4WD Instagram Campaign!
Hi everyone, this is Carrie, founding editor of 4WD!
It is July 19 and 4WD on Medium is 4 months old. It now has more than 1.4K followers, 33 authors, and published 53 articles, including travel stories from 19 countries.
As a founding editor, I am excited that 4WD managed to get together a diverse group of authors, about a hundred times more followers than I expected it to get, and a fair number of pieces addressing the issue of gender inequality in travel and travel writing.
Thank you all, immensely, for your support!
Instagram campaign!
July and August is summer in the Northern Hemisphere, and summer means summer break in a lot of different ways. Not all of us will enjoy a holiday break, but a significant amount of us engage in a lot more seasonal work, social activism, or simply family-and-friend time. Moreover, it is often a time when freelance travel writers head off to faraway places and collect content and photographs for their future pieces. I myself will be in northern Scotland for a few weeks, do some hiking, writing and photography.
So 4WD Magazine will shift to 2WD for a few weeks, and let everyone do what they have to do. However if you have written a piece, do submit it and it will be published and advertised as usual within a few days!
Now… Maybe you won’t have time to write a lot of pieces, but you may have time to toss a picture or an update now and then about what you’re up to on your social media.
So here’s a deal: let’s set up an Instagram campaign! When you post an update about your July-and-August activities on Instagram, please add 4WD’s Twitter handle as a hashtag:
#WoWrWaWoD
If enough of you guys (writers AND readers!) participate, 4WD will feature your adventures in a special article on Medium in September. Plus, it would be a great way to get to know each others better as a community!
What’s next
Now, of course, the project is still burgeoning! As a woman, a traveler and a travel writer, I still have a checklist for 4WD!
- I would love to see it become even more diverse and break the boundaries of Medium, which, let’s face it, is a very Western and very white medium of communication.
To do this, and with the agreement of the authors, 4WD can embed articles that have been published on other platforms and formats. With some help, it can also copy these articles and offer an international English translation for them. Finally, if you know someone who has something to say in 4WD but doesn’t have access to / can’t use the internet, please contact us and we can work a way to publish what that person has to say in 4WD.
- I would love to see more languages used. Even I in this newsletter use international English by default, as it seems to be an “okay” vehicular language for most of you guys (I myself am a native French speaker).
I send a message to all of you multilingual travelers: if you can write your post in English and in one of your native languages, please do so! We will be happy to publish it, and even revise your English draft if you are uncomfortable with it as a second language.
Now, if you’ve followed 4WD closely, you will see something that the map doesn’t quite show: a significant part of the “travel stories” published in 4WD happen in the United States of America. As a founding editor, I’ve had mixed feelings about this. First, of course, it puts to my face the fact that 4WD was created by a Western woman with an essentially Western network on an essentially Western platform. But I was also happy to see that a lot of these articles told stories of invisibilized places and people, sometimes right down the author’s street. And I liked that, because it gives a voice to places and people that are supposed to be well-represented, but are not.
So far, 4WD has been a very exciting project, and we received emails from some of you telling us that you loved the concept and would like to continue following us, writing for us, using us for writing projects in places and contexts where women do not typically end up on the bookshelves of travel writing.
4WD is not only about traveling. It is about public space. It is about women living and moving around, in a world that still is reluctant to let them do so.
Happy trails to all,
Carrie,
on behalf of the 4WD Project
