An increasing number of professional writers are lamenting the rapid decline in the quality of travel articles in the newspapers. Celebrity junkets, brazen advertorials and articles that might well have been researched and written via Wikipedia are all cited as part of this drop in standards.
In his hard-hitting post yesterday (What is wrong with travel writing) David Whitley bemoaned the awful quality of travel magazine and newspaper articles, using a recent article to highlight six areas where travel writing has lost its way. David’s article itself is well worth a read, as is the lively debate in the comments that follow.
I cannot match David’s insight into the world of travel journalism, and the topics on which I typically write are so far removed from any place where a celebrity or their PR might be interested. Yet even merely as an avid traveller with a strong interest in all forms of travel literature, this demise in the recognition of professional travel writing is sad to observe. Are those pages where a travel writer once aspired to seeing their name appear in print really now becoming an irrelevance? And if so, then who is to blame, if indeed there is blame to be attached?
The reasons are well documented – lower budgets, less willingness to engage professional writers, the willingness of a cash strapped ex-celeb to travel for free in return for their name in lights.
I guess my instinctive observation is to wonder whether the pattern in travel writing is actually any different from that in other publicly consumed professions. Or is there a general decline in the public demand for quality that means that those who aspire to excel at their craft (writers and others) will increasingly be pushed to the margins, admired by their peers and often shunned by the masses?
One look at the TV schedules should give us a clue. Aspiring talented musicians who slave away at improving their skills and seeking that break watch on as someone with a fraction of their prowess grabs instant fame and opportunity via some reality ‘talent’ show.
Who do we want to see dancing the tango on a Saturday night? No, it’s not some world-class professional Latin dancers. It’s washed-out newsreaders, sportsmen and soap stars; we choose to watch mediocrity or worse as long as we recognise the face that delivers it.
So why should we be so surprised that an ex-Corrie actress is chosen to write about a holiday in Barbados, or a old member of a long forgotten boy band about a diving trip in the Red Sea? The public has shown time and time again that there is an overwhelming preference for frivolous nonsense packaged up with a famous face, over the less glamorous but more skilled output of a professional at the top of their craft.
Is this parallel a fair one, or am I being unkind to the newspaper editors (or even to the general public?) I would be interested to hear others’ thoughts.
Andy,
It’s odd that quality should decline, especially since more people are now contributing to online content. If anything, I would expect this constant influx of new blood to drive quality upwards.
The general move toward multi-media perhaps overpassed the need to write well, which, as we know, is difficult.
Producers of content now need to be multi-skilled: Words, graphics, images, SEO awareness – the travel bag of skills has become a duffle bag…
So, on one side, the art of writing is perhaps taking longer to craft as new writers are needing to master so many more skills. On the other, publishers are forced into taking cheaper options as their ad revenues falter.
Ultimately, as editors we have to set the standard. There’s no need to dumb-down information either – just make it understandable.
As for the future we are, sadly, playing second fiddle to the market.
And as for celebrity culture, you should watch ‘Wedding House’. Two former Big Brother contestants just had their dream wedding arranged on the show; it featured celebrity ‘lookalikes’ as guests, with the pair radiant from their latest plastic surgery session.
They got their celebrity wedding in the end and joined travel writing budgets to spend the rest of their days under the knife…
I was bombarded by a spate of Facebook wall postings by a particular boutique hotel in Singapore who managed to get itself into several local lifestyle magazines.
Unfortunately it has fallen for the advertising jargon of ‘mindshare’ and ‘eyeballs’ and had tried to get itself in every trendy magazine it could get its hands on.
But it said nothing about the hotel or the service it rendered and if looks were everything, we wouldn’t have so many people complain about 5 star hotels.
But when you have an advertorial disguising itself as a travel article and the lines are blurred between what is a paid article on a certain country and a genuine insight into a travel location, one does need to take more than just a gulp of salt to discern fact from fiction.
I think the real problem is that people don’t know what is good or bad. They have to be told. A celebrity traveler makes readers think it is good. Television laugh tracks cue people when to laugh because they wouldn’t know otherwise.
There was a famous story of a world class violinist (Joshua Bell) who played in a subway station in Washington D.C. He had a $3.5 million dollar violin and kept a security guard in hiding nearby to protect the instrument. In the political capital of the U.S. with all the power brokers and cultural elite, only a handful of people stopped to pay attention to the amazing talent. Most didn’t even acknowledge him. He played for 43 minutes and only managed to busk $32.
Without the context of a theater and traditional show people didn’t know it was good. I think the opposite is also true. If you dress up mediocre talent enough and make it look professional than normal people will think it is great. That is the problem with travel writing, television and all popular culture. Put a $100 price tag on a $20 bottle of wine and people will be revelling in its amazing characteristics.
Mark, a well crafted final line if ever I’ve seen one. You make a good point about the opposing forces of needing to upskill oneself to stay in touch with our peers on the one hand and the need for editors to control (slash) costs for getting their content. Let’s see how the future pans out – something will need to change.
Michael, agree with you about eyeballs being the metric that so many now chase. Get the followers, get the ‘likes’ and you’re a success – even if you’ve achieved that through spamming methods rather than quality content.
Thanks guys for the great contributions.
