I recently read an article on the New York Magazine website titled Have ‘Best of’ Lists Made Travel More Bland?. The article examines the deluge of travel recommendation articles in the “50 best” format. I neither read travel lists nor travel often (evinced by my small number of travel articles), so the subject matter is not relevant to me. But granting my lack of context, I found the article interesting and well-reasoned, and its assessment of the travel list scourge struck me as consistent with my view that one benefit of using a feed reader as a portal rather than online reading is that it makes it easy to filter out frivolous online writing and media. The article includes quotes from travel writers. One quote at the end of the article from Stanley Stewart, who the article describes as a travel writer for the Financial Times, inspired me to write this article:
I worry that [readers] just want to be told where to go and what to eat. Not to be inspired.
Notwithstanding my lack of contemporary travel writing subject-matter expertise, I think Mr. Stewart is generally over the target, but the quote would be more incisive if it had swapped the phrase just want for expect. Taking the quote in isolation, just want suggests that readers would affirmatively opt for generic what you should do travel lists over travel essays and other article and media formats in the subject area. While preference is a factor and may be the dominant factor for many travel list readers, but it is not the only factor. Readers may expect to find writing and media about certain topics in specific formats. These expectations may be motivated in part or whole by things other than what the reader’s preference would be if presented with a choice between the expected format and some other format. I am interested in how reader expectations may be set by how readers surf the web. For example, I have written often about how many people use Google, big tech social media, algorithmic recommendations, and to a lesser but growing extent, generative AI, as a portal to the web. These media are more amenable to surfacing certain formats ahead of others. Websites which produce content such as travel lists often write to the portals as much as, if not more, than to the end readers. Taken together, how readers browse the web influences how content is structured and by extension what readers expect to find.
I am not qualified to opine on the current state of internet travel writing and media due to my lack of subject-matter familiarity. But I am interested in best practices for finding meaningful writing and media online. For those who may be unsatisfied with travel lists that purport to tell them where to go and what to due (perhaps due to some travel libertarian impulse), I recommend looking beyond Google and Bing, social media platforms (big tech and indie), and generative AI (always look beyond that for discovery) for different kinds of travel writing and media which may be disfavored by some or all of the above. I use a feed collection and feed reader to stay abreast of my favorite online sources and recommend others give it a look. With or without a feed reader, people can also consult niche search engines and site directories and follow internal and external links from interesting articles to other articles of interest.
