>> My name is Ben Cocking, I'm the Director of Research in the Center for Journalism here at the University of Kent. One of my areas of research interest is in travel journalism. Travel journalism has emerged as a particular strand of academic interest within the broader field of journalism studies, itself a relatively new academic discipline emerging in the 1960s and 1970s in this country. 

>> Academic interest in travel journalism began in the late 1990s and early 2000s and I think should be understood in the context of the journalism industry itself and some of the economic changes that it was going through during that period. Globally there was a quite significant decline in foreign correspondence and international news bureaux. Alongside that journalists themselves were finding that they were increasingly the targets in wars and conflict zones. In that broader context academics became increasingly interested in travel journalism as a significant media source of representations of different parts of the world. 

>> If we think about media related travel content we can see that it informs and encourages us to understand different parts of the world in different ways. Ways which often relate to the politics, the history, the international relations of our country. More specifically looking at travel journalism we can see that it has a sociological dimension, alongside the cultural ways in which it represents different parts of the world. 

>> We can also see that it encourages certain social practices, certain forms of behaviour, if you like. If you think about a piece of travel journalism and what it might encourage us to do in a particular destination: where to stay, what to eat, what to go and see and so on, we can see that there is a strong sociological element there that academics are very interested in.

>> What types of behaviour it encourages us to engage in and I suppose also there is a link building there between destinations and types of behaviour we come to understand particular destinations in terms of what they might offer and afford in terms of forms of behaviour and tourist practices.

>> Travel journalism has always been very closely linked to the tourism industry. The tourism industry is generally regarded as the largest industry in the world, it globally employs around 1 in 11 people in some form of work or other related to the tourism industry. It also accounts for about 10% of the global GDP.

>> The tourism industry has traditionally used travel journalism as a conduit for promoting particular tourist experiences, everything ranging from package holidays through to various bespoke high-end luxury experiences. Traditionally, the professional travel journalist has operated in the medium of print and has positioned themselves as the professional expert, if you like, who provides their readership with an insight account into a particular destination and how the reader might approach that destination. 

>> This relationship is very interesting for academics working in this area but it is a complicated one. Travel journalism seems to be very much at odds with a lot of the professional values that we associate with news journalism – objectivity and balance seem to be things that the travel journalist is not directly involved in, in the ways in which they put together content. 

>> Indeed, if we look at lots of travel journalism content it often appears to be blurred with adverts, advertorial if you like, so travel journalism is a complex area. But it is an area of great significance in terms of how it engages with other cultures. 

>> Alongside this tourism industry which it's very closely allied with, we've seen that unlike other forms of journalism, travel journalism has remained a very buoyant area. It's, in many cases, expanded in the last two decades. It's an area that has not suffered perhaps as much as other areas of journalism in the context of the internet and the development of online sources. What we see now emerging is many new forms of travel journalism: blog posts, YouTube videos, as well as lots of other user-generated sites that encourage readers to comment on to review places that they visited and so on.

>> So travel journalism is significant for what it does, in terms of how it represents places, but it's also significant in terms of the amount of it that seems to be out there in the media landscape that we as individuals engage with and consume. It's also interesting to note that alongside those traditional forms of travel journalism, newspapers such as the Mail and the Guardian that have been very successful in attracting large online readerships, we can also see other emergent forms.

>> Blogs, for example, are a very very prevalent form of travel content. Indeed, globally in the last quarter of 2016 around 30 million unique visitors visited the top 50 travel blogs worldwide, so we can see that already although this is an emergent form, although this is a form produced by users rather than professionals, it is gaining a great deal of popularity both in terms of people producing it but also in terms of people consuming it. 

>> Sticking with this idea of the representational significance of travel journalism, my own research has sought to explore this in light of the shift from print based media to more online forms of travel journalism. 

>> Recently I undertook a study looking at a range of British newspapers from tabloids through to broadsheets and I sought to try and identify the kinds of representational forms that are typical of this sort of content. And looking at a broad range of articles I identified four main forms of content. 

>> Briefly, they are the travel narrative - which is the most traditional, most prevalent and perhaps best recognised form of travel journalism. It usually operates in a first-person form and the central premise of it is really to try to promote a particular destination as a point of commodification really for the reader and encourages the reader to follow in the footsteps of the travel journalist, to walk with them around a particular destination and do the things that they are doing whilst they're there. And that form is very prevalent across the newspapers in this country from tabloids through to broadsheets.

