PRINTWhere are they now? Vox staffers weigh in. Q&A: Beth Collins
Courtesy of Sarah Engler
After departing from Vox, Beth Collins worked at Food and Wine and then went on to Woman’s Day before Budget Travel.
May 15, 2008 | 12:00 a.m. CST
Beth Collins, Vox editor-in-chief during fall 2002, is now an associate editor at Budget Travel in New York. Although Vox is no longer part of her weekly reading repertoire, she still makes it a point to pick up a copy when she visits her parents, who live in mid-Missouri. After departing from Vox, Collins worked at Food and Wine and then went on to Woman’s Day before Budget Travel. She also works on feature stories, writes and edits for Girlfriend Getaways — a magazine published by Budget Travel twice a year. Collins believes Vox was effective in preparing her for the magazine industry.
Vox: What’s been the most challenging part of your career?
Beth Collins: We just did an issue here; it’s our 10th Anniversary issue, and it was entirely reader generated. That was just a huge amount of work for everybody because our readers wrote all the text, did all of the photograph phases and even a few sections have illustrations they created. It required a lot of coordination, along with editing back and forth with the readers. It was a huge undertaking. I wouldn’t say it was necessarily fun, but I’m really happy that we did it. I think it’s a great issue — it comes out in June.
Vox: What’s it like to be an associate editor at Budget Travel?
BC: I have two sections that I work on. One of them is called Trip Coach, which is where readers write in to us and tell us about a trip they’re taking but they’re having trouble planning, so I’ll find a coach who can help them and correspond with him or her. I monitor the correspondence and edit the stories. The coach turns it into a story such as “How to do Portugal” or “How to do Hawaii.” I also work on a section called 20 Tips, which is literally readers writing tips and us choosing 20 for an issue. We fact check and edit them pretty heavily.
Vox: What did you learn at Vox that’s stuck with you?
BC: So much of it is about interacting with your reader and making the story work on the page. Things that aren’t necessarily intellectual — you’re not necessarily going to write a paper about it — but in a lot of ways it really comes down to things like getting the interesting angle rather than going for the obvious one and just fitting text. This was the huge thing at Vox while I was there, and they really drilled it into us.
Vox: How did you work your way to Budget from Vox?
BC: I came out to New York to do my master’s project at Food and Wine magazine. I was there, it was like a two-month thing, and I ended up staying. They hired me on a contract basis to do another project, and I was there for a few more months. Then after that I went to Woman’s Day, and I worked on some special interest publications, so I did their food magazines and their decorating magazines. And I was there for a few years in a couple of different capacities, and then came here and started out as an associate editor.
