Within 24 hours, I’ve had my dreams of being a successful magazine journalist shattered.
It’s nothing to do with efficacy; I believe I’ll get there in the end. It’s just the realization of what I’ll have to do to get there.
Now before you say that I’m much too old, too chunky (I refuse to call myself fat) and too dull to sleep my way to the top, that isn’t exactly what I mean.
This dissonance began with a visiting speaker at Uclan on Wednesday. Alumni of the university, Rob Crossan is now a successful freelancer specializing in travel writing. He had four years at Front magazine but managed to wean himself off “lads mags” and regularly gets features in the broadsheets.
Sounds great – if he can do it then so can I. Then what’s the problem?
The problem is that to be a travel writer you have to sell your soul to the devil. It works like this:
You come up with an idea for a story, which is finding a “peg” to visit some exotic location where you fancy a holiday; anywhere, really, other than Scotland or Wales. You then think of a really clever angle – or better still, six or seven clever angles so that you can sell your feature to six or seven different publications. Nothing wrong so far, is there?
Next, you get a commissioning editor to say: “Great – that would sit really well in our travel section!” You will, of course, somehow have to put those words into his mouth.
So off you go to that exotic location to research and write your commissioned piece at the publication’s expense? Wrong.
Very, very few publications will consider paying your expenses. Ever. Not even your bus fare home from their offices.
And your piece, brilliant though it may be, will earn you anywhere from £130 (e.g. TNT magazine) to £750 (e.g. The Times or Telegraph) so that’s not going to cover a fortnight in Cape Town.
To fund your trip, you will have to beg. You will have to go cap in hand to airlines, travel PR companies, tourist boards and blag the bits and pieces that will make your trip feasible without causing insolvency.
And in return for that, the airlines, resorts, restaurants, tourist guides, theme parks and anyone else who opens their doors to you free of charge, will expect you to write something about them; something nice about them.
The simplest way to do this is to add them to the “how to get there” footnote part of your piece. That’s works well for airlines, as it draws attention to a destination that travellers may not know about, and may open up a new market for them.
However, the problem is that if you say in your piece that the destination was awful and really no one should go there in a fair, objective and balanced manner, no one will buy a seat on the plane bound for your destination.
Furthermore, you
will seriously piss off the PR people, the country or region’s tourist board and anyone who felt the fallout of your wholly unbiased feature.
Let TripAdvisor do that, if you want to be a successful travel journalist – and by that I mean one who gets to go places at other people’s expense – you have to write what us referred to in the trade as a “snow job”. That is, to say how wonderful everything was and why everyone should spend their lives’ savings to go there.
So that’s travel writing out, then – I just can’t do that. I actually like to find things that are rubbish and write about them. If I have a meal in a restaurant that is inedible and they service is dreadful, I cannot bring myself to praise it.
Well that’s part one of my disillusionment.
Now, for no better reason than I have to put it somewhere, I’m going to add a video clip of me grumpily reading some news.
I have to do this for the Digital Content part of my MA so it might as well go here as anywhere.
Please ignore the fact that it has absolutely no relevance to this blog and enjoy it for what it is – a very amateurish piece of multi-media.
Part two of my disillusionment tale will be coming right up. Enjoy.
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