The Rise of Independent Travel Magazines

The new magazines also move away from the traditional “colonial” model of travel journalism, where a writer is sent overseas to experience a trip as a holiday-maker would, then report back. Instead, many of the new titles commission pieces from writers with existing connections to a destination (a model that happily saves on travel costs, too). Boat magazine, an early independent which first published in 2010, produces an entire issue focused on a single destination, and moves its editorial team there for several weeks to seek out stories. Many of the new editors are scathing about conventional titles’ focus on hotels and restaurants, and their extensive use of lists. The independents see themselves as being about places, rather than holidays.

Others see themselves as part of a “slow journalism” movement, analogous with slow food and slow travel. “With independent publishing there is clearly a reaction against what else is out there, and we wanted to embrace slow, thoughtful storytelling,” says Keeling, who worked for large publishing houses before starting Ernest. “When I first started out, I was on weekly, then monthly magazines, then six times a year. Now I’m on two per year. It feels really good to slow down, to have something you can craft over a long period of time, and that people will keep, rather than throw away or just leave piling up in doctors’ surgeries.”

—Tom Robbins writing in the Financial Times (registration required) about the new breed of print travel magazines that have emerged as commercial travel magazines suffer diminishing circulation.

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from Longreads Blog » Longreads Blog http://blog.longreads.com/2015/07/08/the-rise-of-independent-travel-magazines/