Travel in newspapers and magazines
Despite theoretically making a living by writing for them, I rarely read travel magazines and newspaper travel sections. With the odd noble exception, I find that they just don’t interest me. And there are two possible explanations for this – 1) I’m weird and they just don’t speak to me and 2) They’re just awful.
I’m on record as saying that the travel sections of British newspapers in particular (I’m sure it’s the same overseas – I just have lesser access to them) do a tremendous disservice to their readers. There are many reasons for this, but reading just one piece this weekend summed most of them up.
2,000 words of nothing
I’m sure I could have picked a story from just about any newspaper, but this one happens to be from Saturday’s Independent. I was saddened to see it – partly because it commits a one-man crime wave against a craft I have a (probably misplaced) affection for, and partly because the Independent’s travel section is usually the best of a bad bunch.
But, if you will, please take a read of Brilliant Beirut by Dominic Lawson. This took up three pages in the front of the section, sprawls for over 2,000 words and manages to offer pretty much nothing in terms of insight or entertainment on the way. It is what’s wrong with travel writing in microcosm, committing just about every sin in the book. And, for the record, here are just some of said sins:
ONE: “What I did on my holiday” journalism
Lawson’s piece reads as a virtually unedited reeling off of what he did – right down to the coffees and orange juices he consumed. This is what you do in primary school after you get back from the school holidays, and whilst it may be worthy of praise coming from a seven-year-old who has just mastered joined-up handwriting, it isn’t worthy of three pages in a national newspaper. The first person is vastly overused in travel writing; unless you’re an integral part of the story you’re telling – and it had better be a bloody good story if so – it doesn’t need to be used.
TWO: Celebrity writers
Why has Dominic Lawson been given three pages to prattle on about his free holiday? Because he’s relatively well known and used to edit the Sunday Telegraph, I’d guess. It’s certainly not because he’s offering any special insight into Lebanon or, if we’re being honest, any indication that he might wish to offer any special insight into Lebanon. There are far worse (often ghost written) examples of celebrity travel journalism – witness this piece by Allan Lamb on The Bahamas for an example that dips truly into self-parody territory – but the whole genre is lazy space-filling.
In what possible scenario could Dominic Lawson – a fairly conservative 53-year-old man – be the right person to write about a party city’s exclusive nightclubs?
THREE: Junkets
There is a long standing debate over whether travel writers should accept freebies from tourist boards/ hotels etc. To me, it’s not a black or white issue – I take and actively seek them myself in a bid to keep costs down. It’s absurd to say you can’t write something good, insightful and honest just because you had a free night in a hotel room.
Lawson, however, is clearly on an all-in junket; one where just about everything is organised for him in such a way that the average reader would never be able to replicate. He’s not used the junket as a springboard in order to investigate the destination in more depth and provide something valuable for the reader – he’s used it to shamelessly blather on about the companies he’s (almost certainly) got free stuff from. There’s no justification for the number of words spilled on both Bentleys and the Le Gray Hotel. It’s utterly shameless.
FOUR: Pricing out the readers
Straw poll: Of the Independent’s readership, how many people do you think could afford to stay in a £253-a-night hotel whilst greasing palms to get into the most exclusive nightclubs in the city and being chauffeur driven around mountain roads in a Bentley? And if some could just about afford this, would they ever consider it money well spent?
The travel media, almost as a whole, works at price points that are dreamlands for the majority of the audience. Call it aspirational, call it travel porn, call it what you will but the constant skew towards luxury travel that is an impossibility for many shows exactly who the content is for. It’s not for readers; it’s for advertisers who want to believe they’re reaching people who own a different Rolex watch for each day of the week and think anything costing less than £150 a night is a shabby budget hotel.
And when something is written almost entirely for the benefit of advertisers rather than readers, is it any surprise that most travel writing is so tediously upbeat, positive and uncritical?
FIVE: An obsession with hotels
This may just be me, but travel really isn’t about hotels. It’s about where you go and what you experience. A hotel is somewhere you sleep in; a practical necessity. Not in the travel media it isn’t – hotels get a totally disproportionate amount of focus. Pages are devoted to ‘news’ of hotels opening, adding a spa or a new restaurant. We simply have to know which hotels are cool, seemingly for the benefit of that microscopic subsection of the population that base their decision of where to go for a holiday on wherever the hippest new luxury hotel is. But hey, why not? The hotel PRs provide all the info for free, it fills space cheaply, the advertisers (ie. The very same hotels) love it, and it keeps the freebies coming whenever the editor fancies a bit of pampering.
SIX: Complete absence of fun
Lawson just spent a few days in luxury hotels, exploring what he himself dubs a party city and whizzing around the countryside in fast cars. Sounds like great fun, doesn’t it? Yet read what Lawson has written, and there’s a complete absence of joy, excitement or indication that what he’s doing might be enjoyable.