>> Alongside that, another very popular form which is something of a mutation really of that travel narrative, is what we might call 'the list'. This is a more stripped-down form that involves tips or a top 10 guide to a weekend in Barcelona, for example. It tends to be not so commonly in the first person it's often written in a third-person style and it tends to be very much about specific details rather than overarching sort of narrative. Other forms that we find in print based journalism are the report. 

>> This is again much less common than the top two forms but it's quite a significant and important form. It tends to be one that comes into play, for example, when there has been a security risk in a particular destination or if there is a particular issue that surfaces that may affect the consumer interests and rights of the readership of a newspaper. An airline going bankrupt, for example. Lastly, there is a more entertaining form that readers seem to engage with in a more vicarious way. 

>> This might be much less to do with promoting particular destinations or particular tourist products, and much more to do with showing the reader something that they will find entertaining or aspirational. Holiday destinations based around film locations, for example, or the homes of rich and famous film stars. Those kinds of features tend to be quite prevalent in tabloid newspapers. They might lie outside of the economic capabilities of their readers but they keep readers interested in the overall package of their newspapers. Contrasting that with what we find in the online environment, I looked at the top 50 blogs worldwide that deal with travel. And in this list two strong forms of representations seem to emerge and these are quite interesting in that they're self-identifying. 

>> We have the digital nomad and the travel hack blog. The digital nomad is very much about the individual who has given up the trappings of everyday life, has given up the job, the home, all of the kind of security that we associate with everyday life and is perpetually traveling. And their blogs are a series of updates of their latest adventures and experiences.

>> By contrast, the travel hacker is somebody who provides tips and information hacks, if you like, on how we as consumers can experience usually high-end travel experiences at much cheaper prices or more efficiently. Different destinations and different routes that we can adopt to get to those destinations and so on. 

>> What we see if we look at those two forms online is some interesting developments in these modes of representation that travel journalism engages with. Underneath those two forms, a very similar business model seems to operate, essentially all of these blogs are trying to encourage us to buy into something. They may be encouraging us to follow affiliate links and consume various products or they may be encouraging us to buy a book that a digital nomad has written on their experiences of travel, for example. 

>> So despite those similarities on an economic level, on a representational level we find that the digital nomad tends to use a form of narrative that is akin to the traditional travel narrative. But it is one that, rather than placing the destination as the forefront of the narrative, it places the individual at the forefront of the narrative so it becomes less about enticing the reader to come and walk with the travel journalist in a particular location and more about enticing the reader to become a digital nomad. And the destinations become a backdrop for that new identity to be played out. 

>> Alongside those, the travel hacker again uses the traditional travel narrative format but it is one that carefully mixes with it. Links and adverts that draw the reader into these hacks that provide us with cheaper more efficient forms of travel and so on. It is one that also carefully packages up those links and adverts in a way that works as an overall narrative. 

>> The similarity there is very much with more traditional forms of travel journalism, in that we're encouraged as a reader to buy into the expertise of the travel hacker to understand them as the person that we can gain some advice and experience from, and we identify with them in that in that sort of relationship. 

>> So my research in this area has sought to explore the changing nature of representation in travel journalism. The ways in which some of these, what we might call more hegemonic representations of destinations, are being challenged by new user-generated content. Forms of content that aren't perhaps as constrained or perhaps as closely allied to the tourism industry, and can adopt very different styles of address, very different voices if you like, then they're less perhaps needy and a needing of being positive, of being very optimistic about destinations, and can be more critical, more reflective, more engaging and so on. 

>> Going back to some of the points I mentioned at the beginning, there is also a sense here of different types of cultural representations emerging. A professional travel journalist writing for the Guardian may write about a destination in a very different way to a blogger and we as an audience, we as a readership, may encounter these things in very very different ways. 

>> So travel journalism is like all forms of journalism, shifting and changing from its traditional forms of print-based journalism, moving online. And with it too, seem to be emerging what we might call "i Travel", a type of representation that is much more personalised, that places the individual at the forefront, with the destination as the backdrop. And that seems to be quite a significant shift in the way in which travel journalism is engaging with its readership and with its audience. 

>> My next research project intends to focus more on travel journalists themselves, and seeks to understand a bit more about who travel journalists are: what their role perception is, if you like, what their professional values are, and how those values are changing and shifting as they move between different mediums from print to online.

>>Thank you very much.