My postcode has a brand new blog – thanks to The Archers

Is it local journalism? Probably not but it was amusing to see how The Archers* triggered a chain of events resulting in a new hyperlocal blog and a deep funk theme tune for my own small but dear postcode in south Birmingham. How it happened in a minute, but first, please welcome:

fuckyeahstirchley

And a round of applause for my B30 neighbour @graphiquillan who set it up, and the various contributors and curators who have made Stirchley look rather interesting if not downright pretty.

How B30 was reborn online on the night of 10 June 2010:

• A London chum of mine texted to say Stirchley had been mentioned on The Archers* that day. Kudos for Stirchley from Radio 4 and the longest running soap opera in the world!
• I duly sent a message to Twitter to alert the Birmingham massive (well, a few Twitter followers).
• Graphiquillan suggested there should be a tribute site called ‘fuckyeahstirchley’ and before my train had pulled into Birmingham from London, she had set it up and invited several contributors.
• FuckYeahStirchley then went live with the tagline: ‘Stirchley. You know, the one that got a mention on The Archers.’
• The content flowed in: recent pictures, old images, reminiscences… who knew there was so much out there on little old Stirchley.
• There was Cartland Road in a rainstorm, shots of the cream-and-blue 45 bus, a Co-op milk float (the Co-op dairy is no more), 70s actor Robin Nedwell who was allegedly born here, the now-closed public baths, the DIY stores, and much more.
• Someone else from Twitter then grabbed the audio from the show and the original Archers Stirchley namecheck was posted. Here’s the infamous line: ‘I think Jack liked having another Brummie in the village – someone to reminisce about Stirchley with.’ [Insert your own unknown suburb in here to imagine just how exciting this is.]
• Then @PeteAshton, also of B30, went one step further and put it to music – posting ‘The inevitable Archers Reminisce About Stirchley megamixmashup thingy. With beats.’ – listen all the way to the end for a lovely TeamAmerica-Stirchley-Archers signoff flourish.
• It got picked up by a writer on the show and distributed to The Archers community on Twitter at 6am the next morning: ‘Peggy Woolley mashed up by the Stirchley massive: http://bit.ly/arjMaj via @peteashton#archers‘.

And so the circle was complete. That’s how we roll in Stirchley (non-marina end). Fuck yeah.

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*The Archers (from Wikipedia): The Archers is a British soap opera broadcast on the BBC‘s main spoken-word channel, Radio 4. It was originally billed as “an everyday story of country folk”, but is now described on its Radio 4 web site as “contemporary drama in a rural setting”. With more than 16,000 episodes, it is both the world’s longest running radio soap and, since the axing of the American soap opera Guiding Light in September 2009, the world’s longest running soap opera in any format.

The Other Birmingham

It’s been a bit quiet here of late – and that’s because there’s lots going up at my first Tourist Vs Traveller experimental microsite, which has an ever-changing name but is currently called The Other Birmingham.

What started out as a feature on ’24 Hours in Birmingham, Alabama’ (yawn, stretch, seen all that before), has become a twin city matching experiment, looking at what we – that’s Birmingham UK, my current hometown – have in common with our industrial namesakes in the US, how we might be doing things differently and maybe even using some of the matches for ideas and inspiration. I did all the big fancy thinking about it in an earlier post for the interested.

This time around, I just want to point out that there are a good few matches on there already and more to come. So far, I’ve twinned:

• Bus stations
• Roller derby
• Problematic highway exchanges
• Coworking spaces
• Skylines
• Iron statues

This is probably only of interest if you live in either city, but hey that’s what niche travel journalism experimentation is all about.

For Brummies, Bhammies and ‘none of the above’, it would be lovely if you could follow the Birmingham Match Tumblr for more posts as they come in – roughly one a week at present – add this link as an RSS feed in your reader, or ask me what you’d like to know about the ‘other’ Birmingham.

Thanks and ta ra a bit.