For all my other criticisms, this is the one thing that bugs me the most about travel writing in today’s newspapers and magazines. It’s so serious, so po-faced, so humourless and so worthy. The insane urge to appear knowledgeable and authoritative leads to any signs of life and fun being stripped away. Why is it a crime to have a travel article that is, you know, entertaining? These writers aren’t covering earthquakes or civil wars – they’re writing about places that you might like to go to on holiday. Surely the travel section should be the most rip-roaring, engrossing, amusing read in the whole paper? People go travelling in order to have a good time don’t they? Why is it against the rules to reflect this?
I feel slightly bad for picking on one piece (particularly one from the Indy), but Lawson’s tedious blathering about his jolly in Beirut is a textbook example of what is wrong. If you’ve got a spare 20 minutes, it’s worth listening to Andrew Mueller explain “why travel writing sucks” in a far more detail. A far better writer than I, Mueller nails it in a speech at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne.
Got any pet hates with travel writing? Feel free to get them off your chest by leaving a comment below…
Tags: freebies, hotels, luxury travel, magazine, newspaper, PR, Travel Writing
Truly great post David. I wonder if Ben or Simon will respond?
Who knows? As I say – rather unfair to pick on the Indy here. It usually does a better job than most of the other papers. But the criticism applies, sadly, almost universally across the travel media.
Good stuff
This is why we started Naked Hungry Traveller, to have a little fun and see if there are readers out there who want some substance in their travel writing. There’s just not enough respect for the reader by most publications.
[...] A good number of the travel bloggers I’m aware of are mostly damn good writers, who bring the tastes, smells, sights and pleasure of their trips onto their blog with ease. Treating their readers to a second hand experience that often escapes the traditional (paid and paid-for) travel writer. [...]
All you ever do is moan about travel writing and PRs. Why don’t you just find another job and lead a life that makes you happy?
No Juliet (if, indeed that is your real name – which I doubt given the obviously fake e-mail address you provided). I moan about lots of other things too. I’d also like to consider it constructive criticism and analysis rather than pure, out-and-out moaning.
And I am, on the whole, happy with my lot in life too. I’m very lucky to be able to do what I do and make a living from it.
This blog, incidentally, isn’t everything I do. It was specifically set up for the purpose of highlighting the negative aspects of travel and the travel industry (and has crept into the negative aspects of travel writing too). If that seems a bit down in the dumps, I respectfully suggest that you can balance it out by getting unremittingly positive reading material about travel just about anywhere else.
This blog covers part of my views and personality; I’m in no way trying to make it thoroughly representative of what I do or think overall. PS. I have a lot of Beatles songs on my iPod – doesn’t mean I listen to them all the time.
“I used to think I wanted to be a travel writer. Then I realised I’d probably have to read the travel publications I’d need to pitch.” – Anonymous.
Great, and definitely justified, critique. I don’t think I’d have got past the first paragraph of the article if I hadn’t read your post first!
[...] this excellent post, freelance travel journalist David Whitley – who authors the Grumpy Traveller blog – [...]
there’s nothing worse than a travelogue stuffed with fancy hotels and overall feelings. UGH. i want details – the people you see, the food you find (and where, street? recommendations?), and maybe ONE aspect of the trip. i love this article. BRAVO!!!!
Great post. Look forward to the follow up. I caught the link to the talk by Andrew Mueller last week and it made me go out and buy his book.
Fantastic post, David, thank the gods someone has finally got the bottle (nearly used another word beginning with ‘b’ there) to tell it like it is. I am truly sick,tired and heartily de-motivated by the crap travel sections of British newspapers.
I remember the days (she said, sounding like her old gran used to)when travel sections were exciting places to visit, places that made me laugh and elicited gasps of ‘wow’ as I read; places that inspired me to pack a rucksack and just go.
Now they bore me into turning to the business pages for an interesting read.
Oh, how I hope this debate takes root.
Thank you.
Hi David, Its not just the text, I cant tell you how many times, I see an image with the wrong caption, recently a village over 100kms from Cadiz illustrating Cadiz capital. A dangerous beach with a well known “shelf drop” to illustrate a safe family beach etc.
I´m referring to top names in Travel mags and broadsheets. Cuts in travel depts, mean that the dept hasn´t the time, experience, budget to research and check imagery, let alone the luxury to commission a photographer to shoot imagery, text in hand.
Micro-stock photo sites have made photography very cheap, however its comes with a high price, especially to those of us who are professionals in our field. Those of us who genuinely love travel writing and photography.
David, You are spot on with your points above. I’m a person who travels the world extensively, year in and year out, and I don’t like to read the travel sections of all the major papers in Australia. To be quite honest, they bore the crap out of me. I may quickly flick through the pages, and look for a cheap airfare or deal, but other than that forget it.
I’m coming late to this – another outstanding post, David – but I happened to read ‘Brilliant Beirut’ on Saturday in the paper version of the Independent, coincidentally while sitting on a flight to the Middle East. I had two responses at the time.
One was “This doesn’t belong in the travel section” – it’s a decent enough feature article, well-written, talking to interesting people and giving some flavour of Beirut atmosphere, but it’s got nothing to do with travel writing. Adapt it slightly and it would work better in the motoring section, or employ a bit of crafty editing and shove it into the weekend magazine. Travel it ain’t.
