ABSTRACT
In 2009 an Australian Broadcasting Corporation foreign correspondent expelled from Fiji during political unrest pointedly excluded travel journalists from the fellowship of serious news reporting. “Well,” he said, “it’s probably open season in Fiji for travel writers but no one else is going to get in” (Dorney in Ritchi 2009). Perhaps we should not be surprised at this newsman’s assessment. Decades earlier, in 1988, the chairman of the Canadian chapter of the Society of American Travel Writers had decreed: “We are not qualified, as travel journalists, to take a political or an economic stand. The bottom line is that travel articles are selling tools. They should make people want to go to those places” (Loverseed in Gillespie 1988). Much of the scepticism directed towards claims that travel journalists might
contribute to the public sphere arises from the knowledge that many do their research in the field at the expense of tourism offices or commercial tourism businesses. For this reason it is important for me to reiterate here that some publications do not allow their journalists to accept free travel and accommodation. A number of interviewees in Part 2 travelled to and around Tasmania at the expense of their employing publisher or funded themselves from their freelance payments. Nevertheless, some United States publications do still accept hosted visits, while freebies are common among the British and Australian travel press (in regard to the Australian press, see Hanusch 2012b). In these circumstances, tourism offices and tourism businesses attempt to gain publicity they consider more credible than advertising by hosting travel journalists, hoping to capitalise on traditional associations between journalism and objectivity while simultaneously working to manage the journalists’ access to information and sources. When hosted writers produce brand-aligned texts, there is a strategic advantage to the tourism industry for those writers to be regarded as journalists by their readers. For the writers who accept such assistance from tourism offices or tourism operators, the moniker “journalist” – whether explicit or merely implied by their publication in the editorial sections of newspapers and magazines – can also serve as a bulwark against assumptions that bias will be an inevitable consequence of freebies. Even if the word journalist has come to be attached to certain sorts of travel writing almost by accident, it is laden with meanings that tourism public relations routinely exploit. In this chapter I consider debates about government media management
and the influence of public relations on hard journalism in order to contex-
tualise the symbiotic relationship between tourism and travel media, before looking more closely at the role of government and quasi-public tourism offices in attracting travel journalists to destinations. This leads into a discussion of sociological brand theory, which offers insights into some aspects of placebranding. From here, I return to a more detailed discussion of the attributes of place-branding that distinguish it from corporate branding and tourism-only branding but also make it vulnerable to political pressure. Using New Zealand’s “100% Pure” campaign as an example, I consider ways in which environments can be branded, before focussing on the uses of branding in broader government media management. Finally, I explain place-branding itself as a public relations practice and a set of discursive strategies intended to secure access to travel journalism and control over meanings in both the space of places and the space of flows.
