¿What Should the Future of Travel Journalism Look Like?
“That’ll be a good picture. Okay. Let’s go.” These are the passing words uttered between two minor characters in Jacques Tati’s seminal work Playtime but they encapsulate everything that the French auteur wanted to say about the consumption and curation of culture already prevalent in the late 1960s. The movie strikes a cord today, just as it did when it was released in 1967, but for intensely different reasons.
Playtime takes place in a futurist version of Paris, in the middle of a world that has rapidly hurtled itself into the monoculture. Various storylines intersect in a city that is indistinguishable from any other through a meticulous attention to set design. Tati’s prophecy of the future is a unified modernization of culture, expressed both in enormous modernist structures made of metal and glass and endless streams of people and vehicles painted in the same hues of grey as the buildings themselves. Tourists play an important role in the film, but in 1967, they spoke more to the globalization of modernism than they did to mass tourism; today, observing the travelers’ fascination with the comfortable sameness of a foreign land is like staring at our own reflection in the pond.
Barbara, a white upper class traveler from Miami, is one of many women being shuttled around Tati’s alternate version of Paris. They ooh and aah at the chrome colored rationalist office blocks rather than looking towards the city, which is captured, occasionally, as a sort of mirage in the background. As they tour the city, Barbara stops from time to time to admire flyers for different foreign destinations. Whether it is Mexico, Stockholm, London or Hawaii, each flyer boasts an identical skyscraper. A duplicate building exists in Paris, too, to which a fellow traveler points up and screeches, “That’s really Paris!”
Tati’s prophecy, of course, never came to full fruition. Hawaii looks nothing like London and London looks nothing like Stockholm. The world is still a place of unimaginable cultural and social diversity. But where Tati hits the nail on the head is a desire by people, particularly from the white upper middle class, to edit foreign spaces into narratives that are as compartmentalized and simplified as Tati’s set design. Those narratives are then retold as truths through the white gaze inherent in the unbalanced control over media and broadcasting.
Barbara is frequently the face of narrative control. On a crowded city corner, an elderly flower vendor and dozens of bouquets of flowers interrupt the neverending grey. Barbara, with her camera permanently dangling at her neck, wants to take a photograph. The object of her photo pleads with her to not take her picture, but look how I’m dressed, she tells her in French. Not understanding, and likely not caring if she did, Barbara arranges the photograph. Passerby constantly enter the shot and she shoos them all away: a pair of paying customers, a fellow female traveler and a Japanese tourist. When two teenage boys dressed in letterman’s jackets listening to rock n roll on a portable radio enter the shot, she huffs at them Would you mind? whilst pointing at the cars and buildings that surround her, This is really Paris! Before she can snap the perfect picture, a young U.S. soldier tells her he wants her photo. He shoves her against the vendor and directs them to grab flowers, smile wide and hide the camera.
A decade later Susan Sontag would theorize in On Photography that to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. And this is exactly what the duo have done. Neither the soldier or Barbara were really interested in capturing the reality of Paris as it presented itself. A Japanese tourist and two teenage boys that appeared to be ripped out of American Graffiti just didn’t fit. Instead the duo colonized the image to exert their narrative power and create a wholly new one that was palatable to their foreignness, muddling the image of any truth in the process.
Tati’s portrayal of narrative control is far from fiction. This approach to storytelling with its careful editing of imagery and narrative of foreign peoples and places is standard practice for travel media. Travel journalism, and especially destination bound travelogues, is journalism at its most controlled. Everything is written with the shiniest hyperbole: the Best, the Greatest, the Top 10 and the Must-See written by an Insider or Expert with surgical precision for the highest google placement. This journalism neither calls for or is truly interested in craft or expertise as long as it fulfills a click driven content strategy constructed with best SEO optimization standards to fulfill a vertical content strategy and, ultimately, capture ad revenue from an industry that represents hundreds of billions of dollars.
But this segment of journalism is hardly as frivolous as the content it pumps out. According to official media kits, Travel + Leisure has a circulation of 6.1 million readers with digital readership and social media reach clearing 10 million. The other travel mag powerhouse, Condé Nast Traveller, racks in 20 million monthly page views and has 2 million combined social media followers. That’s a lot of readers. And an enormous amount of influence. Researchers have consistently found positive correlations between travel media and traveler decision making — from the destinations we choose to the hotels we book to restaurants we dine at. With that power should come enormous responsibility. In the case of travel writing: treating all content with the same journalistic integrity as any other beat.