Then it struck me how travel so rarely matches up with travel writing – and how a piece of fluffy nothing like this, allied with a big, eye-catching cover image and the simple cover strap “Brilliant Beirut” will boost Beirut city-break bookings on operators like Cox & Kings or Audley Travel, regardless of the fact that Lawson’s japes bear no relation to how anyone else will experience Lebanon. What he did doesn’t matter; the fact that he did it in Beirut is the key.
A single newspaper article can have a major impact on the tourism receipts of an entire country. Say what you like about new media, but it’s not there yet.
Then I chucked the paper down into the footwell, opened my minipack of Wing Nuts and watched a Ricky Gervais movie. Aspirational travel my ar$e.
Tried to read that Lawson article but got bored about halfway through and skimmed over most of it past the 200quid a bottle nightclub where that cool young hipster and his rich buddies got to hang out. As a mostly aspiring fiction writer myself it holds true that you have to read bad writing sometimes in order to learn how to write better.
I think I agree … most of what I see in newspapers is over-padded waffle, usually ‘thanks for my free holiday’ stuff written by a so-called celebrity.
I particularly remember a 5000-word tome on Egypt written by a well-known actor, which I could have summed up in 1000 or less. And, this guy would be the first to protest if you or I jumped up on a stage, started spouting the Soliloquy from Hamlet and got paid for it.
I haven’t read the specific pieces you are grumbling about but on principle – much as I hate to go against the general trend here, I would say there should be room for two distinct streams of travel writing in the mass media – travel writing and holiday writing. Most of us pros would prefer to do and read travel writing, which is all about colour, flavour, real writing. It’s far more fun and creative. The vast majority of the public want to know about which hotel has a good spa. I am doing a lot of online writing these days and you look back at page hits and Top 10 Golf Resorts outstrips the colour piece by a factor of 10. It may be incredibly frustrating for us, but there needs to be room for both sorts of writing on the pages of a well-edited travel section. Just as there needs to be a selection of articles to suit the pockets and tastes of all target readers. Perhaps we should just separate out a holiday section and a travel section so people know what they are getting.
I made similar complaints to my wife after reading two travel pieces in a magazine published where I live in California: Boring and lacking information useful to those planning a trip to the destinations in question.
Two weeks ago I met one of the travel editors of a prominent magazine to which I’ve subscribed for nearly 40 years which covers the Western U.S. Its travel stories have gone from a longer, informative narrative style, to what we in the U.S. call “chunky bits” — the verbal equivalent of the T.V. news “sound bite” accompanied by photos and graphics scattered about, but of little or no value in trip planning. Both I and the former travel editor for a U.S. newspaper told the magazine editor that we rarely read the travel stories in his magazine anymore.
Unfortunately, here in the States travel writing published in newspapers and magazines is all too often “travel dribble” or “travel drivel.”
Thanks to all for commenting. Glad I’ve managed to kick off a debate.
@michelle – I’d not considered it from the photographer’s point of view, but you’re so right. Getting free images seems to count for far more than getting good, or the right images, and they’ll almost always be picked out by someone who doesn’t know the destination.
@matthew – Yes, it will have almost certainly boosted bookings to Beirut/ Lebanon. But is that the point? You may as well just put in some copy provided by the PR agency.
@melissa – I actually agree with you. The whole ‘real travel’ thing is unbearably snobbish. Two weeks on the Costas might not to be my taste, but it is the choice of many. Just because it’s mainstream doesn’t preclude any of my criticisms. Frankly, I’d sooner have a piece about someone sitting on the beach and doing not much rather than someone trekking through the Guatemalan jungle if the former was more engaging and fun to read.
A good travel section does need a good mix – info, detail, insight, inspiration and entertainment are all key ingredients. I just think most travel sections get the recipe wrong, and skip some ingredients almost entirely.
I’d also argue that the top 10 pieces we complain about too often have their place as well. They’re holiday journalism, yes? Picking out a few good options that people may want to include in their next holiday? Perfectly valid as long as everything isn’t reduced to a top ten and they’re well researched.
As I say, by far my biggest criticism is that most writing in travel sections is just plain dull. It doesn’t matter where it’s about or what sort of traveller/ holidaymaker it’s aimed at – it just needs to be either useful, interesting or entertaining. So many pieces aren’t any of the above, and there’s no excuse for it.
I love this post. I haven’t read the piece in question but I agree with you on many points. To be fair, when I wrote an article for The Guardian on Damascus I was told to avoid any chain hotels and that $100 a night was too luxe for the audience. So that particular criticism may not hold across the board.
I agree on many counts about this particular article and the travel press as a whole. It is the one and only section of the Sunday paper I never read at leisure – it would only wind me up. I force myself to have a flick through on a Monday at work….
However, I would like to take issue with one point concerning the expense of the hotel and the holiday. As a travel company we get mixed repsonses from articles we help organise and get credits for (always experience, rather than hotel based) but our biggest tend to be for expensive hotels.
The other poster is correct – the Guardian have a policy to keep to under $100 per night – though I think they under-estimate the spending power of their readers – particularly online!