S5 E62: A Lesson From Inside Intro To Travel Journalism

Get the show’s transcript

[00:00:00] YD: Welcome to the Travel Media Lab podcast. I’m your host, Yulia Densiyuk, an award-winning travel photographer and writer, entrepreneur, community builder and firm believer that every one of us can go after the stories we've always wanted to tell with the right support, encouragement and structure. I’m on a mission to help women's storytellers everywhere break into and thrive in the travel media space.

If you're ready to ditch your fears to the side, grow your knowledge and confidence, and publish your travel stories, you're in the right place. Let's go.

[INTRODUCTION]

[00:00:37] YD: If you've been interested in learning more about our Intro to Travel Journalism Program that's enrolling for a few more days, you want to listen closely today because I'm sharing with you a lesson from inside the program called, What Does Travel Journalism Look Like Today?

I wanted to do that for a couple of reasons. First, I believe that when we embark on a new journey to learn something new, who our teacher or mentor is on that journey really matters. For that reason, I want to give you a taste of what it would be like to be part of our program. How would our lessons sound and feel like? How would it feel like to have me as your teacher? When you listen to this episode today, you will get a feel for that. 

The other reason I'm sharing this lesson from inside module one of our program is so that you can see how we really take the time to set up the foundation, the basics of travel journalism in this program. If you know nothing about the industry, you belong here. If you've been in it for a while and need a boost of fresh ideas and energy, you belong here as well.

Inside this program, we break out the six foundational modules into very easily digestible lessons. I heard the feedback from our prior students who told me that the lessons were just too long, and they couldn't sit through an hour, hour and a half of video. So, now each lesson is no more than 15 to 20 minutes long. They're all recorded and you can play them as videos or even take them with you wherever you go via a private podcast feed and you can listen to anywhere. 

What do we cover inside the program? So, it's based on the framework that I love so much called Dragon Dreaming Framework, where we go through four equally important phases. Dream, plan, do, celebrate. 

In the dream phase, we do a lot of work on our mindset, on overcoming fears and doubts that we might have about getting into this journey, and we get clarity on what we actually want from this career. In the plan phase, we learn more about the travel industry, research the publications we'd like to pitch, and get our ideas flowing. In the doing phase, which is the most important phase, we actually send the pitch out with my guidance and feedback. In the celebration phase, I share with you all the resources you need to keep the momentum going on this path. 

Of course, the most important thing is that when you join our program this year, you get to hang out inside our membership, this circle, for the next six months. If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you know that we have a lot going on inside the membership and we provide a lot of support for our members. So, I'm very excited to welcome you in the Circle as well. I hope it's now a bit clearer to you how this program is set up. We are enrolling until Sunday, May 22nd, only go to travelmedialab.co/class to get all the details.

Alright, now onto this episode, where I'm sharing with you a lesson from inside our program called What Does Travel Journalism Look Like Today?

[EPISODE]

[00:04:03] YD: Let's spend some time looking at what does travel journalism look like today? Broadly speaking, travel journalism is telling stories about destinations, people, places, news in travel, different travel trends, and any other travel adjacent stories in magazines, publications and online outlets. When I say travel adjacent stories, I mean stories about design in different destinations, stories about food trends in different destinations that people might be interested to learn about and travel to, to find out. Stories about entrepreneurs in different regions of the world that again, would be interesting for audiences to read and learn about so that when they can go to those destinations, they can be better informed travelers, better informed citizens of the world, and more engaged with the communities and the destinations that they're visiting. 

Notice that in that description just now, I did not mention travel blogs, because essentially, travel journalism is about stories of other people in travel, published on other people's platforms such as, again, magazines, or publications or online outlets. Whereas travel blogging is about stories of you, the traveler, traveling and recording your own experiences in your own emotions and everything that happens to you published on your own platform.

I want to spend some time here because this is a question people ask me all the time. How is struggling journalism different from travel blogging? So, if I had to summarize it, it's really that travel journalism is stories about others in travel. The focus is not on you, as a journalist. As a journalist, you're reporting about other people, about trends, about companies doing innovative things, et cetera, et cetera, versus travel blogging, which is really stories about myself as a traveler, and the focus is on me and on my own experiences in travel, right? That's actually the whole reason why people follow travel bloggers, because we want to get that really personal take, that really personal experience of somebody traveling to all these different destinations. 

Now, notice that the lines are really blurring. So, now travel journalists have their own blogs, and travel bloggers can do articles for travel magazines, and other publications. It's not really that if you're a travel journalist, you can’t be a travel blogger, blogger, and vice versa. But really, I want you to understand the key difference here, because they'll also be helpful to you as you craft your own stories, as you start building your portfolio. The difference is really that as travel journalist, you're not reporting on yourself and on your travel experience, unless you're doing like a personal narrative story, which we're also going to cover a little bit later. Most of the time you're reporting about other people, so the focus is not about you. Whereas as a travel blogger, it's all about you, right? Because that's why we want to follow you as a travel blogger.

