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.
A tribute to my friend, the late travel media icon Arthur Frommer
The legendary U.S. travel journalist and entrepreneur Arthur Frommer passed away November 18 at the age of 95. Born in Virginia and with an early boyhood in a small town in Missouri, Arthur was a lawyer who became a pioneering and great travel journalist, and who will be remembered as having helped open the joys of travel to the masses. While serving in the U.S. Army in Europe in the 1950s, he got the travel bug, came out with a travel guide for servicemen, and followed up in 1957 with…
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We've had travellers coming to places asking where are the groovy cafes or restaurants serving late, or just the local bar terraces with a view eg:
http://jack.qguide.com/bar-alto-brisbane-powerhouse.php
Travel blogging is sharing your local secrets with either locals or visitors aswell as telling the world about your trips away :)
I've heard a number of writers mention how markets have dried up, but does all this cyber stuff simply fill out your time versus spending it on marketing? Last week I sold two editors on feature ideas, a third is mulling a query over and I got a publisher interested in a book idea (he replied in less than two hours to my email).
I'm playing devil's advocate here, but are we so obsessed with what's new that it's impacting our income because we (as a group) have given up on our traditional markets? People have talked about how print is dying. It's having a rough go in some countries right now, but is this a shift in society or simply a reflection of these particular economic times? Other industries have cyclical trends. Steel, auto, manufacturing, etc. all have good and bad years. Why should we be surprised when media suffers a downturn? And don't forget that a lot of the supposedly bankrupt media outlets were still making money on their traditional product (their print and broadcast media), but because their new, non-media owners had so saddled them with debt that they couldn't cover that.
I read a piece yesterday on how print advertising spending was up 5% over last year. I've mentioned before how in Canada across the board circulation for newspapers and magazines only dropped 1 - 3%, which is probably just some belt-tightening by households. (Some titles were down more, but if you looked at which ones they were, it was understandable that they would suffer - I'm thinking now of one that focused on entrepreneurship. It's a hard time to be selling that idea.)
One magazine I have contributed to for almost 20 years has re-organized (they'll eventually learn their mistake). And while all the other writers ran away thinking their was no more work here, I simply shifted my focus to another part of the title. I'm still selling to them because I know the readership and their issues. Same amount of money, but less time required because I'm not on the road. But to keep me on the road, I found a new market that will afford me the opportunity to still travel. It's a little less per word, but they're buying multiple articles per issue.
It is interesting for me to see how others are using tweeting and Facebook. I struggle to get my head around how it can work for me and how I could find the time to work it into my day. And I'd probably have to be nice to far too many people to get them to want to read anything I'd tweet. I'm not sure I can do nice on a mass scale.
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