Travel journalists! Ditch the fancy writing and just give me your travel notes…

© Len Kendall

Does anyone actually read those lengthy travel narratives in newspapers anymore? After all, travel features are really just a vanity in that the travel section is not written for you, the consumer, but for the advertisers who desperately need content on which to hang their product. This in turn funds the news part of the editorial mix – as Paul Bradshaw from the Online Journalism Blog reminds us in this Audioboo about the Times paywall.

I’ve been wondering what kind of travel writing/journalism a reader might actually want to read, now that the advertising imperative is pretty much defunct and traditional travel supplements on their way out.

As a consumer of travel writing, what do you actually want from a feature? Do you just read the first few pars of a lengthy travel article and then scan for the relevant bits? Or do you enjoy the poetic telling, wrapped up in a narrative, inside one particular (and privileged) writer’s experience?

Or perhaps you may just want to cut to the quick and see the summary or the travel notes? (I’m sure I’m not the only one who skips to the end of a feature to get the lowdown on whether the writer liked a place or not.)

In the interests of experimenting, as is the will of this blog, I was interested to come across Len Kendall’s series of visual note sketches taken at SXSW Interactive this year, a festival I also attended and struggled to write up because of its enormity and huge downloads of information. Above are Len’s visual notes on how to take visual notes – or you can visit his Posterous if you want to see the whole sketchnotes series.

I think they are cute but also show a mixed bag of results – some of the sketches make life very easy indeed, while others leave you hanging and full of questions. And yet…

I’m wondering if this could transfer to travel writing?

After all, travel journalists are trained to observe, collect and note experiences on a destination. And The Times has already got in on the travel sketching act in the form of George Butler’s Sketch Travel Blog –  of course, after June, the paywall means you won’t be able to see it, for free anyway.

I have a trip coming up soon to Paris. If my hands aren’t dead from taking notes at the conference I’m attending, then I might attempt to do create visual notes rather than write up a feature. I imagine it will look kind of like an ‘essay plan’.

We’ll see. Any further suggestions on how to ‘do’ travel writing differently, I love to hear ’em.

Behind the scenes of a travel feature – pt 5: 101 romantic places around the world

Well, allegedly. Here, finally, is the source material that more than 100 PRs created via the TravMedia/Google Docs experiment. You can dip into it for reference or use it to create a whole new feature – just leave a link to your stuff in the comments so I can see it. (Also, scroll down for links to the rest of the series and the published articles):

View this document on Scribd

The features

• Most romantic places in the UK
• Most romantic places worldwide

The deconstruction

• Behind the scenes of a travel feature – pt 1: transparency and the trouble with top tens
• Behind the scenes of a travel feature – pt 2: the commission
• Behind the scenes of a travel feature – pt 3: the seven tools of feature research
• Behind the scenes of a travel feature – pt 4: the results of the Google Docs experiment
• Behind the scenes of a travel feature – pt 5: 101 romantic places around the world
• Downloadable PDF of the research spreadsheet

Behind the scenes of a travel feature – pt 4: the results of the Google Docs experiment

Time for a quick review. After being commissioned to write two ‘top tens’ for Allaboutyou.com, I posted a PR alert and Twitter callout to help me find ‘romantic places’ in the UK and abroad – more on the problem with top ten lists in part 1. In part 2, you can read the travel editor’s original commissioning briefs, and in part 3, the seven tools of feature research are listed. Now, in part 4, the story continues…

So what happened next?

There was my blank Google Q&A form sitting out there in a load of PR and tourist board inboxes. The idea was that it would act as a collection funnel for the incoming data – and keep it off my email.

Answer: Google Docs went nuts.

