The ethics of taking freebies | Travel jobs | New webinar
Warning: we're opening a can of worms here 🪱
New webinar! Working smarter with PRs — 18 April
Thanks to Meera at Travel Writing Webinars, we’ve got a brand new webinar to share for April, this time all about how we can work better with PRs. Shout out to Adventure Travel Networking who have sponsored this webinar, too.
With a panel of top-rate PRs and Meera’s smooth steering of the conversation, this is your opportunity to find out the best ways to get press trip invitations, ensure your fact boxes come in on time, and get more from your PR relationships. The panellists are:
Fiona Anderson is a Company Director at specialist travel and lifestyle PR agency GEC PR. Fiona has enjoyed a 25-year PR career, and her travel client experience includes premium tourism brands Aitken Spence Hotels, Conrad, Kimpton and Hilton Hotels.
Kasper Iversen is PR & Press Manager at VisitDenmark UK, the official Danish tourism board. Born and raised in Denmark, he graduated as a journalist from the Danish School of Media & Journalism and The University of Hong Kong. In Copenhagen, he worked for DR (Danish Broadcasting Corporation) and for Politiken, the largest newspaper in Denmark, including two years as an in-house travel writer.
Sophie Morgan is a Partner at Finn Partners, and has represented global luxury brands at agencies in London and Sydney; she currently represents Tuscany Tourism, Italian Government Tourist Board, Visit Jersey, Baros and Milaidhoo Maldives, Silversea and Savoy Signature at Finn Partners.
Meera Dattani (host) is a freelance travel and culture journalist, senior editor at Adventure.com and founder of Travel Writing Webinars, with bylines in Wanderlust, Evening Standard, BBC Travel and others.
The ethics of freebies: can we still be editorially independent?
Somewhat pertinently after last month’s series on paying your own way, I’m writing this very newsletter from my caravan while parked up in a campsite I’ve paid for myself. I spent the afternoon hiking in an area where I stumped up the entry fee to get access to the trails. And tomorrow, I’m going to pay for a wine tasting and I’ll buy my own lunch, too. Now, some would say that doing all this spending will mean one key thing: editorial independence. I, on the other hand, reckon that’s tosh.
Not that my third dog travel book won’t be editorially independent; of course it will. But not because I paid my way while doing the research. It will be editorially independent because I’m a trained journalist and I’m capable of critical thinking — and I don’t bow to PR pressure.
If you’ve been a subscriber to this newsletter for a while now, you’ll know we’ve written about the New York Times’ insistence that their freelancers never — never — take a comped trip, even for another publication. This, they say, is so that their journalism can remain editorially independent. Just last week, in our final newsletter of the month, editor of Which? Travel, Rory Boland, wrote:
…we pay our freelancers’ travel expenses. The vast majority of what we say in the magazine is positive; destination recommendations and profiles of the best companies to book with, but when we do find that destination that disappoints or a hotel that has underdelivered we can say so. Journalists must be able to express their opinions freely.
Now, I love that Which? Travel pays writers’ expenses — it’s a smart move, as Which? is known nationwide as a publisher that scrutinises in all of its verticals (I love reading how they test appliances and cars in the main mag). There’s nothing like anonymity as a journalist to help you get a little more insight: if people don’t know who you are, they won’t be worried about what’s getting published, after all.
But I will refute the idea that only writers who pay their own way can be editorially independent and express their opinions freely, as Rory says. I, for one, have never written a disingenuous sentence in my entire career. I’ve never given airtime to a hotel or tour op or destination that didn’t deserve it. And I’ve never written a glowing review when my experience was anything but positive.
When I was web editor at Rough Guides, we had a policy: we were allowed to take comped trips, but we always made it clear that coverage, positive or not, was never absolutely guaranteed. If something went seriously awry, we couldn’t commit to recommending a place or operator to our readers. And if something wasn’t totally up to scratch, we reserved the right to explain that in our articles. Rough Guides’ books, after all, were known for their occasionally cutting and somewhat judgemental remarks about particular destinations or attractions.
(I fondly remember trekking all the way out to a waterfall in northern Kenya because my friend’s Lonely Planet recommended it; we were utterly underwhelmed and found the nearby town a little sketchy, which is almost exactly how my Rough Guide, which had remained in my backpack all day, described it. “Don’t bother,” was the advice from author Richard Trillo.)
