Kaplan: Journalism Can Learn a Lesson from Travel Writers

Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 02.01.06 | 7:58 AM ET

Travel writers don’t get much good press these days, and they aren’t held in very high regard by traditional journalists. When I worked in newspaper newsrooms, I never once heard a fellow reporter rave about a travel story or a travel writer. So it’s noteworthy that the latest issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, which is widely read by journalists of all stripes, features a compelling essay calling on journalists to learn a lesson or two from the great travel writers. “Journalism desperately needs a return to terrain, to the kind of firsthand, solitary discovery of local knowledge best associated with old-fashioned travel writing,” writes Robert D. Kaplan, a correspondent for The Atlantic. “Travel writing is more important than ever as a means to reveal the vivid reality of places that get lost in the elevator music of 24-hour media reports.”

Before you run to your local newspaper’s Sunday travel section to soak up all that good terrain, note that Kaplan also writes: “In and of itself, travel writing is a low-rent occupation, best suited for the Sunday supplements. But it is also a deft vehicle for filling the void in serious journalism: for example, by rescuing such subjects as art, history, geography, and statecraft from the jargon and obscurantism of academia, for the best travel books have always been about something else.”

Note to Kaplan: There’s some terrific, high-rent travel writing being published these days outside of books. But you’re right, you’re not likely to find much of it in the big “Sunday supplements.”

Kaplan has high praise for Lonely Planet guidebooks, and for writers like Colin Thubron and Paul Theroux. He writes:

The best travel writing prepares you for what a place is really like, and consequently gives the reader who will never travel there an accurate ground-level portrait of it. Colin Thubron’s In Siberia (1999) provides a much more vibrant picture of the dissolution of rural Russia after the collapse of communism and the advent of Boris Yeltsin’s cold-turkey democracy than the Moscow-centric reporting in the most prestigious newspapers of the period. If one wants to know about how sub-Saharan Africa is actually doing, forget the newspapers and read Paul Theroux’s Dark Star Safari (2003), which demonstrates how finely wrought observations of people and landscapes offer the best kind of political and social analysis. Theroux describes bus and train stops, lawless borderlands, and urban nightmares, as well as individual beauty, honesty, and friendliness. Whatever the prejudices of Theroux and Thubron, at least they are the result of direct contact with the evidence — uncontaminated by contact with a clerisy of specialists, clustered in nearby foreign capitals. As Jack London put it, “They drew straight from the source, rejecting the material which filtered through other hands.”

That passage calls to mind Pico Iyer’s classic essay, Why We Travel. Iyer wasn’t writing from a journalist’s perspective but from the perspective of all newspaper readers.

Wrote Iyer: “We travel to…learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate.”

And:

We travel, then, in part just to shake up our complacencies by seeing all the moral and political urgencies, the life-and-death dilemmas, that we seldom have to face at home. And we travel to fill in the gaps left by tomorrow’s headlines: When you drive down the streets of Port-au-Prince, for example, where there is almost no paving and women relieve themselves next to mountains of trash, your notions of the Internet and a “one world order” grow usefully revised. Travel is the best way we have of rescuing the humanity of places, and saving them from abstraction and ideology.

Kaplan seems to be calling for fewer gaps in tomorrow’s headlines. Time will tell whether journalists take the message to heart.

Personally, I’d love to see a different kind of newspaper section altogether that blends the best of the front news section with the best travel writing. It wouldn’t treat travel simply as a leisure pursuit (those stories could remain in the travel section) but as a means to report first-hand some the most compelling stories of the day. The stories could include opinion, reportage, fascinating characters and vivid, evocative description—a blend of Harper’s and The Atlantic, National Geographic Traveler and National Geographic Adventure, old Rolling Stone and the best of Salon.

I’m not holding my breath.

Tags: Life of a Travel Writer