Category — Media

It sounds a bit cavalier, I know, but I just turned down a free phone. RRP around £450. The timing was perfect: I’m about to buy a new handset, having got frustrated with my old Nexus One and thoroughly fed up with my iPhone.

There were strings, of course. But they didn’t insist I write a glowing review anywhere. They didn’t even oblige me to write a blog post or two. In fact, they didn’t ask me to generate any content at all, as far as I could tell from the T&Cs. However, they did insist that my name and face be available to them for future “publicity purposes”. Not with an endorsement appended, obviously, but still. I value my impartiality and independence, and a reputation for taking ethics seriously. Lending my name (even trivially) crosses a line. [Read more →]

There’s a short interview with me in this week’s annual Bookseller travel supplement. It’s part of an interesting piece about how the move to digital has “changed things” for travel publishers, and what (if anything) this means for print. Quite rightly, I think, the conclusion is: The printed guidebook ain’t dead yet, and indeed is still seeing some clever innovation.

I won’t lift directly from the piece, as it’s not online, so pasted below are transcripts of the answers I gave to the interview questions. My meanderings were (quite rightly) truncated for the final feature; even I had to trim some of the waffle, in retrospect, to reproduce these below. So…

Are travel writers being given different briefs, and has the type of content that publishers want changed?

Yes and no. Certainly, we’re now clear from the minute we put keystroke to page that the content we’re producing has to work in a variety of formats. Given the wide range of the Frommer’s offering, for example, that might include appearing in an app, as lead destination information on Frommers.com, or as an e-book… as well as its traditional home in the pages of a guidebook. However, the basic demand for well-crafted, timely, accurate, and informative content hasn’t changed one bit. In fact, given the poor signal-to-noise ratio of travel information on the Web, those traditional qualities demanded by a leading guide publisher are even more important. Writers and publishers who want to make a profitable living in the era of mass “free” content have to be 100% committed to quality in order to survive. Sometimes, that means a 2-hour round-trip to check the accuracy of a couple of sentences of text.

Is the commissioning process changing? Is there less work available?

The commissioning process is changing in the sense that it’s now possible to bypass it altogether. There’s more work than ever before for entrepreneurial writers, and some out there are doing a fine job of producing quality content from outside the traditional publishing industry. I write for Frommer’s, in the traditional, contracted way, and have written and commissioned iPhone travel apps for InstantCities.com in a looser way, taking a share of the profits. Both work for me. Far more than the details of the commissioning process, however, it’s the role of the editor that’s key. The editorial process is what makes the quality difference, and I’m always grateful to the people that edit my work at Frommer’s, the Sunday Telegraph, and elsewhere. The carefully crafted edit, as much as the research and writing, is one of the key factors making content worth paying for.

What are the key changes as a result of the digital shift?

The explosion of digital is probably the biggest revolution in publishing since Gutenberg. It’s an exciting time to be a travel writer, for sure. However, the proliferation of “publishers” hasn’t eroded the value in writing for a leading outlet, a name that comes with its own reputation. It’s no longer the only way to get your writing heard, of course, but it’s still the best. The exponential growth of the “travel Web” has also tweaked the nature of our job. We’re as much “curators of the best things” as “discoverers of new things” these days. Digital offers one set of tools for curating information, certainly, but print isn’t standing still either, and print design is becoming hugely important for leading readers around guidebooks. Some of the forthcoming redesigns I’ve seen from Frommer’s for 2011 are mighty impressive.

[Disc.: I mention Frommer's and the Sunday Telegraph, obviously, because I write for them. Other publishers, newspapers, and travel websites are available.]

Can we rely on travel information we find on the Internet? An exchange on Twitter with entrepreneur and world travelling phenomenon Gary Arndt set me thinking.

@hackneye (me): Being right more of the time is what guidebooks do better than the Web. It therefore makes me sad to see one with horrendous errors.
@EverywhereTrip (Gary): I’d disagree that they get things right more than the web. They are always 1-4 years out of date given the publication cycle.

@hackneye: Yes, they can be, and sometimes that’s important. But they also tend to be researched and fact-checked more carefully.
@EverywhereTrip: So long as the public can edit the info, errors can be corrected quickly online. 1,000′s of people checking instead of 1.

@hackneye: I agree. But the public don’t correct most of the travel content on the Web. Hence the variable quality.
@EverywhereTrip: What is an example of this? Most pages have comments, or at least a way to contact the owner.

