ormegolf, you may like to read this piece from the Good Hotel Guide newsletter this month.......
ISSUE 29 - October 2011
www.goodhotelguide.com Travel journalism
No need to bribe or twist...
Most readers have no idea that when they read a hotel review in a newspaper that the journalist who wrote the piece will not have paid a penny. The bill for the room, meals, drinks, and often the travel, will be picked up by the hotel.
I have nothing against lubricating the wheels and the throats of the media. I once wrote an article for Punch titled “Confessions of a motoring correspondent”. This listed all the bribes I had been offered and had regrettably accepted on the dubious ground that bribing the Guardian's motoring was an absurd proposition.
I was promptly summoned by my Scottish editor, who told me through gritted teeth that the paper had a house rule that you could accept gifts only if they could be consumed within 24 hours. As sets of tyres, tape recorders, etc, did not fall within this grace period, that was the end of my days as a motoring hack.
I would therefore accept (before Private Eye points out) that my hands are not entirely clean. But what I do find worrying is how much of what is written about hotels these days is inspired and financed by PR companies. Readers need to read such stuff with more than a pinch of salt. So should the banks which have lost millions lending to dodgy groups (see the Von Essen article below).
This issue is rarely discussed by the media. But Liz Jones in the Daily Mail wrote recently: ‘Never mind about phone hacking, you need to know about travel journalism. All the holidays are freebies, and so the journalist dare not publish a word of dissent.” This provoked Sally Shalam of the Guardian to write: ‘The great thing about travel writing for a British publication is that we pay for nothing and write what we want.’
Would that were true of all hotel reviewers. Some of the stuff I read makes me wince. Giles Coren in The Times was more accurate about the prevailing culture when he wrote: ‘I never take a freebie from a restaurant, though I have from the odd hotel, because that seems to be how travel writing rolls.’ As newspapers have become impoverished, they claim that they can no longer afford to pay their own way. But how many of their readers know this?
An exception to this freebie culture is the Sunday Times which next Sunday (October 9th) will publish a review of the Guide's latest César award winners. The paper paid the expenses of its travel journalist to stay anonymously at all ten César award winning hotels ( a very expensive exercise) to see if he agrees with our judgments. It certainly keeps us on our toes. More important, it shows that there is much to be said for working for a successful and profitable newspaper.
Adam Raphael
