The Writer's Dilemma

A few week's ago the Travel Writers and Photographers Conference took place in Marin. It always amazes me that a conference for a community of people who are constantly pointing out how little money they earn, can cost as much as it does!

No, I didn't attend the conference as I am neither a writer nor a photographer. However, I did attend an author event that was being held in conjunction with the conference featuring Jen Leo (editor of the Traveler's Tales Humour Series) and Tim Cahill, an award-winning travel writer and founding editor of Outside Magazine.

The event itself was a bit of a disppointment, with the two of them barely scratching the surface of anticipated topics such as travel writing, travel in general, or Jen's new book,  What Color is Your Jockstrap?. Instead, the two traded incoherent jabs and reminisced about random encounters.

What was interesting was Jen's perspective on travel writing. It is widely known that the life of a travel writer is much less glamorous than it sounds. Publications rarely pay for travel writer's expenses, leaving them to scrounge and find ways to make ends meet, while supposedly covering topics in the reader's best interest. I've heard many stories from writers of the Lonely Planet and similar publications whereby the writers are given a set fee, told to cover a certain area, and allowed to keep whatever they don't spend. What are the odds that a teenager who is given a few thousand dollars to head to Greece for the summer is really going to spend that time running from hostel to hostel rather than sitting on the beach and simply calling those hostels to make sure they are still around? It certainly explains all the holes and mis-information that I have found in my guidebooks over the years.

What did take me by surprise was that well-respected magazine publications do the same thing. Forbes Magazine will be launching its first issue of Forbes Traveler this fall. Jen, who now resides in Las Vegas, told us she was asked to write a few articles for the inaugural issue. One of which is the Top 10 restaurants in Las Vegas. However, Forbes would not pay any of her expenses, either to eat at the restaurants, or even to take a cab and look through the window. So I asked her: 'did you accept the assignment, even though you won't have actually tried any of the restaurants?'. Her response: 'F - yeah! For $1 a word... of course I took the assignment!'. (She actually said 'F', she didn't swear in front of the 50 or so wanna-be travel writers in the audience).

Its not to say that she probably won't write a very informative article about great restaurants in Las Vegas, but is Forbes providing any value-add by printing an article that has not been written from first-hand experience?