CENTRAL CITY - Today I sat down at our Central City office to contemplate a few topics I have been considering for my Peak Perspectives column. Here is what I settled on.
I am going to share this as my own opportunity to educate you from my point of view, to tell you a little bit about what goes into every single publication we produce here at The Mountain-Ear. This time I'm going to focus on just the 2025 Studio Tour.
This week, as we have wrapped up and distributed our Peak to Peak Visitor's Guide all over the region, I have spent a bunch of time organizing for the Studio Tour map. For me, this is normal time spent on pulling all the moving pieces together as we move into the print stage.
The work is done aside from my newspaper work, which thankfully is a little less these days because we have such an incredible TEAM that take on so many roles (none of us has one single job, but perform multiple duties every week).
Our process starts months before you see a single thing advertised about an upcoming publication. The Studio Tour guide and map started in February, when we determined we should combine our Visitor's Guide, Studio Tour and Taste of the Peaks guides. The compilation of all meant we would get more guides out to the public, for a longer period of time.
This is a win / win for all of our advertisers, readers, and our staff, to combine it into a larger guide. At this time I get print quotes from Colorado printers, to determine what it will cost, start to finish to produce this publication.
Once the idea of the publication is shared with staff, we start the process of assigning content. For the Studio Tour, inside the Visitor's Guide, we assigned 25 stories for the Visitor's Guide, including a Studio Tour list of participants who had signed up before the deadline.
We had over 20 staff working on the Visitor's Guide. At the time, there were 21 studio/artist participants. Today, as we close in on the deadline for the map, there are almost 40 participants for the tour (a lesson for me to reach out earlier next year for participants).
After we assign content, we begin advertising sales. Amanda MacDonald has been our primary salesperson for many months. And Kaia Cole joined our team and is learning the ropes on sales with the map. She also understands our (beyond) complicated CRM system and is actually showing us how some of it works.
We want to make sure we have the sales needed to (at minimum) break even on the project. In the case of the Visitor's Guide, we made it! And we even printed extras!
For the map, we are at break-even now and will have a few last minute sales that come through tomorrow. This could help us print extra copies or expand where we put them in the region, and beyond. The content deadline is then met and we figure out if we need anything else for the guide.
During this we have several edits. We have two main editors at the paper, Lynn Hirshman and Sara Sandstrom. Both are an integral part of the work we do, every single day. Both edit each piece we produce for every publication.
Ad sales are completed, I created the rough (hand drawn) map. I sent my poor depiction of a map to our designer, David Sockrider. He has already had the idea going for several weeks and this is the final step for him to make it reality. He is also working on the ads and content for the back of the map.
As is Lori Garcia, our Special Sections designer and ad creation designer. David also created our cover for the Peak to Peak Visitor's Guide, our interior page covers for Studio Tour and Taste of the Peaks, as well as several covers for previous guides over the last year.
David is also one of our Studio Tour artists with work displayed at both One Brown Mouse in Nederland, and the Ward Mountain Exchange, in Ward.
Tomorrow, in between newspaper needs, I will finalize the lists of artists and studios. These will also go to David to add to the back of the map. The lists, created from submissions from each artist and gallery, are also used to create our newspaper stories for The Mountain-Ear, promoting the Studio Tour, for all of August and September, right up to the tour dates. Lynn Hirshman has been writing these stories, along with some promotional pieces we write.
Brittney Wagner takes our promo and puts it on social media. Polina Savich also posts all of our stories on our Facebook page and pages all around our region.
Jessica LaFone and Blaizun Diamond work it into the website as a beautiful section dedicated just to Studio Tour. Jessica is also our Creative Director, so she is part of every single step of every publication we put out.
The map will be distributed in a few weeks, before the Studio Tour September 20 and 21. It will be on stands, inserted in one edition of The Mountain-Ear and available at all of the studios and galleries listed for the tour, as well as at our sponsor locations.
We deliver our publications over 200 miles per week and over 300 when we deliver the north route (western Boulder County all the way to Estes Park).
Have I shared all the work that goes into these publications? Just this one? Have I also shared the dedication of our entire TEAM to everything we have going on? Are you as excited as I am about this?
If you ever have a question about what we do at The Mountain-Ear, I'm happy to chat in person, online or by phone. I'm in Nederland at least two days each week. I'm in Gilpin County the rest of my work days. I love sharing what we do. I love being part of this amazing group of incredible people.
Reach me by email at info@themountainear.com, by phone (the phone is always at one of our offices) at 303-810-5409, or catch me at any of a million events every year. This weekend, catch me at the Colorado Press Association conference this weekend in Thornton. I'll be there all day, every day, to learn more, share knowledge, network, and celebrate another year of hard work!
