TOURISM BECOMES AN INDUSTRY - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 19

you lose the vision of an individual, how they interpret a country, you've lost the heart of
travel,” Newhouse said. Travel writing was becoming reporting an “experience” where the
reporter didn't need to know that much about Burma as show a talent for telling a good
story about the experience of visiting Burma and well-researched recommendations for
where to spend the night.
This produced the major emphasis on “good news only” consumer travel writing.
Travel sections told the reader where to go and what to do, but not what to avoid. Ne-
whouse believes this is appropriate journalism and says that her reporters will check out
ten hotels in a city in order to recommend the four best. They won't mention the six that
didn't make the cut. “We didn't give out the bad report cards.”
“We never did the ten worst, only the ten best,” she said for emphasis.
There were hints of problems—overcrowding at historic sites like the Taj Mahal, pol-
lution by cruise ships—but the larger picture of the enormous changes in the travel and
tourism industry, and the dark side of those changes, went unmentioned. “At our staff
meetings we constantly brought up changes in travel and we used changes in the industry
as a jumping-off point to discuss changes in the way we travel,” said Newhouse. “It was the
whole newspaper's failing not to cover the tourism industry—the sex trade in tourism, en-
vironmental and cultural degradation; that's legitimate news but not for us, for the travel
pages,” she said.
That is the standard for travel journalism at its best, according to more than one dozen
travel editors I interviewed. The critical judgment, they all said, came in their recom-
mendations for best value or exotic new destination. And they rejected any suggestion that
this kind of writing looked more like an extension of the industry—telling readers how to
spend money traveling.
The rise of the Internet confirmed this direction. With its websites rating hotels, air-
lines, restaurants, and tours, travel writing became singularly focused on practical con-
sumer information. Catharine Hamm, the travel editor of the Los Angeles Times , told me
she has made news and consumer information her chief mission to lure back readers. Her
reporters write about the fluctuating dollar, the change in passport requirements, effects of
the price of gasoline, the best luggage and travel clothes or, more recently, which hotels
have serious environment standards.
“Our competition is everybody and everything. Travel news and information is so big
out there—guidebooks, websites, magazines, that we compete with anything that takes
time or eyeballs away from us,” she said, explaining she needs those eyeballs to hold on
to advertisers. Despite their mission statements and the hard work it takes to put out their
sections, travel editors know their pages are meant to attract advertisements.
Travel sections are not and never have been an essential part of the core journalist mis-
sion of a newspaper, said Stuart Emmrich, the successor of Newhouse at the New York
Times. Instead, he said, “travel is designed to bring readers to the newspaper.” To that end,