Travel Writing Today: ‘Public Relations Bull’?

I love this. New York Times Frugal Travel columnist Seth Kugel just interviewed John Wilcock, who, in addition to editing travel stories at the New York Times in the 1950s, wrote “Mexico on $5 a Day” and “Japan on $5 a Day” in the 1960s.

Among the highlights:

You wrote in the 1970s that most most travel writing is just “public relations bull.” Is that true today?

Things have changed a lot since then. One of the things I’d like to claim is that the underground press changed the nature of almost all newspaper and magazine writing. Travel writing today is much more interesting than it was in those days. When I was working at The Times everything was incredibly impersonal. Basically, you weren’t allowed to have an opinion at all. And nowadays it’s almost the reverse, almost everything is written from the personal point of view. So things have changed tremendously.

All true. And yet, let’s be honest: There’s still plenty of public relations bull out there.

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