Readers, Writers and Contributors: Lend Us Your Ideas

By the time this November issue hits your desk or mail-box, work will already be well underway on ELEVATOR WORLD’s December issue. With another year almost in the bag, we have our sights set on 2012. The EW team worked together over the summer to create an invigor-ated editorial calendar for the coming year, which can be viewed in full at website: www.elevatorworld.com/pdf/EW_2012_mk.pdf. We are excited to continue bring-ing you coverage of technology, history, engineering, en-vironmental issues, codes and standards, events and project spotlights, among many other topics. Our colorful columns will remain, as news from the U.S. and around the world always requires our attention. And, we could not do without a Last Glance to make us think another minute before closing the book on another issue. In addi-tion to all these tried and true EW standards, we have added a new variety to the mix.

We plan to highlight more people in 2012 through our new Profiles department. In talking with everyone from CEOs to mechanics to engineers, we plan to reveal sto-ries of industry insiders that are both enlightening and entertaining. With an expanded On Camera department, we will let unique pictures tell stories that words cannot. By resurrecting our Management department, we plan to shed light on such topics as the challenges of running a business during a recession, moving/expanding a busi-ness overseas, hiring practices and educating young peo-ple in this industry, to name a few.

We will continue to explore a focus topic each issue in 2012 and have done some research internally to deter-mine which topics seem to demand the most attention. We will cover a range of those topics, including consult-ing, accessibility, suspension means, escalators and mov-ing walks, cab enclosures and system fixtures.

Our newly redesigned website, which launched September 6, now contains a monthly web-exclusive feature story. This provides us another outlet for telling stories and sharing news beyond our printed pages. We will also continue to feature Online Extras on our web-site, giving multimedia coverage from EW articles.

While we feel confident EW readers will benefit from the new and expanded coverage planned for next year, we require your input to solidify our success. Your ideas, whether in the form of phone calls, quick e-mails, de-tailed letters or full-blown articles, are invited. We are lucky to have an engaged community in the elevator in-dustry, and it has been my experience, in my short time at EW, that we are never at a loss for interesting material to publish, thanks in large part to readers, contributors and correspondents. We hope you will continue to share your interests, insights, knowledge and experiences with us in 2012. To make doing that a little easier, here are some tips from the EW Editorial Department:

• Start a conversation with us: Sometimes it takes a while to cultivate a new idea. If you have the seed of an idea, call or e-mail us. We are happy to talk about it and help you develop it for the EW audience. You may have an idea but do not want to be the one who turns it into an article. We have a staff of writers and a cadre of contributors and correspondents who can help with that. Worthwhile articles often result from a gen-uine collaboration.
• Send us a news release: One of the best approaches for you to deliver news to us is through a news release. Beginning with an explanatory headline, a well-written informative news release that includes the standard who, what, where, when, why and how in the lead paragraph gets us interested. Follow those elements with facts and figures, good quotes from reliable sources and contact information we can use to gain more information, and you’ll have provided much of what we need to get a story started.
• Develop an EW article: When writing an article for us, know that we are flexible on article length. Most of our features and technical articles run 1,000-3,000 words. News items, such as awards and recognitions, project announcements, company events or promotions, can be much shorter. We prefer you give us too much in-formation than too little. We are happy to edit a piece down if necessary. We are most interested in the story being told thoroughly and to readers’ satisfaction. We will also proofread and edit your work, keeping you in the loop throughout the process as you wish.
• Include photographs with descriptions: We appre-ciate it when high-resolution photos accompany an article. This provides us the opportunity to illustrate the text for the reader. Color or black-and-white photos e-mailed to us as .jpg files work well. With all photos, we ask for captions/cutlines to clearly label and describe the photo. Photos can be e-mailed, mailed or placed on our FTP site. As with all submissions, give us a call or send us an e-mail with any questions.    
• Write a bio to accompany your article: Writers hope to never write in vain; meaning, they want to be read. By including an author’s biographical informa-tion and a photo (usually a color or black-and-white headshot) with his/her article in EW, we hope to en-sure the work will be read. When an author’s creden-tials are known, the article stands to gain a large measure of credibility, and, hopefully, it will then not only be read, but talked about, too.

We hope this information will in-spire you to submit ideas or articles to EW in the coming year. Please find all of our contact information on page 4 of this book under EW Services. We are planning a dynamic 2012, and your ideas are essential. We look for-ward to hearing from you.  

Editor’s Note: Angie Baldwin is our new managing editor, and we thought this was a good way to in-troduce her to our readers. She has extensive magazine management experience. In addition, Angie has taught journalism, magazine writing and editing, and newspa-per reporting. She has freelanced for international, national and re-gional publications, including ELEVATOR WORLD, for 13 years.