My Amazing New Project
I’ve got a book and a TV series you’ll love!
-Melina Gerosa Bellows
Courtesy of National Geographic Society
When I was a kid, the world came to me through my mailbox. My parents subscribed to magazines like LIFE and National Geographic, and the first chance I got, I grabbed each issue from them so I could spend hours poring over the photographs, spellbound by the colors, the locations, and the people I saw. Those images burned into my brain forever.
Cut to me as a grown-up when, 15 years into a career in entertainment journalism, I switched gears to edit the National Geographic children’s magazine. In short, I went from divas to dinosaurs. The job was an exquisite challenge: Everything I knew, loved, and learned the hard way about storytelling had to be sped up, shrunken down, and made über-relevant to satisfy a younger audience with a microscopic attention span. I learned that you had to get to the point fast, or you’d bore the reader.
I took the lessons I learned there and put them to work for the latest project I’ve thought up: Nat Geo Amazing. It’s going to launch as both a book and a 10-part series on the National Geographic Channel (premiering July 9). I took my love for unforgettable images and unbelievable stories and traveled the globe, scoured our archives, and cut through the clutter of information that assaults us daily to present you with 100 people, places, and things that will totally wow you. It’s brain candy for busy people – you’ll get a look at worlds you’ve never seen it before.
Look, I’d love to plunk down with a copy of the latest National Geographic magazine and read an in-depth article on all the important things happening in the world today. But with two kids under six, a full time job, an attempt at a social life, and well, a blog to write, I don’t always have time to delve deep into one subject. So I thought: what if we took the Us Weekly bite-size-info approach (short text boxes, vivid photographs) to National Geographic’s global content? I care about the world, but I need the information fast—before my kids finger paint my walls or my boss needs a presentation yesterday. There’s a lot of you who can relate, and I made this book for us.