About a year ago, I received an email from a woman whose name I didn’t know and cannot now recall. The crux of her dogmatic email was to “inform” me of the true definition of a journalist, and why a travel blogger/writer should not be so presumptuous as to use that title. I replied that...

"At a much deeper, more metaphysical level, foreign news should offer us a means by which to humanize the Other -- that is, the outsider from over the mountains or beyond the seas who instinctively repels, bores or frightens us and with whom we can't, without help, imagine having anything in common. Foreign news should...

"What you see on large news channels is not the only truth, or even the only news. In fact, often it is the bad news. If you want to hear the good news, then travel. People are basically good and worth knowing, whatever the race or culture they hail from." --Mike Spencer Bown, What I've...

"Out in the great wide world, foreign reporting can be depressingly narrow, especially in the post-9/11 climate. Sometimes it seems as if there are only two possible subjects for stories: people we should fear and people we should pity. But those aren't the individuals I met while living abroad." --Peter Hessler, Strange Stones: Dispatches from...

"1,000 people died in a rural village in Ivory Coast; this was a small news item in the western press, though when one person is injured in Jerusalem it’s on the front page as an outrage. I’d like to know why this is so. The fact that there are far fewer foreign correspondents makes the...

"I think increasingly with globalization the job of the travel writer has to be to try and peel back the surface impression of globalization and to reveal the much more complex reality. It seems to me in a sense an almost paradigmatic illustration of what a travel writer can still do today. Today there is...

"A good travel writer can give you the warp and weft of everyday life, the generalities of people's existence that are rarely reflected in journalism, and hardly touched on by any other discipline. Despite the internet and the revolution in communications, there is still no substitute." --Colin Thubron, quoted in " Home truths on abroad...

"Just look what gets written about Afghanistan. In an age when journalism is becoming more and more etiolated, when articles are becoming shorter and shorter, usually lacking all historical context, travel writing is one of the few venues to write with some complexity about an alien culture. An Obama speech, a foreign policy paper or...

"Writers are often misled by the exoticness of foreign places. Their perceptions are distorted by it. As a result, they don't consider the people they meet there as truly human in an everyday sense that they would ascribe to people 'back home.' So when I'm reporting an international story I do my best to strip...