The last time I checked, the no.1 writer on revenue sharing travel site Simonseeks was Cliff Richard. I think that says it all. At the same time, we are constantly being told that we need to embrace video blogging to be taken seriously, as if the omnipresence of moving images in our culture somehow negates the written word. This mens that people who are confident expressing themselves with text have to adapt become ‘engaging personalities.’ Those who embrace that (or can do it naturally) are probably the ones with the best chance of competing with ghostwritten sleb writers/presenters.
Even before the surge of travel information on line there was bad travel writing. Blaming this phenomenon on the Wiki is a little short sighted. I’d say it has more to do with low budgets or even no budgets to pay travel writers. There is some truth in the saying “you get what you pay for”.
Yes, there has always been bad travel writing, bad writing of all kinds, but even if it got past professional editors, the public had to put out money to read it, so the bad tended to sink to the bottom rather quickly. It’s become too easy for people to grab onto the bad for little or nothing and ride it for a quick feeling of being pals with whatever celeb, and never mind what the piece says or how badly it’s said. To me, good writing is a courtesy, and bad writing says “I think you’re too stupid to know the difference.” Am I the only one who resents this? I don’t believe people have to be taught what’s good, but they do need to be taught that, yes, the difference is important. Now I’m blithely told that spelling and grammar no longer matter, unless the spell-check happens to catch it. (I can’t remember the last time I bought a book by a big-time author that didn’t have a misspelled word.) My friends sneer at me for keeping a dictionary next to my laptop. Yes, there have always been people who preferred to feel every experience (in every media) without having to think about it, but until now they didn’t have control of the industry. I grew up believing that being an ‘author’ was a wonderful height to attain, truly a dream to wish for, and that to earn such a height was something to be proud of throughout your life. The first time I entered “writer” on my passport application under ‘occupation’, I cried. What does it mean now? A large Twitter number? A busy blog-site? Now any self-appointed ‘writer’ can be ‘published’, and we are told that without a ‘presence’ online you cannot possibly have what it takes. Publishers and websites are forcing us to spend time sloughing through an appalling pile of crap to find the diamonds. Small wonder most people don’t think it’s important enough to bother. By the way, Andy, I’m so happy to have found your diamonds!
Genie, you’re opening a whole new topic here. The lack of interest in grammar in written (even edited) work is sad to see. A trend that will continue though, so we’d better get used to it.
Meanwhile, I’ll have to look up Cliff Richard’s masterpiece on Simon Seeks!
Looked up Richard’s blog post. It was rather hard to find, so I don’t see that he was the no. 1 writer at that site. And it was pretty bland, but readable. Obviously he’s a celeb, not a writer, but if you take that into account, a lot of slack can be given. Forgive me — my rants are about the ones who fancy themselves on a par with, say, Augusten Burroughs or Peter Mathiesson, because they can hand you their ‘published’ work. They can’t spell or construct a readable sentence, but the worst is, they don’t think that it matters. Heaven knows, and I know, that the history of grammar and spelling is one of constant flux (especially in English and hurrah for growth and flexibility). It’s the indifference to quality that makes me fear for the future.
To my dismay, after over 25 years of successful travel writing, I now find that I am expected to change my style and write a blog type story. I’ve noticed a lot of these stories published around the web and although some of them are well written, a lot are sloppy writing and not well crafted or thought out stories. I guess when I teach my new classes in travel writing next year I will make more emphasis on blog writing. But I think this writing still needs to be crafted properly. (Too many “I’s” in a story is often the case, I’ve noted). Recently I was in a workshop with a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist speaking about using narrative in non-fiction stories (which I try to do), but I have been informed using narrative in an on-line blog-type story isn’t okay. Who’s right about this? The other thing is, getting paid $5- $15 for a story a writer used to get a minimum of $100 for has definitely cut the quality of writing. A sign of the times I guess. People are too fixated on their iphones and reading stuff off the computer. A sad demise for print publications and good writing.
I’d say writing is no different than any other art. Truly original, creative work costs money, but you can buy posters to hang over your couch at Ikea. Framed, even.
I’m an optimist, I think the people want beautiful things, but economics get in the way. Making art is the domain of the wealthy or the crazy, those who can afford to be artists or can’t help themselves. As a product, we want the stuff by those that can’t help themselves, but we’re just not willing to pick up the tab for that.
On the cynical side, we may have undereducated ourselves to the point where we can’t tell cheap knock off from the genuine article, so hey, Ikea art is really just fine.
There might be more of the cheap stuff because it’s a commodity, but the good stuff, I think there’s as much of it, it’s just harder to find in the noise.
Travel IS tricky, though, because when the provider is paying the bill, they try to call the shots and it takes a lot of nerve to bite the hand that’s feeding you. This DOES beg the question of why you’re writing travel. If you’re writing travel to get to travel, well, you’re on shaky ground. If you’re writing travel because you can’t help it (see above), you’ll probably write the truth, PR be damned, and travel anyway.
I can’t remember who said this but it was a fine quote about the problem with travel writing — Spud Hilton maybe? Something like, “Less writing by travelers and more traveling by writers, please.” Indeed.
Very well put. I enjoyed reading your comment about ‘a sad demise’. I hope good writing will always be available, but like honor and integrity, when people stop valuing it, it tends to withdraw, discouraged.