#MediaMonday – Danielle Accovelli

Having grown up in north Scottsdale (Go Huskies!), I am obviously a bit partial to news from the area – in fact, I am obsessed with it. Like a kid on Christmas morning, I run to my computer on the first of each month to download all of Scottsdale’s great magazines and read them even before they hit newsstands. Often, I do this even before getting ready for work (Scott/Abbie – this explains why I tend to be a few minutes late the first of each month).

I was first introduced to Paradise Valley and North Scottsdale Lifestyle Magazines in 2012, when television media vet Jessica Parsons took over as the editor. In fact, we did a #MediaMonday profile on her at the time, which you can find here (but note that she is back in the TV biz and killing it every day at Good Morning Arizona these days).

I immediately fell in love with the “Good Times” features published each month – but was biased given one of my fave media peeps Alison Stanton puts them together – as well as all the hot news on the local food scene. Still love them, in fact!

And now, I love their new editor too!

You will too.

As you can guess, [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]today’s #MediaMonday comes to us from Danielle Accovelli, editor of North Scottsdale Lifestyle and Paradise Valley Lifestyle Magazines.[/inlinetweet]

So, Danielle, time to share!

What do you want to tell the blogosphere about yourself today?

Magazines have always captivated me. I would spend most of my summers lounging by the pool for hours, turning red as a lobster, reading all the magazines I had bought but never had the time to read during the school year. I loved everything about them—from the features and style pages down to the type-settings and glossy feel of the pages. That, coupled with my insatiable thirst for traveling, meeting new people and hearing their stories, made the magazine industry the perfect fit for me.

However, it wasn’t until my sophomore year of college at Pepperdine University, while I studying abroad in Italy, that I seriously considered entering the magazine industry as a profession. Every time I would visit a new country, I would buy a magazine from there, and by the time the year was over I had magazines from Italy, France, London, Germany, Turkey, and many more. What I found amazing about all of them was that even though I couldn’t understand the language, I got a sense of the country’s culture, trends and current topics of interest purely through the visual components. Then one day, as I was lugging my magazines into a classroom to read, a professor stopped me and suggested that I give journalism a try.

I started working for the Life&Arts section of Pepperdine’s student newspaper and really loved it, so I decided to try my hand at writing for their Lifestyle magazine too, eventually becoming a feature writer. It was then that I landed an internship with bask Magazine in Newport Beach. I worked my way up from an intern to an editorial assistant in two years, I still write for the magazine today, and learned invaluable lessons about every aspect of the magazine publishing process along the way.

After college, I attended the NYU Summer Publishing Institute and spent some time in New York City. Once in Arizona again, I started writing for North Scottsdale and Paradise Valley Lifestyle magazines, eventually becoming the editor for both of them just a few months ago. Every time I open an issue of one of the magazines, I think of how lucky I am to have found a home with two publications, and an amazing group of writers, that I have come to truly love.

When not working, you can find me running, hiking or doing something else active. I also love to travel, whether it’s a quick weekend getaway or longer sojourn to Europe, visit art museums and spend hours on my couch curled up watching movies.

I am always looking for stories and available at danielle.accovelli@lifestylepubs.com or 714-615-6924.