Research results 1-50

• Over 48 hours, the online Q&A form filled up with 98 responses.
• The CEO of the African Travel and Tourism Association (ATTA) – spotted the callout on TravMedia and reposted the request to 400 association members across Africa.
• The PRs did all the hard work for me in preparing guide prices, product details, image sources and contact info.
• Nearly every question was answered by each PR and boxes were filled in – although many wrote an essay where the simple location was asked for, which stuffed up the spreadsheet layout.
• Reams of irrelevant material and spin were produced to make a generic place sound romantic rather than point out any actual romantic history, tradition or fact. Annoying although certainly not unexpected.
• There were a small number of bang-on-target suggestions, which were siphoned off into a UK and a worldwide file as per the commissions.
• Several places were suggested twice, eg the Taj Mahal. I ended up using both client details as I used information from both.
• I DID receive emails – but only nine (annoying but better than 98!). Three PRs ignored my form and emailed text such as a ‘nestled castle in a perched village’ or entire Valentine press releases (all ignored). Another emailed for clarification – subtext: was it worth her filling in the form? Some PRs experienced firewall issues and couldn’t access the form due to Websense, which blocks personal storage sites. Another emailed after the deadline had passed. And one filled in the form with out of date information – oops!
• My favourite justification for romantic credentials was this one: ‘My daughter was conceived there, so no better compliment to the romance of the ambience.’
• Another PR threw in some language tips on what to say in Sardinia to your beloved: ‘Non posso vivere senza di te – I can’t live without you!’
• Twitter feedback resulted in a few funnies but no major new ideas. It did have a supportive role when I had further queries, though – see part 3 for more on this.

On the whole, it was a spectacularly good response, though. What did I learn from it?

Some pros and cons…

There were issues: double postings, excessive writing, unfounded statements and opinions, clichés, spin and so on. (The original source material is to be published in the next and final post.)

But there was also great value in rooting out knowledge I wouldn’t have found otherwise, such as being able to wear a suit of armour to propose at Warwick Castle or the location of the original ‘Horse Whisperer’ ranch.

So I have to say to the PRs, a big thanks for taking the time to fill in the form rather than send generic press releases.

Some tips for PRs…

For those faced with a Google form or  journalist request, DON’T waste your time spinning your product to fit the journalist’s angle. Facts, evidence, relevance and concision are the things that stand out over pretty prose and just stating that something fits the bill. It took seven hours to plough through all 98 responses, and to copy and paste the potentials. Take out all the generic suggestions spun for romance and this could be reduced to just an hour or two.

Ultimately, it was the chancing of so many sort-of relevant ideas that made the Google Docs/PR alert route financially unviable – shoving me frustratingly over time and therefore budget.

Factoring in picture research…

Sourcing good pictures is also like entering a time warp.

The pic research for each of the 10 blurbs was another tipping point. Free tourist board or PR pics are desirable and usually great quality. But traditionally writers haven’t had to source them – picture researchers have. Now, though, gallery features make popular editorial pieces and sourcing can be part of the commission package. Even with a media library log-in, or the PR contact for images, the resulting workload – the back and forth of emails, selection and zipping of images, collating and sending to the travel editor – soaked up another half day.

Surfing for images on a stock library is faster but you can still while away many minutes looking for the right image to go with your copy.

My judgment on the Google Docs research method…

Ordinarily, this type of feature would take me 1.5 days to write, but the extra spreadsheet and picture sourcing brought this up to 2-3 days. So using Web 2.0 tools did make life easier but it also actually slowed down the work.

The Google Docs sourcing experiment is not for every time – you have to be pretty dedicated to go through this process – and it’s probably not targeted enough for general themed features like these ones. It would probably work much better for my next list piece on great rail journeys.

But I do think it is invaluable when you are stuck for inspiration and it takes only a couple of minutes to put together. It also throws up some great source material and new ideas. The likes of TravMedia and HARO offer a community of experts and the wisdom of the crowd.

Statswise, in the end 6 out of 10 of the UK’s most romantic places were sourced from the Google Docs form; 8 out of 10 of the most romantic places worldwide feature were.

An invitation to rewrite my feature…

To round off, I’m finishing this series by publishing the source material itself (the locations and romantic USPs only in order to keep it manageable and to keep individual PR’s emails and phone numbers private).

Again I invite readers to compare the finished articles (UK and global) with the sourced material – would you have picked out the same list? I also invite the romantic among you to look for further inspiration and make your own selection from the list. Meanwhile, journalism students or wannabe travel writers are free to use the material to create their own travel feature from the material – – just leave a link to your stuff in the comments so I can see it.