@hackneye: An example of what? An uncorrected error on a travel site? Just Google your hometown and dig around.
@EverywhereTrip: That’s the thing. I don’t see much incorrect information. People always give theoretical examples, never concrete ones.

@hackneye: Chelsea’s football ground is the site of a battle that took place 200 miles away: http://bit.ly/agSoZN… Michelangelo’s David is in the Uffizi: http://bit.ly/aq8Vfn [it isn't]. 2 quick searches, 2 highly ranked sites.

@EverywhereTrip: So leave a comment correcting the information problem solved.
@hackneye: I admire your idealism. It’s a fine quality. But I suspect ‘correcting the Internet’ is too big a job.

@EverywhereTrip: The internet is a work in progress. If you see an error, correct it. Everyone does a little bit and it adds up…

And so it continued, with a 140-character limit becoming increasingly unsatisfactory for expressing quite complex ideas. [Read more →]

One of the (many) things I find genuinely useful about Twitter is the ability to get an instant answer or opinion on just about anything. Like this:

Wondering: in the medium term, which is worth more to a tourism business: 1. Nice mention in a guidebook. 2. Nice mention in a paper. Ideas? [@hackneye]

I  didn’t really have a motive for asking this, other than genuine, theoretical curiosity. It strikes me that many PR companies put a lot of effort into courting periodical, weekly and daily media, and a whole lot less time on guidebook writers. Maybe PRs know something that isn’t immediately apparent to me. [Read more →]

Last November I wrote a piece outlining the worrying implications of the BBC’s acquisition of Lonely Planet for the Corporation’s non-commercial UK neutrality. I’m not the only travel journalist with these sorts of doubts. The BBC Royal Charter and Agreement, remember, is very clear on how the Beeb can and cannot interact with the UK media market:

The Agreement requires all commercial activities undertaken by the BBC to comply with four criteria. …

4. comply with BBC fair trading guidelines and in particular avoid distorting the market.

Of course, that begs a whole series of questions, but this much is plain: BBC Worldwide activities that distort a domestic market in which the corporation is a player are forbidden. This, essentially, was the basis for the decision to disallow BBC investment in ultra-local video last year. It’s the reason that the BBC’s acquisition (through BBC Worldwide) of Lonely Planet should be reversed at the first opportunity. [Read more →]

It was announced this week that my second guidebook, co-written with Stephen Keeling, has been judged Best Guidebook 2008 at the ENIT Travel Writing Awards. Obviously, we’re chuffed to bits to have impressed the panel of Italian tourism experts, and to have beaten so many other fantastic new guidebooks. The new goal is for my next book, due out next year, to win the 2009 prize.

There’s more on the announcement here:

The winning Frommer’s title written by authors Donald Strachan and Stephen Keeling was singled out for the quality of its research, writing and opening up a new area in Italian tourism.

It’s a commonplace on this site that one should “defend” the BBC from unceasing, unsubtle and rather tiresome attacks from trenchant right-wingers. Very little written about the organization by either the Daily Mail, or any of its apers on the Web, has any merit. That’s true. The Beeb is worth defending: there’s something enriching about our ad-free broadcaster. Something that serves the public, that stands above the commercial white noise of modern television. Of course, the organization isn’t entirely non-commercial: BBC Worldwide makes decent profits that, at least nominally, feed back into UK public service broadcasting. So far, so uncontroversial. However, BBC Worldwide’s 2007 acquisition of travel guidebook publisher Lonely Planet did raise objections, [Read more →]

So, who wants to hear a joke?

Q: What’s the difference between libertarianism and anarchism?

A: Under anarchism, the poor people get to shoot back.

Boom, boom. I guess that’s more a caricature than a joke, as such. Anyway, I’m not here for the standup. What I want to address is the arts, partly by way of reply to Chris’s post here last week, specifically the estimable libertarian objection to arts funding. In libertopia, arts funding is for private individuals. “There is no such thing as society” (some of them really write stuff like that, non-ironically), so spending on the collective is wasted. Immoral. Theft. In any case, the Dead Hand of the State (10,300 Google hits for a phrase I’ve never heard anyone actually speak) can only have a pernicious impact on private interaction, and what could be more private than art?

Let’s look at some evidence. [Read more →]