Showing posts with label Travel writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Travel writing. Show all posts
23 May 2012
Blogging for freebies
Since the last posting I've been in Japan, Hong Kong, China, and the USA twice each; and in Australia, Macau, the UK, Poland, France, and The Maldives. The lack of even a single word on any of these trips is an indication that I prefer to write for a living, and with travel, administration, not to mention family responsibilities there's little time to waste on financially unproductive activities.
Apparently, however, there's a whole world out there of people who blog in order to be noticed, and whose principal activity when not blogging is doing anything that will drive traffic to their blogs; notably tweeting. In many cases the purpose of the blog is to attract sufficient attention so as to bring free gifts and some advertising revenue. Many of them (I find from looking at the links given in various tweets) are absolutely appalling: unpublishable in any other form. But if enough traffic is generated, from the point of view of destinations, outfitters, and properties hoping for increased sales, it's a case of 'never mind the quality, feel the width.'
Now one website is offering a service which claims to provide a measure of influence, and with coverage in Wire and elsewhere its name is about to join Twitter, Google, Facebook, as part of everyday speech, or so it seems to think. If the boosters are to be believed our Klout score (www.klout.com) is already being taken into account by employers and by those looking to get persuasive coverage on-line for their products and services: get high enough Klout and couriers will be arriving at your front door laden with desirable kit for you to write about.
However, we're entering a world in which influence is only measured by interaction with others, and only on-line, essentially through Twitter, Facebook, and Linked In. It's about being mentioned in other's tweets, about being re-tweeted, and about getting responses to posts on other social media.
I joined Twitter early, and left it again almost straight away. It is probably already obvious from looking at this blog that 140 characters is not my preferred medium of expression, and I'm not interested in communicating the trivia of my day. I've discovered, though, that a significant number of my friends and colleagues do most of their communicating via Twitter. Some are now required by their employers to keep the profile of their organisations up by constantly tweeting together with links to the organisation's site.
But just as so much blogging is about discussing what others have written, so most tweeting is about drawing attention to such comment or its subject, and re-tweeting links posted by others. A small amount of original content mostly goes round in circles with very little added value. In the Klout world, however, the persuasiveness of the content has nothing to do with its inherent value. Well-informed and well-expressed criticism has less value than vapid gossip if it is re-tweeted fewer times.
I find this world picture one of fascinating horror: a little like being unable to look away from a car crash. The Klout score above which the couriers start ringing the doorbell is 50, we're told. The average Klout score is 20, but every successive increase in value becomes harder to obtain. Given that the average person in the world isn't even on-line, I was surprised to find I had an initial score of 12, well below the average. This was despite having published several articles across North America this year, as well as in the Asia edition of the Wall Street Journal, reaching audiences of millions and beyond the wildest dreams of more than a handful of bloggers. But off-line influence apparently doesn't matter, even when the articles also appear on-line. And there's apparently no account taken of the relative persuasiveness of items appearing under the auspices of organisations with large, long-standing reputations in the real world, compared to items under the banner of Joe Bloggs' Blog.
This may be the world wished for, and the world predicted to come to pass, but it isn't here yet, and it will be a worse world if it ever arrives. However, and playing the game by its own rules, I re-joined Twitter, and within two days my Klout score had rocketed to 42.
Life isn't really like this, but since I heard a story from a colleague that he'd been turned down for a press trip because he didn't blog, I've been asking various PR people I've come across (rather a lot, unsurprisingly) about the emphasis they place on bloggers versus those being published in print media, and I've yet to find anyone who puts any weight at all on blogs.
Last year I visited Scottsdale for the third time, and about two weeks ago two resulting stories happened to appear in Canadian media at the same time. As the people at Scottsdale are always well-organised and helpful (and likeable), and as I'd been thinking that they'd gone a long time without seeing a return on their investment (not that any is ever guaranteed) I took the time to send a note with links to the two stories.
I received a delighted reply. I then received an equally delighted email from one property mentioned in one story. I received another from a property that got a passing mention in the second story, rather disproportionately small given the amount of effort it had put in, I felt (but that's just how it goes sometimes). Finally today I received a letter personally signed by Managing Director of one of the properties. I imagine this was written for him by the PR person, but nonetheless the effort had been made.
I'll perhaps discuss in another post why all this is unnecessary but the point is that these people are in no doubt where clout's important. And it's with four million newspaper readers across Canada. The on-line presence is just a bonus.
