In today’s April 28 edition of the Sedona Red Rock News, you will see copies of our spring Lifestyles of Sedona magazine. This biannual magazine highlights people, institutions and programs in Sedona and the immediate area in a magazine-style feature format.
Lifestyles of Sedona aims to show a cross-section of our community. Over the years, feature stories in the edition have showcased working families, retirees, seniors, single parents, New Age practitioners, artists, U.S. Forest Service rangers and volunteers, painters, poets, business owners, entrepreneurs, frontline medical workers, police officers, firefighters, city of Sedona staff, teachers and nonprofit leaders.
The magazine is a snapshot in time that captures what it means to be a Sedona resident. While it would be impossible to showcase everyone in the city in a single edition, we hope it at least preserves a microcosm of the life of our city.
Although my day-to-day tasks consist of writing news stories and editorials, editing my reporters’ stories and photojournalists’ captions and designing and laying out pages, this biannual project is a bit of treat and an opportunity to put together a magazine rather than a standard newspaper.
Twice a year my staff and I brainstorm topics that might make interesting features for the magazine, be those residents we encounter during our regular news coverage or tips from readers about interesting people, organizations or programs they want to know more about or want us to tell you, their neighbors, about.
Along with our Sedona History special section in October, putting together the Lifestyles of Sedona magazine has been one of the highlights of my job as managing editor these last 10 years.
It’s a lot of work to wrangle staffers and subjects, get together photos and captions and hand them off to Tina Smith in our production department, who does the actual lion’s share of actually building the pages I design and preparing and color-correcting all the photos for print.
When building a newspaper, I can use my powers of prognostication and reporters’ story lists to get a pretty good idea of what the next front page is going to look like — last-minute or breaking news stories excluded. But we never know what the final Lifestyles of Sedona publication is going to look like when we start the process, so seeing the development from initial staff meeting to reading the final magazine is deeply enjoyable.
On your end, dear readers, you get a top-notch publication that highlights parts of or people in the city you may have never known about.
We hope you enjoy this year’s edition and the work my staff put into it, whether it be the stories from skilled reporters Carol Kahn, Tim Perry and Alyssa Smith and freelance writer Lo Frisby or the creative photography from both our talented photojournalists, Dalton Venglar and David Jolkovski.
After this publication, we’ll be gearing up for our high school graduation and eighth grade promotion and matriculation pages in the middle of the month.
While Sedona readers only see graduation photos from our Sedona schools, Tina Smith also builds the pages for our sister publications, The Camp Verde Journal and the Cottonwood Journal Extra, for our students graduating or matriculating in Camp Verde, Cottonwood, Clarkdale, Cornville and Beaver Creek. Combined, that’s well over 1,000 Verde Valley kids’ names and photos from about a dozen schools, but we publish these pages because — as I recently told a Sedona City Council member — our children do, must and always will come first in our community.
Publishing these pages is part of our dedication to the families and readers that call Sedona and the Verde Valley home. While yearbooks and graduation events are mementos, it’s great to showcase our students to their community at large and celebrate the students who are leaving middle school to become freshmen or graduating high school to enter the world as young adults.
If you want to highlight a graduating senior or eighth grader with an advertisement in this section, please call General Manager Kyle Larson at (928) 282-7795 ext. 114 or email him at klarson@larsonnewspapers.com.
If you have a suggestion for our fall edition of Lifestyles of Sedona, email me at editor@larsonnewspapers.com. If you want to advertise in this very popular and well-read publication, contact Larson and he will be happy to get your ads in front of our readers.
Thanks for letting us serve you.
