Yesterday, Astronomy’s editors, art staff, and publisher left the office to hang out at Editor Dave Eicher’s house for our annual staff retreat — a major component of how we bring you new ideas each year via the magazine and the website, and something the staff always looks forward to.
Karri Ferron suggests ideas for new website content during the first half of the annual editorial planning meeting. Alison Mackey photo
Article ideas, thoughts on our recently updated website, potential special issues, design tweaks, and much more formed the day's agenda, and the group of 12 talked, talked, and talked. We covered a lot of ground — but also had plenty of laughs, from generation-gap jabs (a big topic at Astronomy right now) to sci-fi humor. We’re kind of like a family, so it’s a pretty neat environment to work in.
As we do each year, we had a great time, came up with and shared a vast number of ideas, and enjoyed the day as breakfast transformed into box lunches and then into middle afternoon. Dave spent the retreat feverously scribbling down all of our ideas, and I’m sure pages and pages of notes captured the results.
Everyone is welcome to share ideas at our annual retreat. Here, Elisabeth Kelly, our illustrator (far right by the fireplace), outlines a great concept for a future special issue. Alison Mackey photo
We broke up at about 4 p.m. after covering a huge amount of information — enough great ideas for years to come, some of which I’m sure we’ll use in the next few months and some of which will have to wait until later. So stay tuned for lots of fun stuff coming down the road.