The Feature Well

Today we laid out the pages for the October issue of Hoof Beats. Usually this is an uneventful part of the publishing process.

It starts when art director Gena Gallagher prints out a thumbnail image of each story on individual 8.5x11-inch sheets of paper and lays them out in order on the long table in the conference room. Nicole comes in and makes sure that everything looks to be in the right order and that all the advertising flows well with the editorial copy.

Today, however, they called me in for my opinion.

Each month we look to have a "feature well," usually four stories, broken up by very little advertising, that have rich art and hard-hitting copy. This month's features are: Little Brown Jug coverage (which will be written next week, naturally), Embryo Transfer, Pennsylvania update and a profile of Treasure Blue Chip, a 34-year-old mare living at Blue Chip Farm. We like to balance between hard-hitting stories (like ET) and more entertaining stories (like Treasure Blue Chip).

Our problem this month was that we had two long, substantial stories in ET and the state of Pennsylvania racing story. We don't want these two stories to come back-to-back and bog down the reader, but we also would like the feature well to end on a lighter note. Plus, we had what amounted to be three cover stories in the same issue, which made it feel heavy.

Eventually we decided to lead with the Jug coverage, then transition into the Pennsylvania story, which is a positive piece written by Tom Lamarra. I made a case to transition into the ET story to keep the meat of the issue together, but not cause a reader standstill by turning from the spalshy Jug layout to the more scientific ET story. We would finish with the Treasure Blue chip story,which will leave the reader coming out of the feature well on a breezy, high note.

We hope you have never even thought of the order of the stories, because if we are doing things right, you never have. TJB