We’re deep into planning for 2015 at Trains. (Great stuff is on tap. Of course, I can’t tell you about any of it. This is in part because I barely know about it myself.)
As part of the planning process, our Map of the Month designer, Bill Metzger, stopped by the office recently to pitch ideas for the year ahead. Since Your New Guy is going to be the primary editor for Map of the Month, I sat in on this meeting with great interest, if little input. I’m still very much in the better-seen-than-heard stage of my brief tenure.
Well, not long after this meeting, I saw this online map of the best bars near each stop on the Los Angeles Metro light rail and subway system. (You can take the Southern Californian out of the Pacific time zone, but you can’t take the Pacific time zone out of his Facebook feed.)
Of course, I had to share it with Metzger and the rest of the staff in an email headed, “Foolishly, we overlooked this idea in our Map of the Month discussions.”
A round of one-liners followed: Suggestions that we haven’t done enough to serve the drinkers in our audience, volunteers to conduct research for similar maps in other cities. Ultimately, it was Metzger who suggested that a series of these maps would be a great basis for one of our once-a-year special issues, like this year’s Big Boy magazine or the upcoming Locomotives 2014.
Which is particularly appropriate, because these are known in house as Special Interest Publications. Or SIPs.
What better name for an issue built around bars?
Seriously, though, we’re now wondering: How would our readers feel about a Map of the Month that would be a sort of user’s guide to transit in a given city, showing attractions, top restaurants and, yes, notable watering holes near each stop?
We welcome your comments.
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