Robert D. Kaplan on the advantages of travel writing over standard journalism, part II

“Journalists belong to a policy elite that is fixated with politics to the exclusion of much else that goes on at home and abroad. Thus, when they arrive overseas they gravitate toward movers and shakers in foreign capitals who have similar fixations. For example, overseas reporters exhibit an obsession with covering elections. But because democracy has less to do with elections than with the building of institutions — a slow process that rarely translates into news events — a region like Africa would remain largely a blank were it not for travel books. Many dispatches counter this trend, but it is the trend that I am talking about, not the exceptions.”
–Robert D. Kaplan, “Cultivating Loneliness“, Columbia Journalism Review, Jan-Feb 2006