The 52 Places to Go list is one of Travel’s biggest efforts of the year, for which The Times enlists writers and photographers around the globe, as well as a cadre of editors, designers and interactive specialists who work to produce it. Until the list is published early on Wednesday morning, I can’t reveal what spots made it, but I can offer some insight into how it is put together.

I became The Times’s Travel editor at the end of October, just as the process was ramping up, and I had to leap into the deep end.

To start, the editors on the Travel desk asked the journalists who have written for us in the past what places they find most intriguing. We asked them to pitch their favorite destinations in about 150 words or so, about the length of the final write-ups. Their suggestions were compiled into one big document, which this year ran to more than 70 pages. In some cases, multiple writers suggested the same place — often because there was some new development, or a special event taking place in 2019 — and a number of them made our final list.