Jack Shafer in Slate: “Every profession needs what academics call an “occupational mythology” to sustain it, a set of personal and social dramas, arrangements, and devices, as sociologist Everett Hughes put it, “by which men make their work tolerable, or even make it glorious to themselves and others.” As hard drugs are to the hard-rocker…
Daily Archives: 4 January 2008
Why is travel journalism so mediocre, dishonest?
“Hip”, “happening”, “sun-drenched”, “undiscovered”, “magical”, “eat this”, “do that” , “go there”… Why does all travel journalism seem so manufactured and artificial? Because, says Chuck Thompson, author of Smile when you are lying: “Almost all magazines exist for a single purpose—to move product,” he writes. “As conditioned purveyors of the sell-sell-sell mentality, magazine editors routinely…
IJR 