Starting from common sense: isn’t there lots of people who would love to be a travel writer? To be able to go from one place to the other, and being paid for this, is something truly enviable. Unfortunately, things sometimes are not so simple or pretty. Every time I read the phorum or blogs that gather travel writers or journalists -particularly freelance in english language media- I find an aboundance of complaints. That the payment is low; that there’s more marketing and less journalism; that the good times are gone… Any journalist knows that his job is quite conditioned by advertising, the incomes of the media and the attractiveness of the section you work in. And apparently, the media’s travel sections are more read by advertisers and actors of the tourism sector than by ordinary readers. Which would explain, partially, why the “media readers” choose the Internet to inform themselves about destinations. The reason: they can talk directely to other travelers and tourists without necessarily having to undergo the media’s filters and the travel companies’ marketing areas.

Let’s return to travel writers. Some days ago, The New York Times published an interesting article about the problems of being a travel guides writer. The core issue: this is work, not a leisure travel. So, everything you do when you travel in such conditions is… move around the places that will be useful to develop a travel guide that’s helpful to other travelers. That’s not what we see as usual in a travel, where we rather assume we’re relaxed and move from on place to the other without hurry or problems.

Do we move without hurry and carelessly around the city? I’m afraid this form of tourism we have incorporated as “what we do when we travel”, is quite far from many real travel practices. More likely, when we arrive to a city, we usually have so little time, we move frenetically around in order to see everything our guide has marked down as “must sees”. And it’s not only during the day, at night we also have to go out, take pictures, walk around, check out the “local environment”. At the end, when we return from our vacations, we’re more exhausted than when we left. Although, of course, strangely happy.

Could it be that, in fact, practices generally associated to travel writers are increasingly becoming part of our routines as travelers? When we travel, we produce more things in order to publish them in the Internet: pictures, travel notes, videos, etc. I know many of these supports were already common to travelers, taking notes is a travel tradition of many centuries; and taking photos, of many decades. But there’s a more clear idea of producing “private” and “public” versions of our travels, something common for a tourism journalist, but not so much for the rest of us. Of course, these “public” versions of our trips are possible thanks to new forms of Internet publications, such as blogs, phorums, etc.

Will we end up as travel writers, but without working in a traditional media?

And what about the problems of travel writers, finally? Better read the New York Times note (you’ll need to register in the site, for free, first)

The New York Times article was originally seen at Travel Writers.

For a long time, we’ve been used to a one direction type of information. The media presented articles, we read them and, at most, we could send a letter if we had any question. Interaction didn’t go beyond that. But in blogs, which usually allow comments, the situation is quite different.

Let’s take a note about some european destination, for example. The journalist made some previous research, travelled, told what he’d seen, and period. How he got there, is not part of the note; that is, certain production conditions were erased from the final text. If he’d gone there as part of his vacations, or if he was invited by some country’s tourism office or travel agency, that’s something we don’t see printed. In a way, that became part of the backstage, part of the note’s making of process readers didn’t have to know about.

With the arrival of blogs and comments spaces, these things have begun to change. If I wrote some entries dedicated to some european destination -hopefully soon, let me dream a little- good part of my reader’s questions would be, precisely, about that backstage. How much did the ticket cost, how did I find out, what guides and Internet sites I consulted, how to prepare for the trip, how much for the lodging, where did I stay…

If my answer was “I was invited by a travel agency, and I spent my time from tour to tour, all paid, and I have no clue about how much these things cost” -since, of course, I didn’t have to pay for them or even care about organising my trip- my experience of the place will lose sense for my readers.

Since I didn’t have to plan the trip as any other person has to, I’ll be unable to answer most of the commentators questions.

And here’s an interesting distance between graphic journalism, which doesn’t allow direct interaction with readers, and blogs which allow comments. The travel experience of the travel journalist who has someone else plan the trip for him, is not too interesting for the reader who wants to know more information to plan his own trip. And this is part of the process we’ll all have to learn: we are not able to provide answers to all questions, and without our readers help we wouldn’t be able to handle everything.

In the future, the most interesting travel stories will be those produced by our equals, other Net users. Like it or not, journalists and the tourism industry will have to get used to it. Because the travel experience is not only about experiencing the place; planning the trip itself is part of our questions and doubts.

One of the worst features of the mediocre travel journalism made in Argentina is the absence of the native’s voice, the one of the inhabitant of the destination covered by the note. Usually, we find descriptions such as imposing landscape”, but we barely find a contextualization of the history of the place and how do people live there. And it’s not casual.

We know traditional tourism, the one of tours and hotels reserved beforehand, is known for having an almost null contact with any natives outside from the touristic circuit. What they usually see is hotel staff, waiters, cleaning people, but many times no more than that. While some travellers usually care about having contact with a native when getting information about the place, this is not as common as we’d like.

AS long as most of the notes about destinations that show up at the newspapers and magazines in this part of the world usually start from invitations made by tourism operators or government agencies -that pay for the travel and stay of the journalists- what we have many times is the typical story of a tourist. Without much contact with natives, and with their time occupied with tours and circuits, and with a stay at an excellent hotel, finally the information is rather poor, impressionist and bottom-line useless.

I don’t think anyone has a problem with journalists travelling, mostly if we consider the fact that low wages of this profession would barely allow them to travel much. But what we can demand, as readers, is that they do their job. That is, that they develop the task of a journalist, that the collect information, contextualize the situation of the destination, approaching us to the word of the native. Because to write a typical tourist story, there’s the readers, right?