23 February 2010
Soft openings
Although I do a lot of restaurant reviewing it's generally in the context either of guide book writing or of travel features where the stress tends to be on established restaurants typical of the place under discussion, rather than something that's brand new. I often turn down invitations to new openings at home simply because I rarely write about the city I live in (although I happen to be doing so right now) and so there's little conceivable benefit to the establishment in question. PR people often seem interested merely in fulfilling their quotas rather than calculating the worthwhile and persuasive column centimetres to be gained, and I like a good meal as much as anyone else. But fair's fair, and 'never accept a freebie just for the sake of it' is a motto more writers ought to be adopting.
For those not familiar with the jargon, a 'soft opening' is when a restaurant, entertainment venue, or hotel has only just opened and does not feel itself yet fully ready for the limelight. In the case of restaurants it tends to mean that the venue is still in dress rehearsals, and the team of staff still learning the peculiarities of the restaurant's physical form, of preparing and serving the newly-created menu in a timely way, and to work together efficiently. For hotels, however, it often simply means that the building's owner (very often a different entity from the company managing the property) is desperate to start earning revenue after spending astronomical sums on construction, and so the building opens with not all floors or facilities complete.
One suggestion in The Guardian piece is that where restaurants are advertising discounted menus during their soft openings (I've never encountered this, but still) then it's fair to give them credit for that, and leave a full review until it is clear from the full price menu on offer that they are fully operational. However, if a restaurant is charging full prices from the beginning then it deserves to be reviewed comprehensively. It can't have its cake at full price and eat it.
The same argument doesn't quite work for hotels. I very often review hotels during soft opening, particularly in China, and the experience is almost always one of profound incompetence due to the supply of well-trained staff falling short of the Chinese hotel industry's needs, and the tendency of staff to hop from job to job at short notice.
But guide book cycles being what they are, and getting longer in response to the global drop in tourism volumes, there's a choice between reviewing a new Chinese hotel before it's ready or not mentioning it until the following edition, which may be two or three (or more) years away. The opening months do tend to see heavy discounting but it's against a figure which expresses what the hotel thinks it would like to get for a room, not what it may actually ever achieve on a regular basis, and since even when a hotel is fully up-and-running no two neighbours may be paying the same rate anyway, and heavy discounting remain the norm, there's not the same argument for an easy ride from the critic.
And then there's the pressure to have something new, which both demonstrates that the research has been thoroughly done, helps to differentiate a guide from others in print not yet updating for new editions, and conversely prevents your guide from missing a major hotel that those updating slightly later may cover. Unreasonable though it may be to do so, people do say, "Your guide's no good/out of date. It doesn't even have hotel X in it."
I was turned down by one new Beijing hotel this year, but in general there's a recognition that guide book coverage is important to success, whether a hotel is targeting a leisure or business market, and that decision was probably unwise. I assured the hotel in question that I'm fully familiar with the chaos that is soft opening in China, and in fact the only way to review soft openings is to take into account the typical arc through which a Chinese hotel goes and expect an, at best, a disorganised experience and hardware that half works. Experience, talks with management about recruiting and training policies, added to direct experience of the design, comfort levels, and hardware in general enable something sensible to be said about how the hotel will be when it settles down. Technical problems will be fixed, staff will gain experience, and gradually it will all come together until another newly-opening hotel offers staff a little more money and entices them away. For some hotels, a soft-opening-like second-rate experience comes later, when all the staff have been poached.
27 June 2009
Squeaking reaches deafening proportions
Several people on the Mexican trip from which I've just returned were writing for absolutely nothing except the subsidised travel itself. One, very courteously, apologised for contributing in this way to the general undermining of rates, although there's little new in this. But I was the only person travelling solely in the expectation of receiving a fee for material to be published, and that's a first.
Those dreaming of making a living from all this should note that US$0.15 per word is starting to look generous.
22 May 2009
What is 'real travel'?
> I'm glad your press trip went well, but I'm still not persuaded to venture on one myself, I'm afraid. I just can't see how they come close to anything like real travel.
This rather begs the question, 'What is "real travel"?' It also assumes that whatever 'real travel' may be, that's the kind of travel I'm trying to have, which might turn out to be precisely the kind of confusion between work and play this blog (such as it is) is partly dedicated to dispelling.
The phrase 'real travel' is mostly heard in the dormitories of backpackerdom, meant to differentiate between travellers ('real') and tourists (in some sense 'fake'). The idea is never thought through, but is intended to indicate that uncritically following the routes and recommendations of your Lonely Planet guide is somehow superior to being spoon-fed your information on an organised tour. In fact there's little to differentiate the two.
