TOURISM BECOMES AN INDUSTRY - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 20

Emmrich has enlivened the section with off-beat angles on travel and a “frugal traveler”
feature that has erased the paper's image as one for wealthy readers only.
Few newspapers or websites have the budgets of the New York Times or the Washington
Post and magazines like Condé Nast Traveler and the National Geographic that pay all the
expenses of their reporters and forbid accepting gifts. The transformation of travel writing
into an extension of the tourism industry was cemented by the financial difficulties in the
media business. In every other form of journalism free travel is a gift and considered a
serious conflict of interest. “If you take ethics seriously, the same policies that cover news
gathering have to apply to travel coverage,” said Kelly McBride, an ethics specialist at the
Poynter Institute. “Free travel is not acceptable.”
Without free travel, most self-described travel writers would be out of business. And
those free trips don't come easy. Writers have to compete for them. Laura Daily, a freel-
ance travel reporter, was the 2008 president of the Society of American Travel Writers, a
professional networking organization with over 1,000 members that helps arrange the jun-
kets. Daily defends the free trips and routinely accepts them from the destinations she cov-
ers. “There is no way in this day and age that you can go to Antarctica and sell the story to
newspapers without some sort of subsidy,” she told me. “If you're lucky, a newspaper will
pay you $350 for a lead story.”
She said she never questioned why a cruise ship pays for her trip rather than buys an ad-
vertisement. But she said that the subsidies did not affect her judgment. “No quid pro quo
is allowed. That is a no-no. No coming on a media trip in exchange for a positive story,”
she said.
She did say that her articles are generally positive—she could not give a single example
of writing a negative review.
Her description of how those free trips are doled out suggests considerable influence
by the industry. At conferences of the Society of American Travel Writers, journalists meet
with travel industry publicists like Stuart Newman. There the journalists pitch stories to
the publicists to convince them to pay for their trips. Daily described the event as “sort of
like speed dating,” where journalists hop from table to table to discuss new tourism ven-
ues, new trends and get approval for new trips paid for by the industry.
Virginia Sheridan is the president of M. Silvers Associates, a public relations firm that
specializes in the travel industry. She is a member of the travel society and attends those
conferences because, she told me, her relationship with journalists largely consists of
pitching stories for her clients in the same way that political operatives pitch stories that
help their candidates. And with today's tighter deadlines and fierce competition among
freelance reporters, she said, “our relationship with the lifestyle and travel and tourism
journalists has gotten closer.”
There are exceptions to this close relationship. The New Yorker magazine publishes
an annual travel issue that often includes in-depth articles on the industry. Writers Rick