Margaret Sadler | Editor-in-Chief , news & views , ARTA

Which came first : the chicken or the egg ? Just like that , one issue of news & views hatches from the last . We begin one issue by reviewing the previous issue ; there ’ s always some learning from the past that starts the incubation for the next one .

While the submission deadlines ( the 20 ^th of January , April , July , and October ) would seem to mark the beginning of an issue , much is done in advance — finding topics suited to the theme , consulting with possible writers , choosing articles from the backlog of travel articles and other volunteered submissions , cueing up the copy editors , and working with the design team to explore the cover and design possibilities .

Meanwhile , the ARTA Communications Committee , acting as the editorial board for news & views , sets the tone by picking four themes for a year ’ s worth of issues and providing evaluative responses to the editor-in-chief on each issue . The editor-in-chief — that ’ s me — discusses the themes with the production team of associate editor , staff contributors , designers , and marketers ; reports back to the committee on each issue , with response from readers and working relationships with all those involved ; sets policies ; and agrees on practices .

Once articles start arriving ( twenty-five to thirty of them ), I run them through proofreading software to catch inconsistencies and then divvy them up among the three main copy editors , who each edit a third of the articles on the Google Docs platform , following the n & v style guide . I decide which edits to keep and then recirculate the articles to the copy editors ( now proofreaders ) for a different third of the articles . This means that each article is edited by two people ( and reviewed two or three times by me ) before proceeding to the next step .

When all the articles are edited , they are passed to the design team ( in the person of Tony Esteves ) to start work on a flat plan . At this stage , Tony and I are testing out page layout and article placement . We like the cover story to be in the centre

8 | arta . net MAKING IT