Next:

• Behind the scenes of a travel feature – pt 1: transparency and the trouble with top tens
• Behind the scenes of a travel feature – pt 2: the commission
• Behind the scenes of a travel feature – pt 3: the seven tools of feature research
• Behind the scenes of a travel feature – pt 5: 101 romantic places around the world (source material)
  

Behind the scenes of a travel feature – pt 3: the seven tools of feature research

So how do you research a feature in the 21^st century? The short answer is: In much the same way that journalists have always researched their features – by pulling ideas from their own head, asking colleagues, digging through  cuttings, a good contacts book, and researching and phoning experts.

But the variety of online tools, applications and networked communities should make it a) a lot faster, b) a lot easier, especially when it’s not your specialist subject (see pt 2: the commission).

I’ll try to answer whether this was the case or not at the end.

SEVEN TOOLS I USED TO CREATE MY ‘TOP TEN’ FEATURES

1 Personal knowledge/experience
Who doesn’t know that Paris is the city of lovers or that Brighton is the original dirty weekend destination? But the Jewellery Quarter in Birmingham is also on my doorstep – and I had lots of photos of it from a Birmingham Flickrmeet I attended in 2009 – so this threw in a slightly left-of-centre choice. A mix of core choices and thought-provoking ones makes for a good ‘top ten’ mix. (For the trouble with tops tens, see pt 1 of this series.)

2 Online networks
In the last two years, I have built up a community of travel journalists, PRs and friends on Twitter. But it’s not quantity but quality of connections that counts – the truth is it that is the people I have met IRL (in real life) who are more likely to respond and re-Tweet #lazyweb requests for help with a feature, such as here:

3 Social bookmarking sites
I keep an A-Z destination cuttings file of print articles and press kits but these were of no use for a themed feature. In this case, it’s easier to use a social bookmarking site like Digg or Delicious to find your keywords (‘romance’ ‘destinations’ etc). Here are some Delicious bookmarks for ‘romantic getaways’ (click to link through) – after all, why go searching for sites when someone else has probably already bookmarked them for you?

4 PR contacts
I do have a few PRs that I know personally from press trips and if they cover a destination or suitable product, I’ll email them for a suggestion. The naturist Pakleni Islands in Croatia was one, for example. But I also cast a wider net by sending out a journalist alert on Travmedia.com – a useful service for soliciting PR material either in your own region or worldwide. (They also cover other subjects, not just travel, by the way.) HARO aka Help A Reporter Out is another option, though with a US bias the last time I used it. There may be others – let me know…

5 Search engines
I used this as a quick check to make sure I hadn’t forgotten to include a staple like the Taj Mahal. While there’s no copyright on ideas, it can be tempting to lift information from a good article but it’s just not worth it – more than three words in a row lifted from a source may land you in court and all it takes is for a sub-editor to paste your copy into a search engine and you’ll never be used again by the travel editor. For these features, I did use Google to help put flesh on the bones of the suggestions, and to find pictures, but best practice is to source information direct from official sites and tourist boards – such as info on Lover from the Visit Wiltshire website.

6 Review sites
TripAdvisor and other sites that rely on UGC (user generated content) act as a useful check and balance against official sites and marketing blurbs. It’s always good to get the downside on a destination so that you can include it if need be, especially for popular tourist destinations like Gretna Green. Although, for speed, this was an easier ask on Twitter – garnering a response from the owner of a wedding car service:

7 Google Docs
Time to experiment! I’d seen a friend, @uktraveleditor, using Google Docs to source PR information and decided to give it a go – mainly because I wanted PR suggestions, package details and guide prices, but I mostly wanted to avoid an avalanche of marketing gumpf swamping my inbox – it was barely usable the last time I put a HARO alert out.

The idea is that you send PRs to the online form (eg, via Travmedia, see above), set a deadline for responses, they fill in a Q&A that you set up, and the answers are then collated in a spreadsheet. You need a Google account but it’s pretty easy to set up from there.

Here’s is the original form (click and zoom to see it at full size):

You can see I’ve included pitch details on there, who the commission is for, what it is NOT for (ie spamming or emailing), and asked some very specific questions not just to get relevant answers but to keep PRs from chancing their products. I also noted that I might be writing this up here.