Here a press trip (or 'fam trip' as it's often called) is being contrasted with other travel (whether independent or fully escorted isn't clear, but it's a fairly safe bet that independent travel is going to be regarded here as the only 'real' travel).
But all travel is 'real' (or none of it is), and no one who prefers to be carted from A to B need feel obliged to work out how to do it by themselves and by public bus. No one who simply wants to be on a beach need feel obliged to steep themselves in local culture and no one who thinks that following guide book recommendations for a few days amounts to meaningful cultural immersion is to be taken seriously anyway. Indeed, it's almost impossible for something to appear in any popular guide book and still be authentic. That's one of those principles of tourism that might have been constructed by Heisenberg: the more widely something is known about the less likely it is to be original and authentic. This is Neville-Hadley's Quantum Theory of Travel.
But of course, my travel is anyway business travel, undertaken for the purpose of obtaining stories agreeable to editors, and has nothing whatsoever to do with my own travel preferences. A successful trip is one in which I come back with the material I need: observations, notes on experiences, interview recordings. I may not have seen globally famous 'must-sees' despite being within five minutes of them (and I speak as one who has twice been to Alice Springs without visiting Australia's most iconic Rock--it wasn't part of the story in either case). My itinerary is agreed in advance, and even when it involves driving myself, rarely has any flexibility. But it's shaped to the needs of the stories. It's not a holiday.
In general I restrict myself to travel that can be undertaken by anyone else, and write in order to describe the experience and explain how it can be done by those who follow. This sometimes means doing more rather then less than other visitors would do, in order to be able to make a selection of experiences to recommend. One benefit of press trips with groups of journalists, although I mostly avoid these, is that there's often access provided that the average traveller wouldn't get, but which when recounted is helpful to the reader. On the excellent trip to Scottsdale that spurred the original comment, for instance, I had the opportunity to talk directly to some of the architects and their followers in a way not available to the average visitor. The point was, of course, to get information, anecdotes, and quotable material that would enliven the story and explain the experience in the words of those best qualified to comment. If this was 'unreality' then more of it is needed.
There is almost no genuinely critical travel writing for newspapers or magazines or television. This is not what the editorial and production powers feel the readers/viewers want, and the material created for these publications and broadcasts is almost universally artificial in one way or another. But the general public idea of travel is of something so imbued with glamour, whether it's the 'heroism' of hard-seat train travel in China, or the wannabe-James Bond-ness of luxury Caribbean resorts, that even someone as weary of travel as I am (and so far I've managed to avoid a trip further than Fife in Scotland this year) would have a hard time breaking the spell even if permitted by editors to do so. Indeed, it's often noticeable on website travel discussions that the unsatisfactory nature of an experience is the very last thing that either those who haven't yet travelled want to hear about, or that those who may already have travelled want to admit to. They slave and save, look forward all year to what may be the 'trip of a lifetime', and nothing is going to make them admit afterwards, that in swallowing all the clichés about a destination they were involved in duping themselves.
The best thing I can do is to avoid contributing to the overall propaganda, and if there's any distinction to be made between 'real' and 'unreal' in this context then it's to do with writing about, for instance, the insect markets in Beijing, rather than the usual goo about 'ooh-ahh Forbidden City 5000 years of culture Confucius he say'. This, however, requires a considerable amount of study and effort when venturing out of English-language territory, and is best based at least on repeated visits to the same destination. It's a lot easier just to rattle off a brainless piece on first impressions of the top sites, and it's a lot easier to publish such a piece, too.
I'm off to Jamaica next week on a trip that so far has been very poorly handled, insofar as it's taken about two months to set up with final agreement achieved, after long lacunae and one missed deadline, less than a week before departure, and with an absolutely skeletal draft itinerary which appears to have me chauffered everywhere rather than driving myself. However, the trip does seem designed to help me get the three stories I finally proposed (the intermediate PR people in New York having contributed absolutely nothing--sometimes you really do wonder what these people do to earn their money) and I'm promised that everything will stop and start at my pleasure.
The excuse (from the New York PR people) that I can't drive myself because I might get lost seems particularly absurd, not least since the tourism authorities themselves are promoting self-drive to less-visited places, which is one of the topics I'm supposed to be covering. Seeing whether this is in fact practical, and actually getting lost, is potentially part of the story.
