corner from the office. So when I need a little extra energy, it’s the perfect afternoon treat.” So this is interesting, right? Because it’s a gelato place, and you see gelato, and you’re like, “Okay, it’s ice cream.” And instead, he talks about how he also goes there for coffee, so it gives you another facet of this place.
The National Archives, also a very major thing in D.C. that people go to, a tourist attraction. So he says, “Sometimes, I’ll go and just look at the most famous American documents–the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution–and think about everything that this country stands for.” So this is something that people might know, but they might already be going to. But his quote gives you a different way to look at it. But they don’t tell you what the National Archives are, they don’t tell you what any of these things are. They just tell you how he experiences it, and this is really increasingly common in front-of-book round-ups. And I’m seeing a lot of these profile-oriented round-ups where every bit of the round-up is just communicated through the words of the original source.
Okay, so as I slip back to the slides, give me one sec, I see some questions have come in. Any of you guys that have questions, let me know in the chat box, and I’ll get to Priscilla. So these are the three things that we looked at. And this might be her question. “How do you pitch these pieces?” But let’s see, Priscilla said, “When you pitch your round-up like this rice, do you give specifics of each list to show you have the bases covered?”
Why yes, that’s right here. Perfect, Priscilla, that was a great lead-in for this. So yeah, you have to give a round-up. You have to give examples of the places you’re gonna include. And you have to give more than one, you have to give several.
So if the things that you’re including will number five in the end, you want to give at least three; if the number’s seven, give four or five. You want to give, like, a majority, but you don’t necessarily need to list all of them. So you don’t list all of them, guys. You hear me? If you’re doing a ten point round-up on that Tom Hanks one that we saw, you don’t need to have all of those things when you pitch. But you need to show that you have more than a couple, okay?
So the pitch should be crazy short. So you have a little bit in the beginning where you say why this is important, what section you’re pitching, and then you just tell them. You know, list style, “I will include this, this, this, and this.” There can be those places. And just like they did in the articles, you say “This, this, this, and this, which…” and then you explain what’s cool about that place, okay? So you expand on one and why it’s important.
So somebody asked…it’s not super related to what we’re talking about right now, but “If all pitches must be related to places where the airline flies?” With airline magazines, it depends on both the airplane and the specific section. So that’s why in the database, we include different examples of what they’ve covered in that section in the past, so that you can get a sense of if it has to be a city that they fly to, or if it can be a codeshare city, or if it can be somewhere you can drive to from them. And it’s completely different both by airline and by the section of the airline, so I can’t give a general answer there.
Donna said, “When you’re writing a round-up or other article, how do you add the side bars? Do you label them at side bars at the end, or is it up to the editor to do the side bar?” You do label side bars. They will tell you in advance that you’re doing side bars, and they should give you their preferred format for receiving them. Otherwise, you should ask the individual editor, because it’ll vary magazine to magazine what they need internally for their copy editors and for their print production process.
So I hope that you guys all have enjoyed the webinar, and I will catch you next week to talk about Article Nuts and Bolts on trend pieces.
Okay, thank you guys so much. Have a great weekend.
