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Anyone with an interest in travel writing and journalism should check out the latest issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, which features a great article by Robert D. Kaplan on the advantages of travel writing over orthodox international journalism. The article is not available online [update: it is now; see link below], but I will be quoting from it regularly in coming weeks. Here’s a sample outtake to get things started:
“Just listening to people, to their stories — rather than cutting them off to ask probing, impolite questions — forms the essence of…good travel books. I learned this over two decades ago while trying to interview a refugee in Greece who had just escaped from Stalinist Albania. I had a list of questions to ask this refugee, but instead he preferred to tell me the story of his life. It was only after listening to him for several hours that the information I sought began to slip out.
“But such a leisurely approach goes against the grain of journalism as it is commonly practiced. Reporting emphasizes the intrusive, tape-recorded interview; travel writing emphasizes the art of good conversation, and the experience of how it comes about in the first place. It has long been a cliché among correspondents that in Africa 10 percent of journalism is doing interviews, and 90 percent is the hassles and adventures of arranging them. But while the former fits within the narrow strictures of daily news articles, it is the latter that tells you so much more about the continent.
“The travel writer knows that people are least themselves when being tape-recorded. You’ll never truly understand anybody by asking a direct question, especially someone you don’t know very well. Rather than interrogate strangers, which is essentially what reporters do, the travel writer gets to know people, and reveals them as they reveal themselves. After being with a battalion of marines for several weeks in Iraq, I noticed that they suddenly stopped using profane language when some journalists arrived and turned on their tape recorders. Whatever the marines were in front of the journalists, they were less real than they had been before.”
–Robert D. Kaplan, “Cultivating Loneliness“, Columbia Journalism Review, Jan-Feb 2006
January 18th, 2008 at 5:50 am
I find that this man is a real genius, of so much interest. I cannot wait to buy and read one of his books.
June 1st, 2012 at 7:20 am
This is one reason why no one reads even the best journalism after it’s a few days old, but good travel writing is read and reread forever.
August 22nd, 2012 at 4:27 pm
As a constant actual and literary traveler to 3rd and 4th world locales, Kaplan’s observations, historical study, political science analysis and future speculations are the best out there. I’ve long ago given up on simple “arm-chair travel” reads. I want to know why is this what I see and, what might happen in the near future? Kaplan gives well-researched and thoughtful replies. Though I am cooled by his current and past interest in military scenarios, Balkan Ghosts and Ends of the Earth were super reads, particularly for me because I was in Croatia and Cambodia at the exact time he was, seeing and wondering how these things could have happened, talking to locals, reflecting upon world history and still not understanding the gruesomeness of it all. Kaplan helps put it together.