Parachute journalism, the reporting of stories by non-embedded writers with little knowledge or experience on what is being reported, is the general standard across the industry. When the New York Times sought out a writer for their 52 places column, the job posting called for a journalist who could tell us the story of 52 places around the globe. How exactly? Parachute into a place and distill its essence. I have a difficult time believing that the very same publication would let a writer from Shanghai pen them an article that distills the essence of New York culture for the travel section. The Times can barely send one of their staff to accurately report on a single neighborhood in Los Angeles in their real estate section, how are they or any other reporter meant to inform the narratives of a place that isn’t their own? And who does that kind of reporting actually serve?
In my city of Buenos Aires, foreign publications dilute the culture of our city over and over again. Foreign writers write Insider Guides that routinely overrepresent the same four neighborhoods in a metropolis that contains 48 official ones demonstrating a total lack of geographic competence and reinforcing power divisions and uneven development in rich and poor neighborhoods. Others colonize with simplified definitions like Paris of South America meant to define a city in terms that make a Latin American destination more attractive to the white gaze. Or colonizing culture by espousing tango, a dance form created by African slaves and co-opted by white Europeans, as the only dance expression whilst ignoring more complex movements like folklore from the Northeast or cumbia from the urban villas, both borne from disenfranchised brown bodies.
These oversimplifications are dangerous because travel journalism doesn’t just inspire travel. It informs it. Like any reported work, travel writing prefaces a reader's’ understanding of a place before they get there. Travel writing, like all writing, informs story and context not only with what is written but what isn’t. In an article by Javier Cabral for his LA Taco, he points out exactly that in a response to that NYT article in a piece appropriately titled Six Lazy Mistakes in the New York Times Gentrification Report about Highland Park, as told by a POC Resident. He points out the ‘glaring cultural and factual mistakes’ that got past fact checkers — which, true in my own anecdotal experience, were likely not even employed. Cabral points out the danger of misrepresenting place and the ways it misconstrues cultural identity and emboldens the predators of culture, particularly gentrification, which uphold the majority white gaze.
Although there is no research to show just how significantly this brand of journalism might affect cultural spaces and institutions, it isn’t unfair to suppose that a relationship exists. The correlation between socioeconomics and tourism is widely evidenced by companies like Airbnb and their effect on real estate prices and local economies in tourist-heavy cities. In Argentina, tourism represents 10% of national GDP! That’s a lot of dollars. That tourist money could certainly affect restaurant and bar culture, museum and galleries and other commercial spaces, especially when most travel articles are carbon copies of one another.
COVID-19 has wrecked the travel industry for the indeterminate future. Although some countries in the northern hemisphere plan to open borders for summer tourism, the industry has no idea how many years it will take before we can return to normal. In Argentina, at least, the borders are shut through September and once opened immigration is likely to enforce strict controls on travel. Travel media and editors are in a difficult position. Who and how will editors commission pieces as travel becomes stricter? Without a doubt, the presses will continue to print.
Could this be the opportunity for actual experts to take the by-lines and write articles that truthfully, in the words of the New York Times, distill the essence of a place? With less content to produce, could this give way to more thoughtful features over the standard travel copy? Maybe ten years ago, finding capable freelance journalists abroad was a difficult challenge. Today with email, social media and a generation that swings steadily towards remote freelance work, it’s not only entirely imaginable but not tapping into a pool of embedded freelancers and their diverse voices, or at the very least a knowledgeable fact checker, veers towards the negligible.
The architect emerges in the second half of Playtime. He is a bumbling little man whose work, once we take a closer look, is completely falling apart. The clean imagery of his structures don’t fit the tight narrative that Tati sold to us in the first half. They are imperfect and complicated and, as the film progresses, become full of a life of its own. Maybe this is our moment to push into the second act of travel writing, to rewrite the histories and question the lazy mistakes. To tease out something that the travel media has always loved to sell us: authenticity.