Travel Section Letter of the Week

Wrote reader Mary Margaret McGuire to the Los Angeles Times travel section: “Would someone please buy the Travel section editors a blue pencil. Why? Because I (and I am sure many other readers) am sick of the irrelevant references in most, if not all, travel articles to the authors’ mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, spouses, partners, children, roommates and pets. What is this penchant of a seeming obligatory mention of everyone and anyone the writer has communed with in the last 48 hours in every article?”

I suspect Ms. McGuire would enjoy Thomas Swick’s 2001 Columbia Journalism Review essay about newspaper travel sections, Roads Not Taken, and particularly this passage:

To serve their purposes, without appearing too utilitarian, newspapers have created a standard type of travel story that is generally about a person who goes to a place—as opposed to being about a place—often with a spouse or companion. In this genre, a variation on the phrase “my husband, Ken, and I,” is pretty much de rigueur by at least the third paragraph.

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