"Locals" Vs. Expert Travelers: Who Do You Trust?

With the rise of social media and influencers has come the editorial rush to use "locals" for travel reporting.

In the old days (even as long ago as five to ten years ago), career travel journalists would be sent on assignment to places around the world to come back with good, solid reporting on what people would want to know if they went to Bora Bora, or Venice, or Milwaukee. 

Today, editors want correspondents who live in in the places they write about--"local" experts.

I sometimes find that this rush to exclude professional reporters who are travelers from reporting on travel to places they don't live in, to be problematic at best and boring and uninformative at worst.

I recently read a piece on Venice by a "local" expert whose choices for "must dos" were every single major tourist trap on everyone's bucket list. There were no secrets revealed, no essence shared. 

I also recently read a brilliantly evocative piece on a small Spanish city, written by a reporter colleague who had traveled there and was a stranger in town--using all his facilities of sensitivity to color, taste, contour of experience to shape it for similar travelers who would take the same trip.

So when editors insist that they can only take pieces by writers who live in the town or village or hamlet they are writing about it makes me sad for the wasted stories written by curious souls who live to open themselves up to "otherness" and share it with the world.

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