Jack Shafer vs. New York Times Travel Coverage

Travel Blog  •  Julia Ross  •  09.07.07 | 7:53 AM ET

Ouch. Slate’s media critic Jack Shafer took a swipe at conventional travel journalism yesterday, in a column that scolds the New York Times’s “Escapes” section for “lack of imagination” in running three stories on Michigan’s Leelanau Peninsula this summer. Shafer uses the example to launch a broader plea for more bite in travel writing.

“‘Escapes’ faces a problem that haunts every genre of service journalism,” he writes. “Because most service journalism is conflict averse, its editors tend to publish articles that float on a mattress of comfort and cheer. Every destination mentioned in a travel section like ‘Escapes’ is worthy of your visit, and if the local wine goes down like fermented raccoon piss, the section is just too damn polite to mention it.”

No argument here that the best travel stories include elements of conflict, paradox, irony and quest. But as most travel writers know, the service pieces pay the bills. I winced when I read Shafer’s reference to “standard travel section crap that could have been composed by the local chamber of commerce,” but if his column nudges editors to reconsider their space for longer, narrative stories, then good on him.

For those who follow travel writing closely, as we do, Shafer’s critique is spot-on, but it’s old news. For anyone wishing to dive deeper, Thomas Swick’s 2003 Columbia Journalism Review essay Roads Not Taken is a great place to start.

Related on World Hum:
* The Art of Writing a Story About Walking Across Andorra
* Q&A with Pico Iyer: On Travel and Travel Writing
* Thomas Swick’s ‘Letter to a Young Travel Writer’

Tags: Life of a Travel Writer

Julia Ross is a Washington, DC-based writer and frequent contributor to World Hum. She has lived in China and Taiwan, where she was a Fulbright scholar and Mandarin student. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Time, Christian Science Monitor, Plenty and other publications. Her essay, Six Degrees of Vietnam, was shortlisted for "The Best American Travel Writing 2009."


1 Comment for Jack Shafer vs. New York Times Travel Coverage

Marilyn Terrell 09.08.07 | 5:41 AM ET

Thanks for this and for the insightful article by Thomas Swick, who rightly emphasizes the importance of including people, humor and imagination in travel writing.  I just finished reading Brian Sack’s account of a wedding in the Polish countryside, and he certainly avoids that “tone of uncritical approval” that Swick decries in so many boring travel articles.  The results are hilarious and enlightening:
http://www.banterist.com/archivefiles/000490.html

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