Apart from news and views on media covering tourism, travel, and hospitality, writers, editors, photogs, and bloggers share tips, leads, ideas, news, gripes. PR reps/journos ISO press releases/trips, see also "PR/Marketing." Opinions stated are not necessarily those of Tripatini.
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Comments
I just bought Tripatini member Chelle Koster Walton's iPhone app guide to Florida's Sanibel/Captiva islands for all of $1.99. It's interactive and works beautifully, with pictures, detailed reviews, prices, Google maps, it even tells you how far you are from the beach/store/restaurant/whatever you want to go to.
As I understand it, Chelle published it with Sutro Media's user-friendly online interface, then Sutro makes it available on the App Store and Chelle gets a cut when people buy. For those of us who realize that print media are in trouble and are looking for new revenue streams, this could be an interesting avenue to pursue.
Thoughts?
You end up eating at some good restaurants -- but not quite enough to write a food story. You visit some museums -- but too quickly for you to be able to write an honest evaluation of the museums. You go on one hike (abbreviated, no less) -- but you haven't really done enough to write an outdoors story. And so on. Ergo, no angle and a this-and-that focus that screams "PRESS JUNKET!" to the readers. Moreover, because of the this-and-that nature of the itinerary, there's no story in the story.
Understand, there are good guys here, too. A recent press trip to the Alps was good because it had focus and we did things in depth. A recent individualized trip to Toronto was very good, too, because the media reps asked me a lot of questions and delivered an itinerary that resulted in bona fide stories. Win-win.
But, your comments are spot-on. I remember one press trip where we visited a hotel closed since 1965 (really!) that the CVB hoped we'd write about so they could find somebody to invest in rehabbing and reopening it!
"'Be sure there's an understanding that you're going on this trip with every intention of writing something publishable, but that if nothing interesting happens both of you reserve the right to not publish anything," said Chris Elliott, writer of the syndicated Travel Troubleshooter column, which appears in more than 50 U.S. newspapers and Web sites.
Pat Washburn, a freelance journalist for publications including The Boston Globe and MaineToday.com, suggests first considering whether you are interested in writing about the subject, your readers are interested in reading about it, and if there is anything about the trip that sends a bad signal. For instance, if you're asked to commit to a certain number of published stories, or to sign anything preventing you from exploring certain aspects of the destination, you should immediately decline the offer."
We all need a hook or angle worth writing about, and especially these days, with fewer pages to work with, editors can be cagier than usual. So unless I have an ironclad assignment, I evaluate the likelihood of a trip producing information that will actually result in a story, and try to probe and research it beforehand, but it can be difficult sometimes these trips are just dog-and-pony shows that don't cover anything new or that have crazy stuff on the itinerary. I remember one trip where two days were wasted on attractions of interest only to locals, while totally ignoring one of the great colonial quarters of the Western Hemisphere. How nuts is that? I had to extend for an extra day in order to cover that colonial quarter -- which made up the core of the two pieces that resulted from the trip. Was it bad planning or political considerations? I'll never know.
Anyway, check out the Media Bistro item, and it would be interesting to hear everybody's thoughts on it.
http://www.mediabistro.com/articles/cache/a10751.asp?c=mbennf
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