But some tourism authorities insist on having someone at your elbow for the whole visit (and there are certainly journalists who can't survive without this, too), but it can be claustrophobic, especially to someone who prefers to use a dictaphone for notes. With the right chauffeur/guide it can be very helpful (as I remember with one in Melbourne and the Yarra Valley, one in Tokyo, and another in Asti), and in others the opposite (one in Fiji, one in Vilnius). If the timing of all this, leaving me with little option but to go to Jamaica, had been different there would have been further discussion on all this.
Regardless, the purpose of the itinerary is to get the stories. Is this artificial, in the sense that no casual traveller would adopt the same itinerary? Yes. Is it 'real'? Certainly. Getting the stories is the only thing that counts. This is work, not play.
15 April 2008
All his own work
It's also appropriate to write on guide book plagiarism when I don't have time when the reason I don't have time is that I'm working on two guide books.
I believe the story may have begun with an interview given to the Melbourne Herald Sun by ex-Lonely Planet writer Thomas Kohnstamm. His purpose, apparently, was to gain advance publicity for an account of his misadventures working on various South American titles for LP, and tasters given included providing a good review to a restaurant following sex with a waitress, claims to have dealt drugs in order to supplement meagre fees from LP, failing even to visit one country he was paid to write about, and plagiarising or simply making up other information because LP wasn't paying enough. These, at least, were claims in the original story and in versions that appeared shortly afterwards in other media world-wide doing little more than rehash the original with comments from leaked LP internal memos, and later a public response from LP. There followed, inevitably, a lot of braying on the blogs of travellers (never 'tourists') and wannabe travel writers.
A very great deal of all this is utter humbug.
Firstly, there's nothing new under the sun, and most of all not in what passes for journalism today. This is far from the first time that an LP writer has been accused of plagiarism (although it may be the first time one has stood self-accused). Thinking only of my particular special interest, China, I seem to remember there was an issue involving one of the co-authors of the original LP China. Much of LP Beijing a few editions ago was clearly lifted and paraphrased by the author from an expat-produced (and now defunct) guide called The Beijing Guidebook, and I published an article about that at the time. I also recall one edition of LP's Pakistan guide about which many readers asserted the writer could not possibly have taken the trips since his descriptions were so wide of the mark. And in the 'nothing new' department it's also worth mentioning that it's only a few years since the last quick flash of articles about the world of the 'Shock! Horror! Probe! Guide book writers are so badly paid they don't do the work properly!' variety. People have very short memories.
Nor, of course, is Lonely Planet the only victim (although it has only itself to blame). As another guide book editor I know says, the first thing he does when he receives a submission is to start Googling sections of it. And it's not uncommon to find material simply pasted from web pages straight into submitted text. I know of three occasions on which my own work has been plagiarised, and in two cases I've found myself editing text clearly lifted from my own books. As I said to the company in question, as least I'm getting some income out of it as I'm being paid to edit it.
But no one surely needs to read an article about poor guide book research to suddenly discover Lonely Planet titles are fifth-rate. The statements by published media and bloggers alike that Lonely Planet's reputation is suddenly under threat had my jaw hitting the keyboard.
What reputation?
It's been a few years since I looked at a Lonely Planet guide but that's because of their obvious ignorance, cluelessness, and scant literacy. In the China titles there were not only howlers galore but self-confessed borrowing in the form of words of thanks to Fred or Joan who'd travelled the southern Taklamakan route, for instance, and whose notes the author had then used.
I've been told that Lonely Planet recruits a pool of writers (and you have in many cases to use the term 'writer' very loosely indeed) who then get assigned to various guides, rather than choosing specialists. Be that as it may, the mini-biographies of the contributors often go out of their way to stress the writer's complete lack of relevant experience. The biographies are the first place you should look when considering the purchase of a guide, especially for somewhere as complex and different as China. Reading those of many Lonely Planet contributors in the past it seemed the only quality required was that of being able to don a back-pack without falling over. From the text it was obvious that writing skills were not required, and since there was almost always no previous experience of China mentioned and no familiarity with the language, there was absolutely no chance right from the start that a work of any usefulness or intelligence would be produced even in the basic history and culture sections let alone hard research. Time after time LP books make only the vaguest gestures at useful directions or transport information. Time after time they say there's no public transport when there is. Time after time it's plain from the text that hearsay is being used. I once used to know one of the LP China authors who told me quite frankly that if he found he'd forgotten a phone number he'd just make it up. There wasn't time to go back and they weren't paying him enough to bother. And in effect, since he had not a word of Mandarin, he couldn't have used the telephone or printed references to find out even if he could have been bothered.