Integrity is what it’s all about, and I don’t believe that taking a comped trip does particularly impact my journalistic integrity. Of course, I might get a different experience to other guests in a hotel or on a cruise or at a restaurant when I’m travelling on someone else’s dime. I regularly arrive at hotels to review for The Telegraph to a gaggle of senior staff members clamouring to shake my hand and tell me they can do anything to make my stay perfect. It’s all very nice, sure, but that doesn’t stop me from watching everybody else’s experience and judging a place based on that, instead of the fawning staff members who address me as “Ms Gross” the moment I enter a room (which actually just makes me uncomfortable). I talk to other guests, eavesdrop where possible, and watch waiting staff like an eagle-eyed judge on America’s Next Top Model. It’s not always about my experience.
After all, I like to think I’m a little more discerning than being swayed by a free bottle of fizz in the room, and with a first-class journalism degree, plus an NCTJ and BJTC diploma under my belt (and an 80 words per minute shorthand that I never use), I should hope my education showed me how to think critically enough to attain editorial independence.
Of course, this raises other questions: how do you write a bad review? What if you can’t include somewhere that has hosted you because it wasn’t good enough? And how do you tell the tourist board or hotel — and their PR? Don’t fret, I’ll answer these questions in the third newsletter in April (Tuesday 16th) for paid subscribers, so sign up now to make sure you don’t miss out.
Travel writing jobs
The i paper is looking for a travel writer for a six-month full-time contract
National Geographic Traveller UK needs a project editor
Going (formerly Scott’s Cheap Flights) has published pitching guidelines
Tweet of the week
Who to follow
Queenie Shaikh was one of the four up-and-coming writers selected for the Diversifying Travel Media trip with Intrepid. She’s just had her first piece published in the Indy on Islamic Cordoba and it’s excellent. Follow her on Instagram:
Industry must-reads & news
Speaking of ethics and integrity, Xenia Taliotis has shown bucket loads in this i paper piece on Gabon, in which she frankly and honestly explores the country’s poor attempts at wildlife tourism.
The TravMedia Awards nominations are out and can be seen here. You might recognise two names from this newsletter on the list, too!
Not to be confused with the above, the Travel Media Awards are open for entry and there’s a new category we’re excited to see this year: Accessible Travel Writer of the Year.
We’re deeply excited about this memoir-come-travelogue by Phoebe Smith all about the power of hiking Britain’s pilgrimage paths. Speaking of Phoebe, she’s one of two excellent humans running the WeTwo Foundation, which takes young people from less privileged backgrounds on amazing adventures for free, while asking them to “pay it forward” to the environment. You can nominate a young person for their Galapagos expedition here.
And finally, if you need more reading material, there’s a whole host of excellent prose in the pages of the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards winners.
This is our first April newsletter in a four-part series on ethics. Subscribe now to ensure you don’t miss the rest.
I'll never understand editors who think a comped experience means you can't write honestly about it. Like you, I never promise any kind of particular coverage if I am on a comped trip. I've refused to include things that I thought were subpar or not in line with the story I was writing.
The NYTimes might say they pay a writer's expenses -- and that's great! -- but I've been able to turn comped experiences into multiple stories. If I'm writing for The NYTimes, then that's one story. The whole system is built for writers who either saved up a lot of money from a previous career or who have a partner with a financially stable job.
I'm sure people with garbage parents will be honest about who they were even if they did 'comp' all of their expenses growing up. Comped trips is just an opportunity to let writers from less financially advantageous background to tell more stories in a world running on capitalism.
As ever, this is a really interesting discussion. I have similar issues around press tickets and hospitality for concerts and festivals. The best PRs understand that their role is to facilitate a journalist's access and then leave them to make their own observations about the event; others want to micromanage how I experience and respond to it. At the moment I'm doing a mixture of paying my own way and accepting hospitality ... I do like the compete independence of paying my own way, because some events just aren't set up to offer accommodation, let alone travel, but I can't afford to do it all the time. Thanks to your TTW course (prompting me to look below the line on a website for the 'travel trade' section) I've just managed to set up hospitality through a local tourist office for a new music festival ... the festival hadn't even told the tourist office that it was happening because the organiser is new to the whole business, but now they are in touch with one another because of my request so I hope we will all benefit!