Oh, the 52 Places She’ll Go

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/13/insider/how-we-chose-52-places-and-person-jada-yuan.html

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Every year, the 52 Places to Go issue is the most popular one the Travel section does. It’s also the most complicated.

There’s the print product, of course, with its lush, I-wish-I-were-there photography. There’s the online version, with videos scattered throughout. And this year, we added yet another layer: the 52 Places Traveler — a writer-at-large who will go to each and every spot on the list in 2018.

So at the same time that we were sifting through suggestions of which places to include, and how to rank them, from dozens of our regular contributors — who, frankly, know the world a lot better than we editors do — we were also sifting through more than 13,000 submissions (yes, you read that right) for an unprecedented and much-talked-about job posting.

Since readers are likely to wonder how we arrived at both these decisions (and which one came first), here’s a behind-the-scenes look.

First the places.

As we do every year, we asked our contributors to nominate places that would be particularly exciting spots to visit in the coming year: because of new hotels, resorts, museums or restaurants; because there is a new way to get there (or get around once you are there); or because of the emergence of a cultural scene of some sort.

After reading their submissions, the Travel editors met. And met. And met. It can sometimes get contentious. I remember a debate about the 2014 list that revolved around the inclusion of St. Petersburg, Fla. One of my colleagues in Travel, Lynda Richardson, had lived there for five years and was outraged we were considering it. “Fellini-esque,” she called it, and not in a good way. It ended up on the list. “I made peace with that,” she told me recently.

We thought a lot about the No. 1 choice — ultimately selecting New Orleans, on the occasion of its 300th birthday (see the item by yours truly, the project’s coordinating editor) — and tried to make sure there was a little something for every type of traveler through the rest of the list, providing a geographic and thematic mix.

So what about that 52 Places Traveler? It’s an idea that has been percolating for the last couple of years, but always seemed too daunting to pull off. This year, we finally posted the job. We expected a passionate response from a group of inveterate travelers — but I can’t say we expected 13,000 submissions.

A team of four, including myself, divided up the applications and took at least a glancing look at all of them, diving into the ones we thought showed the most promise. Over many multi-hour sessions, we narrowed the list to 139 people — including a father-daughter team and Buzz Bissinger, the author of “Friday Night Lights” — and asked each to send a video introduction, as well as a sample video story from the road for posting to Instagram.

We narrowed the list further, to six finalists. One is an editor at a major travel magazine. Another works as a breaking news videographer for a TV network. Another is a lawyer-turned-journalist. (Mr. Bissinger, sadly, did not make the cut, though his submission video was as compelling as one would expect.)

A team of folks from around the newsroom — representing the Travel section, the video department and the photo department — met with those applicants either in person or by video chat. All were impressive — indeed, any one of them could have done the job.

But in the end, we decided on Jada Yuan. Jada is not a professional travel journalist, but she possesses some of those skills. As a writer at New York magazine for the last decade, she has profiled plenty of celebrities, but she has also parachuted into film festivals and presidential conventions — each time having to find her footing in a new place. She knows how to locate interesting people to talk to. And she knows how to insert herself into a piece in a way that is both personal and insightful (take, for example, her article for Cosmopolitan magazine on trying to date in six U.S. cities).

We’re trying to connect Jada with a few of the applicants who made the first cut. Jamie Lafferty, a travel writer from Glasgow (No. 10 on the places list) has kindly offered to be her guide to his hometown, and we’re going to take him up on that. We’re hoping that other applicants will do the same.

Jada starts her journey around the world in New Orleans in less than two weeks. She won’t be doing the list sequentially — that would be, well, insane (try getting from No. 6 rural Chile to No. 7 South Korea, for example). So after New Orleans, she heads to a few other cities in the southern United States, then farther south to the Caribbean and Latin America. We can’t wait to tag along with her.