The only trouble was it was almost too successful:

Next:

• Behind the scenes of a travel feature – pt 1: transparency and the trouble with top tens
• Behind the scenes of a travel feature – pt 2: the commission
• Behind the scenes of a travel feature – pt 4: the results of the Google Docs experiment
• Behind the scenes of a travel feature – pt 5: 101 romantic places around the world

Behind the scenes of a travel feature – pt 2: the commission

Now for a short post, which shows the kind of commissioning brief a travel writer might get. (Want to read from the start? Here’s pt 1.)

FYI, for any potential travel writers out there, this is how short and punchy you need to keep your pitches to editors, though perhaps with a couple of  suggestions thrown in to illustrate your idea.

Allaboutyou.com, which commissioned the features, is a portal for the readers of Good Housekeeping, Country Living, She, Prima, House Beautiful and Coast magazines. It has  470,000 unique users per month. It publishes some features from the magazine but also commissions fresh website content.

Here are the two briefs from the travel editor.

1. Romantic places UK: top 10 most romantic places in the UK, the actual place, not a hotel so people can do a day trip/walk/pop in if they’re passing without spending £££ to stay the night. If it’s a spectacularly romantic place to stay in a romance-inducing place, that’s fine, or where the accommodation is synonymous with the destination.

2. Romantic places worldwide: top 10 most romantic places in the world. Can include loved-up accommodation as with this one, as people aren’t as likely to be passing. Include a where to stay, how to get there – whether it’s package tour operator or just flight details for a place, or accom details if accom. These 2 features aren’t necessarily a destination guide but more of a general romantic travel theme. Also can you supply a pic for each frame of the above 2 galleries – if PR shots are not suitable, source a ref no from one of our image libraries.

As you can see, it’s a pretty open brief – so there was fun to be had with the theme –but there is also a heck of lot of detail work to do in finding an image to go with each blurb and also pin down prices, accommodations, travel details, etc. However, I had a cunning plan – to be blogged next in ‘tools of research’.

Here are the published features:

• Romantic places around the world
• Where love is in the air – most romantic places in the UK

Next:

• Behind the scenes of a travel feature – pt 1: transparency and the trouble with top tens
• Behind the scenes of a travel feature – pt 3: the seven tools of feature research
• Behind the scenes of a travel feature – pt 4: the results of the Google Docs experiment
• Behind the scenes of a travel feature – pt 5: 101 romantic places around the world

Behind the scenes of a travel feature – pt 1: transparency and the trouble with top tens

Ever found yourself getting annoyed at massive omissions in a ‘best of’ list or wondered where they hell the writer has got their info from?

Well, here’s a chance to go behind the scenes of a feature and see the writer’s process (well, mine,) as well as gain access to the original pool of journalistic research.

The idea is that you can select your own ‘top tens’ rather than put up with mine – in effect you can rewrite the published end result if you so desire. You can also use the info as further reading for more ideas, it’s not in a writerly style but some people will like that.

Or, more adventurously,  if you’re a fellow travel writer/blogger, feel free to mine the data to put together a whole new travel feature altogether – just let me know what you create and I’ll link to it here on the blog.

The problem with ‘top ten’ lists…

…is that they’re subjective. Recently I was asked to compile two gallery features for Allaboutyou.com: the most romantic places in the UK (below) and a global version of the same thing.

Here's what the intro page looks like

Not only are ‘top tens ‘and ‘best ofs’ subjective (unless charted by stats), but how do you measure romance? Answers on a postcard…

Because of my general tomboyish lack of romance, I started to feel the pain of writing something I knew little about. To be honest, writer’s dread set in. As my friend Christine says, ‘No writer likes writing, but they all love having written.’

So I decided to experiment – as is the will of the Tourist Vs Traveller blog – and crowd-source the answers using interactive tools and applications, but also funnel the suggestions into a one universally accessible place rather than swamping my email inbox and making it unusable.

Cue 98 detailed PR responses in 48 hours, a large number of informal social media suggestions, and a spreadsheet that would take me eight hours to plough through.