LP China, in addition to the edifying observation in its first edition that Chinese women must have the smallest breasts in the world, managed to go six editions with its history section stating that the Mongol Yuan dynasty was the only period when China was ruled by foreigners. What's more staggering: that the original writer could be so ignorant or that this could pass through the hands of six sets of editors (or the same editor six times) and still not be picked up?
The answer, to those of us who know the guide book industry, is that neither is terribly surprising at all. But Lonely Planet's reputation is only now in danger? Really? Has no one been paying any attention at all?
The single most important talent needed at a guide book company is the ability to select the right writer for the job. Only one or two I've ever spoken to (and I've worked for five of them, one of those under three different owners, and had discussions with three others) had the faintest idea of that. Very commonly once the decision is made to produce a title there's a scramble to find an author or authors in a very short space of time, and authors are hired on the most casual acquaintance and without any writing tests being undertaken or other hoops being jumped through. That something like this may have happened at Lonely Planet was acknowledged in a leaked internal memo from another LP author, quoted in several stories:
'"Why did you (management) not understand that when you hire a constant stream of new, unvetted people, pay them poorly and set them loose, that someone, somehow was going to screw you?" author Jeanne Oliver wrote.'
Many travel publishing companies are just factories, and if a writer is willing to get started right now, and do it for the pitiful sum on offer, then off they go. The main thing is to get the book done on time and get it on the shelves to start capitalising on an established brand name and make its production costs back. Accuracy is of no particular concern, and not even the most minimal fact-checking takes place. Note that Lonely Planet now claims to be fact-checking Kohnstamm's work in print. Isn't that a little late? The company has been claiming that Kohnstamm's methods are rare in guide book writing, but given the lack of any serious editing or fact-checking it's hardly in a position to know, is it? And implicit in this statement is a denial of earlier cases of the same thing, and the fact that taking short cuts is overtly acknowledged in some titles, and completely clear from the text of others.
Authors who insist on going over edits and checking maps become regarded as difficult, as happened to me at Frommer's, for instance. But then in most cases authors just sling crudely marked-up maps at editors and are happy not to look at them or anything else again. The editor is left to decipher everything, and it's no wonder that guide book maps tend to be so poor as a result. Both sides are to blame here.
I happen to think LP guides (unless they've improved very recently) are particularly poor, not least due to an almost anti-intellectual stance. But every series is in the situation described above: 'pay them poorly, set them loose' and of the five I've worked for only one pays a royalty--helping to keep the writer interested in the quality and sales of the title, and letting him retain the copyright. The rest pay flat fees for all rights for all media for all time and you're lucky if there's any author recognition at all. The quicker the work is done, the more of the fee you get to keep. The more diligent you are, the more you spend, and the less profit you make.
And that--diligence--is the quality guide book companies need to identify. As I've written here before, when I recruited writers to work on the first edition of Frommer's China, I looked for people who spoke the language, who had had periods of residence in China, and who seemed neither in love with the country nor hating it (both common), but engaged with it while being sceptical of it. If an author has had no residence in a country, and does not have at least a modest acquaintance with the local language, there is no chance of a realistic and well-informed portrayal of that country.
An attempt to gauge diligence was undertaken through long interviews and writing tests. The aim was to find people who cared desperately that what was going to appear under their names was accurate, and who understood how little information in China can be taken at face value. I think in three out of four cases I succeeded.
No previous experience with guide books was required--in fact it was regarded as a disadvantage. An ability to write came much further down the list. Naturally the ability to construct properly grammatical sentences was regarded as a minimum (it clearly isn't at Lonely Planet) but the ability to write in a bright and fresh manner was regarded as less important. For those who got the facts right the prose could always be polished a bit. Most guide book formats do not provide space for extended prose. As it was the problem turned out to be the technical one of writing in a sufficiently compressed style, and I had to spend a lot of time on editing it down. But bright, fresh, and often amusing, it turned out to be.
And I think several of the writers spent every penny of their fees on getting the research done. Then held down jobs or undertook other writing assignments to keep themselves fed while they composed the text. No cutting of corners here; no hearsay; just hard work. And there are other guide book authors like them.
