Editor Interview with Cities Talking

Cities TalkingWorld Words editor Joseph Reaney was recently interviewed by one of our clients, Cities Talking, outlining all the skills, tips and tricks required to compose great audio travel guides that entertain and inform the listener. Here was one of the questions…

Q. HOW DO YOU TACKLE A BRIEF TO WRITE A CITIES TALKING TOUR?

A. Cities Talking is a wonderful client. They provide a clear brief about the tour they wish to be written and have in-house researchers who send over a long document outlining each and every attraction en route. We’ll then scour these notes, pick out the interesting information and use this to create an entertaining and informative audio script. We also supplement this research with some of our own. In particular, we try to find interesting characters and dig into their personalities.

You can read the interview in full of the Cities Talking website. You will find some of the audio city guides we have written for this client, including on the beautiful European cities Amsterdam, Budapest and Prague, in our portfolio.

Audio Guides for Cities Talking

Since May 2013, I have written a variety of audio city walking tours for Cities Talking – and my team of writers at WorldWORDS have written even more!

You can now listen to extracts from one my more recent city guides, on the Castle District in Budapest, by clicking this here link – or if you’re allergic to shortcuts you can also go looking for it in the Eastern Europe section of the Guides & Itineraries page. And if you’re considering a trip to the city, why not download the entire three-hour walking tour through the Cities Talking site?

Plus, as an extra bonus thing, I did this here interview with them. Lovely stuff.

Contributing to Vertu Select

I have been contributing short articles to the luxury digital publication Vertu Select for more than a year now, but there has been such a backlog that it has taken a very long time to see any of them published – and even longer to get my mitts on the prints! But now, they have kindly supplied me with the few of my articles that have made it to public consumption. The first, published in May, starts like this:

“The 20th century was a trying period for Ukrainian art. After a promisingly avant-garde start to the 1900s, during which many popular contemporary movements like Futurism, Constructionism and Cubism swept through the streets of Kiev, everything came to a very sudden (and very prolonged) halt in 1922 with the foundation of the Soviet Union. However, since the parting of the Iron Curtain in 1991, Ukrainian art has enjoyed a stuttering resurgence – and it’s set for an enormous boost this summer with the opening of Kiev’s first ever Biennale…”

You can read the rest of ‘Kiev Arsenale 2012’ by clicking on the image to the left. Or you can read my latest one about Eastern European cruises. Here’s the intro:

“Medieval hilltop castles, high gold-domed churches and ancient Mediterranean ports… Eastern Europe has a wealth of treasures just waiting to be discovered. As there’s no finer way to acquaint yourself with a city than with a late night excursion on the water, here are five of the East’s favourite evening cruises…”

You can read the whole article by clicking this here link (it’s external, you know).

If you’ve noticed a theme emerging, it’s that I specialise in Central and European destinations for Vertu. Hopefully, the remaining dozen-or-so articles covering this area, plus the few elsewhere, will appear in my travel journalism portfolio shortly.