Seven suggestions for becoming a travel writer

A friend’s daughter who just earned her master’s in journalism recently asked me about how to break into travel writing. Apparently the suggestions I passed along were useful:

Thank you for giving me more practical, helpful advice in your e-mail than I got in the entirety of grad school. Seriously, if we had only had more guests like you come into our classes (and fewer guests who were frazzled, depressed editors of soon-to-be-dead publications), I might have come out of it with some realistic expectations and feeling like there was a way to make online journalism work as a career.

(I quote her less for the ego boost than the insight into today’s J school.) Anyway, here’s the part of my e-mail to her where I passed along tangible to dos to get a travel writing job:

• Create your own blog. Most online publications won’t hire you unless you have a site of your own. Use it to highlight where you’ve been published, share your expertise, and provide insight on yourself and your articles (like the director’s cut feature on a DVD).
• Create a Twitter account and follow other travel writers and editors, interacting with the most important ones. Follow PR types who represent businesses you’re interested in writing about too.
• Create a Tumblr account–it’s popular with NYC-publishing types (and fun to use).
• Read travel blogs, post comments on them, and apply to write for the ones you like.

And after you get a travel writing job, do the following:

• Promote the heck out of yourself. Every article I write I send out to about 35 different social networks (yes, that’s a bit much, but at least share your articles on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and LinkedIn).
• E-mail the subjects of your articles and their PR people, even if they didn’t help you when researching your article, letting them know that you wrote about them. Hopefully they’ll pass around your article or link to it, leading to more page views.
• Use Help a Reporter Out (HARO) to find sources. Not only will good ones just present themselves to you, but it’ll get you attention from publicists that can help you find good stories.

Experiencing Jsix’s chef Christian Graves’s kitchen for BlackBook

Monday BlackBook published a feature article I wrote:

Jsix’s Christian Graves Gives Us His ‘Chef’s Kitchen Experience’

I had plans to head to San Diego this June for my brother’s wedding rather than work. Either it was coincidence or I mentioned my plans online though, as I received an e-mail from Hotel Solamar and Jsix’s publicist inviting me to stay there and participate in Christian Graves’s “Chef’s Kitchen Experience.” (“Inviting me” is a euphemism for “it was free.”) When I mentioned I was traveling with my wife and 6-month-old daughter, thankfully the publicist didn’t wince; if she had I would’ve felt awful about having them sleep on a bench in Balboa Park while I enjoyed the restaurant and hotel.

I knew Christian was an excellent chef and that he and this trip to a local farm that supplies his kitchen would make worthy subjects for an article for BlackBook. And I realize I’m committing a journalism faux pas here, but I want to like the subjects of my articles (then again, I mostly cover travel, not terrorism). When possible I want to encourage readers to give their business to talented people who are nice. Hopefully Christian’s warm personality came through in my piece.

My favorite example didn’t make it into the final version though. When I asked him why he became a chef, he answered that he found something special about being able to cook for two people who were leaving their infant daughter behind for the first time and watching them enjoy themselves and stare into each other’s eyes.

You can watch Christian plot out our meal here:

Four family friendly hotels stay hip: My latest piece for Air Canada’s enRoute

Resorts with teen programs that the 13- to 18-year-old set might actually enjoy was the subject for my latest piece in Air Canada’s in-flight magazine, enRoute:

• Download a .pdf of the article here.
• Read the article on enRoute’s website here.

I got the idea for the article after a visit to the Ritz-Carlton Palm Beach in January (you can read an account of my trip at UpTake). It’d been a while since facilities for teens were something I cared about–and it’ll be a while before they’re a factor in my vacation plans again–so clearly I wouldn’t have had this idea for an article if I hadn’t been on the press trip and seen that resorts were offering activities for teens that surpassed sticking them with a glorified counselor and their way uncool younger siblings (not that being seen with my little brother was ever a drag).

Where travel bloggers hang out in New York City

Originally this post was for Gridskipper, but my editor there is relocating to Paris for a month today (in a related story, I hate him), so I figured I’d post it here.

Want to see where the sages of online travel advice hang out in New York City? This weekend 300 travel bloggers are convening for the 2010 Travel Blog Exchange conference (with bloggers holding meetings, clearly the revolution is over and the squares have survived). But give new media credit: TBEX ’10′s official schedule and meetups show nary an Olive Garden, Planet Hollywood or Hard Rock Cafe. Check below the fold for the lineup.

Read more

enRoute’s articles, including mine, now appearing on MSN’s Canadian travel site

EnRoute, Air Canada’s in-flight magazine, has a new partnership with MSN Canada in which articles from the magazine now will appear on MSN Canada’s travel section. A couple of mine (Freebies Around the Globe, which I co wrote, and 4 Great Gardens Around the World) are slated to appear there soon.

Look for them at http://travel.ca.msn.com/. The stories will be rotated frequently, so they may not appear on the site now.