TRAVEL JOURNALISM AND ENVIRONMENTAL CONFLICT

Abstract

Although travel journalism can have considerable influence in one of the world's largest marketplaces, a definition remains elusive and the genre continues to be under-explored. The explanation may be a scholarly ambivalence towards the use of the word “journalism” to describe texts characterized by subjectivity and a conspicuous proximity to tourism advertising. Yet not all travel journalism is tourism's handmaiden. Drawing on examples of US and British newspaper and magazine travel articles that criticize forestry practices in Australia's island state of Tasmania, this paper attempts to understand better the genesis and deployment of political comment in a genre routinely subsidized and besieged by government public relations. The paper argues that travel journalism that subverts traditional expectations of the genre through its mediation of environmental conflict can usefully be understood as a textual manifestation of the cosmopolitan interplay of culture and environment arising out of transnational and cross-genre discourse. Noting Ulrich Beck's faith in the media to promote active political cosmopolitanism, the paper hypothesizes that further analysis of travel journalism has the potential to provide surprising insights into journalism, public relations and the mediation of global concern.

Keywords:

• public relations
• Tasmania
• tourism
• travel journalism

Acknowledgements

My thanks to my PhD supervisor Libby Lester for suggesting I consider the theory of cosmopolitanism in my study of travel journalism. Thanks also to two anonymous reviewers of the first draft of this paper for their thoughtful suggestions.

Notes

1. The author was employed by Tourism Tasmania from mid-2002 until mid-2008. My first direct contact with Miles, Greenwald and Jenkins was in 2009, when I invited them to be interviewed for my PhD project. Gill and Flanagan were not interviewed.

2. While Outside magazine presents itself as more than a travel magazine, adventure travel is one of its primary focuses. Certainly, Tourism Tasmania values its praise highly enough to include it on the “Accolades” page of its website, where it writes, “The prestigious magazine Outside rated Wineglass Bay in the world's top 10 beaches” (Tourism Tasmania nd a). According to the website, the rating was awarded in 2000–2001.

3. See http://www.discovertasmania.com (accessed 6 May 2009).

4. See http://www.discover-tasmania.com.au (accessed 8 May 2009). The prior establishment of an associated environmental website www.discover-tasmania.com was reported in the Hobart newspaper the Mercury in November 2002, when “[a]ngry Tourism Tasmania chief executive Rob Giason labeled it a ‘direct hit’ on the state's reputation which threatened visitor numbers and could have a multi-million-dollar impact” (Bailey, 2002). “Eye on the Forests” is text in the banner and mission statement of www.discover-tasmania.com.au that links through to www.discover-tasmania.com. In 2003 a complaint by Tourism Tasmania against use of the website address www.discover-tasmania.com.au by the creator and operator of that site was denied by the World Intellectual Property Organization (2003).

5. “Remote Possibilities”, un-subbed version of article published in the Financial Times, provided by Miles, email, 9 March 2009.