But before I unpack all of this travel feature’s baggage, and reveal the tools I used, here’s why I’m doing it and who I think might be interested.

(In future, you’ll be able to skip this bit and get straight to the juicy stuff when the other posts in the series are written but for now, just deal with it…)

Why expose the guts of a story – and who cares anyway?

Number 4 on my list of 10 New Year’s travel resolutions for 2010 is ‘Transparent Journalism’. And this is good because…

• Curiosity – readers, who never see behind the scenes of travel writer’s job, may enjoy seeing how a feature was put together.

• An exposé of journalism – people have come to distrust journalists because of spin/angles/pure lies. I think they would probably appreciate a bit more honesty, so here’s the guts of both features laid bare for anyone to see, review and make their own choices about.

• Transparency and choice – there’s only so much information you can get into a feature but a helluva lot more collated research just going to waste – maybe the reader would like to see the full set of options rather than just the writer’s choice? Kind of like ‘Further reading’.

• Traditional travel writing has a long history of accusations of lying. What happens when you make the writing transparent? I have no idea what response this series of posts will bring – I hope there will be some response! Especially from those who are disillusioned with journalism. The whole point is to tear down the traditional forms, experiment and open up to other ways of creating online travel content. (Here’s an earlier rant on this over on my website.)

• Skills sharing – print and non-techie web journalists can see some of the online tools available to them, and to know the pros and cons of using them. Techie types can also perhaps advise me of more tools I can have a play with.

• Interaction – Crowd-sourced stories create a small community of contributors for that article and break down the barriers between journalist and readers.

• Distribution – Those who contribute to a feature are more likely to follow the story’s trail to the end. They may also distribute it via sharing sites. Distribution is no longer via a newsagent’s shelf but via networks and communities and RSS feeds and the like, so journalists should have a interest in experimenting with crowd-sourcing. The other thing is that stories no longer die on publication but may come back to life again in the comments to form new stories – see the Online Journalism Blog for more this (eg the News Diamond structure for an online article).

If there are any other reasons you can think of for making research transparent, let me know as these are just initial thoughts. I’m wondering also if there may be some risks involved in doing this, and has it been done before?

I’ll be publishing the tools, results and social media stuff in future posts because this has suddenly grown into an epic. So time to wind up.

Next:

• Behind the scenes of a travel feature – pt 2: the commission
• Behind the scenes of a travel feature – pt 3: the seven tools of feature research
• Behind the scenes of a travel feature – pt 4: the results of the Google Docs experiment
• Behind the scenes of a travel feature – pt 5: 101 romantic places around the world

What will this blog be? Help me decide!

I am a freelance travel journalist. Part-time. I’m lucky enough to be invited on press trips, or arrange my own press trips, and go away a few times a year rather than just the once or not at all.

The rest of the time I am a blogger, web editor, social media-ite, sub-editing pedant and photographer. I like creating content as I go, not the polished travel narratives and end products that are commissioned.

I want a place to write up my travels so I’ve started (yet another) blog.

But how to write up? That is the million-dollar question.

And I’m not sure.

Some thoughts… I’d like to experiment with the information I collect while on a trip. I’d like to play with different structures and styles. Just get away from  the traditional weekend supplement narrative with a few unrepresentative pictures, or the online diary that’s aimed at just a few friends.

I want a place to publish my trip notes and make my journalism more transparent? Less literary end product, more ongoing process and reportage.

I always wonder at the wastage of travel journalism – the discarded notes, quotes, shots and impressions that don’t make the final cut of an 800-word newspaper article. But I have a couple of worries about doing it.

• Is there a place for this? An audience? Or am I on my own here?
• What would make it better than other user-generated content? What value does a journalist bring?
• Can it be done only independently (the ideal but more of a hobby with media budgets failing) or can it be created directly for clients (which is financially viable but may create ethical issues)?
• Travel writing emphasises personality but also objectivity. Is one more desirable than the other?
• How can I make these press trips more interactive in a useful way – taking twitrips to a more useful level?

Would be grateful to receive any thoughts people have. I have some ideas but the answers are out there with those who like to read about travel.