The World Tourism Organisation issued today a communicate about the european regional conference of Communication about Tourism. The debate topic was how to accomplish to get this area to stop losing tourists to asian destinations. But there was a paragraph of the communicate that grabbed my attention (I’ll cite it textually, without changing any punctuation marks):

Answering questions from delegates who argued that some, mainly western media try to impose unethical methods of promoting their destinations, Richard Baerug, marketing director of the Riga Convention Bureau said that “Companies and destinations should only deal with media that make a clear border line between advertising and journalism

I wonder: what are unethical methods? what to they pretend? that they invite them everywhere and provide them money to publish notes that in fact have only a commercial and not an informative interest? There’s a lot of that, at least in this part of the world, the south side. Anyways, I can’t disagree that it’s necessary, once and for all, to have the informative content of tourism notes clearly separated from advertisement. Otherwise, we’ll still be reading very few interesting articles and many ad-notes.

Why are newspaper’s tourism supplements usually so bad? why do they praise that much to the destinations they visit? (with few excemptions) There are some reasons to undestand this topic.

Almost all of the trips tourism supplements journalists make abroad, at least in Latin America, are made thanks to the invitations of state organizations or private companies that want media to cover a specific destination. With the invitation they make it to the agenda of the publication and usually get a very favorable critic.

No one bites the hand of the one that feed him, people say. Of course, the editor can dare to publish something not so benevolent; in this case, there will be phone calls from embassies and companies asking questions for such a problem. For the media, by the way, it’s a way of having more notes, with a lower cost.

But, as you can see, the quality of the information delivered to reader is far from impartial. Whoever reads the information -although as I asked myself other times, I wonder how many people read tourism supplements with interest- is not assuming that the note responds to commercial criteria rather than the periodistic norms that rule other sections of the paper.

By the way, this topic of paid trips not only applies to tourism. It can also be seen at other sections, where trips to cover the events are usually paid by companies.

Can this all be changed? Is it possible for latin american journalists to recover control of the agenda of periodistic supplements? Unlikely. It’s necessary to count on sufficient funds to finance trips and covertures. And that only comes out of publicity. So, in the long run, the commercial department ends up taking control of the supplement’s agenda, again.

Anyways, we are going to have tourism supplements for a long time, among other things because they usually have many paid advertisements. Although, if we follow this path, shortly all tourism supplements will start carrying a headnote that states “advertising space”.

In the imaginary of journalism -at least in well done journalism- there’s always the idea that one doesn’t have to innocently believe in what the other says. That facts have to be contrasted. Checked with other sources. Things others tell us respond to their own interests, and as journalists, our interests are: we care about finding the truth, showing what’s attractive, even when interviewed people don’t like it. It’s our note, not theirs.

Now, well, in this note published by the newspaper Clarin, in their travel supplement, the journalist does the exact opposite: she assumes as her own the whole imaginary of San Antonio de Areco, which tries to sell itself as some sort of origin of “authentic creolism”. Along the note, all the common places on Don Segundo Sombra -one of the main works on argentinean gauchesque- are repeated, thus reinforcing the imaginary that’s being tried to be sold to us, through markenting. As journalists, can we quietly accept that our note matches the same arguments that would sell in a touristic brochure? Obviously, not.

As journalists, weren’t we supposed to always question what we were told? It looks like travel supplements in Argentina follow the same path: too much publicity disguised as notes, but zero journalism. Is the same thing happening in the rest of Latin America? I guess I should start reading other newspapers online.

In a previous entry in my blog in spanish, I commented on a note of the travel supplement by argentinean newspaper Clarin about Potrero Funes, a locality of San Luis. The text is a praise to the location and one wonders where is the famous impartial position of the media. Now, I was browsing the Tourism supplement of the newspaper La Nacion, where a series of notes of -again, what are the chances?- San Luis were published.

The note is already titled as a gazette: “San Luis: defying the limits of the unknown” (in spanish only). Then, the note is a long series of praises, where there’s not even a trace of negativity. Journalism, it doesn’t look like it: there are no contrasting data, no sources cited, no features that distinguish this article from a press gazette.

In my other blog in spanish, I usually complain about how album reviews made by rock magazines never state a single bad launching. The same thing happens to me with tourism supplements: I never find an impartial evaluation of the destinations: there are no negative details or these are placed in the last paragraph. I understand that usually journalist that visit these locations are invited by the province’s tourism offices, or even by travel agencies and are conditioned many times by commercial agreements that the media where they work at have made. But it doesn’t sound very honest to seel this as “journalism”, it’s more a marketing or advertising space. I wonder if anyone might take seriously the recommendations of these newspaper’s travel supplements.

I also wonder if it wouldn’t be ethical to reveal to the readers who financed the journalist’s trip. I think it would be importat, to know from which perspective to read this kind of notes.

In the same marketing style, you can find notes here and here. In the case of the last cited note, that belongs to the newspaper Clarin, the first phrase seems directly dictated by a press agency: “the geography of Chaco is a fountain of life that doesn’t rest”. A remarkable revelation, considering that Chaco is one of the poorest provinces in Argentina, where between 1990 and 2001 24 out of every thousand newborn babies died, outnumbered only by Formosa and Tucuman provinces. This last information is provided by the INDEC, the Institute of Statistics and Census in Argentina. More information can be found here, in Excel format.