But there are plenty more like Kronstamm, if simply lazy and ignorant rather than quite as self-professedly extravagant in their abuse. As I've edited others' contributions to several guide books I've often come across it. The author of the first editions of Frommer's Beijing and Shanghai guides had managed to spend some time in China and yet remain profoundly ignorant even of basic social courtesies and simple street names. The author of the Frommer's Hong Kong guide seemed to me to have only the most distant acquaintance with the destination when I was forced to look over some of her work, some really fundamental navigational information basic to getting round the territory being either wrong or missing altogether (not to mention the provision of tedious prose, bizarre observations such as dismissing a street for being full of Chinese shops, and the most uninspired and ill-informed selection of restaurants I've ever seen in a guide).
So shock and horror at the idea that LP guides might not be all that well researched is hogwash, as is Lonely Planet's position of fainting like a too tightly laced-up Victorian nanny at the mere suggestion. Many another series is just the same, and in the end it's the choice of author that matters, not the choice of brand (except insofar as certain kinds of information are needed--budget travel or cultural, for instance).
What else comes out of all this hoo-hah?
The absurd suggestion that LP writers don't accept free trips, and the equally absurd suggestion that to accept a free trip is to be corrupt. The copy in the front of every LP guide says that writers do not give good reviews in return for free access, not that they don't accept free access at all. If that little loophole wasn't left open it's hard to see how anything could be done at all, although it's also obvious from the text that LP writers do not eat in the best restaurants or stay at the best hotels being thereby forced to fudge their reviews, although this isn't difficult since those reviews are so brief anyway.
Larger guide book series appealing to deeper-pocketed readers rely on their reputations making sure that the writers get as much free travel, accommodation, entry, and meals as possible, and provide a letter for the writer to brandish. In Western Europe and North America this will go a very long way, and needs to, because it simply isn't financially viable to do it any other way. And there's nothing wrong with that so long as the writer doesn't allow himself to be bought. What's more of a challenge to honesty is the determination of some series (not LP in this case) to be relentlessly sunny, to the point where editors, who typically interfere in little else, will rewrite reviews to be more cheerful, or delete critical matter.
Guide books are in general as shoddy as they are not only because the wrong people are recruited and then paid too little, but because of various structural policies, that include:
Investing just about viable sums in producing the first issue of a guide, but then tiny sums in its updating
In some cases expecting only closed restaurants and hotels to be replaced, leading to ridiculously out-of-date selections in subsequent editions for fast-changing destinations such as China
In some cases being happy for the updating simply to be done from the desk, and only paying enough for that
Insisting on having every book for every destination work to the same formula with text being dropped in to a template, leading to silly distortions (since countries vary widely). This is partly done through ignorance of other cultures, and partly because using the template means the author is doing layout work and saving costs at the design end
Refusing to deal with non-Roman scripts because it's just too much bother although guide books to some countries are quite simply useless without them
Employing editors and sub-editors who are barely literate themselves (rare, but it happens), and rarely employing anyone who has been to China (for instance) on a guided tour, let alone having any deeper knowledge of the country.
So for heaven's sake, guide book readers: know from the start that what you're buying is more likely than not to be lazily put together and full of errors, and written by someone largely ignorant of their subject, with later errors added by equally ignorant editors. Look for biographical evidence of familiarity with the subject and long experience of it (but not too close--guide books written by people operating tour companies at the destination, as one Bradt guide I'm currently looking at, ought to be read with caution). Writers who've contributed to books on the Caribbean, Lesotho, the USA, and Cambodia should simply be avoided. Look over the text for signs of keen eyesight and sharp wits, and choose books with longer descriptions that force the writer to be expressive and informative--ignorance will tend to show up. Otherwise treat the writer as you would a film critic, and be prepared to learn over time whether you agree with his or her opinions. Learn principles of approach from your first encounters with your destination, and apply those when looking for accommodation rather than always picking from the list of choices given. It's just a guide.
The writers and wannabes currently screaming that the Kohnstamm revelations (good title for a spy thriller, although the comments attributed to him are about as revelatory as news that there's toast and coffee for breakfast) are damaging the reputation of travel writers in general should reflect that they have no reputations to lose, either. It's like becoming an estate agent, car mechanic, or lawyer: you may be as honest as can be, but you have to live with the fact that the reputation of your profession is not an attractive one.
Kohnstamm has turned out to be an unreliable source in every way. In more recent interviews he is back-pedalling, claiming he didn't invent or plagiarise after all.
Now that's a claim I really do find incredible.
Written in haste. For more on the vicissitudes of writing guides see this post:
Frommer's China
and this one Writing China guides.
Now to bed in the knowledge I'll have much catching up to do tomorrow.
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