Catch up with Hannah Chao, SOLA Network’s editor, as she shares about the 2020 SOLA Network Magazine (read it online as a flipbook or as a free PDF) as well as one of her favorite articles of the year, SOLA’s Hidden Gems of 2020.
You can watch the interview below, listen to it on our podcast, or read excerpts from a lightly edited transcript below.
Aaron Lee: Let’s talk about a couple of things we published near the end of last year. The first one was the SOLA Network magazine. Tell me a little bit about that.
Hannah Chao: I’m so proud of this project. We took some of the best articles that we published on our website, had it beautifully designed, and put it together into a digital magazine that featured articles that go from words for the church in our post-election days to articles about COVID. It’s beautiful and its’ a great read.
Aaron Lee: How did you decide what articles should go into the magazine?
Hannah Chao: I picked articles that had a pretty good readership because it showed me that people resonated with them. But also, I wanted to show the breadth of the coverage that we had this year. So the pandemic, but also things that were related to George Floyd and racial injustice that we have to reckon with as a community and as a country.
I also wanted to include articles that showed the breadth of the readership. There are articles written to college students and another written to youth pastors. I wanted to show that SOLA is here to equip Christians of all age ranges and on so many different topics.
Aaron Lee: You also released an article at the end of 2020, and it was called “SOLA’s Hidden Gems of 2020.” Why don’t you walk me through this idea for the entire article and tell me what’s inside?
Hannah Chao: SOLA usually puts out 4-5 articles every week, and I know that not everyone reads everything. And with Facebook’s algorithms and whatever other algorithms, it can be easy to miss things. Maybe a certain picture just didn’t look good or the headline didn’t resonate. There are a million things that can mean that you miss an article.
So this was to show that these are articles weren’t huge hits, but I really enjoyed reading them and so they’re my hidden gems that are right below the surface. This was another way to show the breadth and depth of the articles that we had in 2020.
I also wanted to kind of highlight the diverse voices. We know the Asian American experience isn’t centered on just one ethnic group. So for example, like, Tony Thomas is Indian American, and Daniel K. Eng is Chinese American. I also wanted to show that we have male and female writers who are contributing; we have younger and older writers. And so I tried to, again, show that these hidden gems are here for all of us to consume that are written by so many of us.
Links
2020 SOLA Network Magazine | Flipbook or PDF