Once you understand that difference between the two, I would say that immediately, your pitches to travel magazines will become better as well, because a lot of times, these are the kinds of pitches that editors get, right? It's your own experience traveling to, let's say, Namibia for a vacation and how you went there, what you did there, which hotels you stayed in, what experiences you had, et cetera, et cetera. These kinds of stories, for the most part, travel magazines and travel publications are not interested in. I repeat, they're not interested in those. Again, this is a story for your own blog, right? Where you're recording your experience of traveling to, let's say, Namibia.

However, if you have a story about a new ecofriendly hotel opening in Namibia, or a new chef, doing something innovative in restaurants in Namibia, let's say, or an annual festival that's happening in Namibia, and that readers of this publication should really know about, these are the kinds of pitches that travel editors will get excited about it. I think it's really important that you know the distinction between the two. Again, like I mentioned, the lines are really blurring these days and we discuss this frequently inside the Circle.

So, if you're a travel blogger, as well, as you're going through this program, and learning how to build your portfolio and start sending your pitches out, you contribute your opinion and your take on this in our discussions inside the Circle as well.

Now, how do you tell the stories as a travel journalist? What are the actual mechanics of traveling and reporting on these stories? There are sort of two key ways to do that. The first one is when you travel on your own, you pay out of pocket, right? So you go somewhere, let's say you go to Namibia, you spend however much time you need to spend there, you investigate your stories, you do your interviews, you do your research, and you have your story, you come back, you pitch a travel magazine. That can be a quite costly way to do it because of course you're paying for travel out of pocket, but in some cases that way actually makes sense. And we will cover this in subsequent modules as well.

The second way of doing that is working with destinations and working with tourism boards and other travel industry partners where they send you on a hosted all expenses paid or most expenses paid trips in exchange of a published article and in a travel magazine or an outlet. These destinations like visit California or visit friends or Rwanda Tourism Board. This is what their jobs are. Their jobs are to find media, and you are now part of the media. So, congratulations.

To find media to work with, to invite to their destinations to come and experience what the destinations have to offer, to assist the media in gathering information for their stories, so that then these destinations get coverage in all of these different publications in their target market. Because for these destinations, and these tourism boards, this is part of their strategy, right? They want to get PR, public relations coverage, they want to get exposure, they want to attract as many tourists and travelers as possible to their destinations from their strategic target markets. So, that's how the media, which you are now part of, fit into that. And then of course, the third part of this is that then you're publishing the stories in magazines, in websites, in various publications, and so on and so forth. 

This career path is highly aspirational, right? It's highly aspirational, many people wants to do this, it's a much more fun job than it is sitting in a cubicle all day. I can tell, because I did both. I had a cubicle job, and then I became a travel journalist, and now I travel a lot. So, it's a really fun and aspirational job. But it's also a very competitive job. There are a lot of people in this industry. There's not a very clear way of entering this industry. There's not a lot of guidance for new people entering this industry. There's very little support. So that's why, what I'm doing with the Travel Media Lab, with our bigger platform, and with this program in particular, is something that I'm really passionate about. Because when I was starting out, now, five, six years ago, this didn't exist. I have nobody to ask any of these questions, or really, I didn't have anybody to show me the roadmap basically, to how to get started in this industry. 

For me, the main draw to this profession was location independence, and the opportunity to discover what our world has to offer and to share those discoveries and those stories with the world. That's why I got into this profession because in my prior profession, as a marketer, I was very unsatisfied. I didn't want to spend most of my time on this earth, again, sitting in a cubicle somewhere. I wanted to explore, I wanted to be creative, I wanted to do something that I felt mattered in the world, and that's why I got into this.

Of course, people have very different reasons for getting into this career path. But I would say that for a lot of people that I've met in this career, what drives a lot of us is pure passion, pure passion for travel, pure passion for storytelling, and for creativity. It's not the desire to make money, let me tell you, because this career is not like an investment banking career where you can expect to make six figures almost right away. This is not that. Freelancing path, in general, is quite difficult and we're going to get into this as well in future modules. So, don't worry.

But what I'm trying to say here is that it's about passion. It's about what you want to do with your life and what you want to dedicate your life to. Do you want to dedicate it to travel? To storytelling? To creativity? You're in the right place.

In the next lesson, we're going to get into visualization, and I will tell you why visualization works. But right now, I wanted to share with you a little story to sort of set up why we are going through visualization in this program in the first place. So, like I mentioned in our orientation, welcome module, I've been in this path for about six years now. When I first decided that I will become a travel journalist, I just quit my marketing job, and I decided to go on the six-month trip around the world. So, it's traveling to six different countries in those six months. Spending one month in each of the countries that I chose, and I told myself that, “Yulia, in those six months, you're going to figure out how to get published, how to work with magazines. You're even going to start working with National Geographic, and you just figure it all out. Here is six months, go.” What do you think happened? Do you think I figured all of it out in those first six months? Well, the answer is, of course not. I did not figure anything out. 

Part of it was that I was just extremely burnt out. After years of working in corporate America, and I just needed a rest, I simply needed to rest. I needed to decompress. I needed to process a lot of things internally. But the other part of it was that again, I didn't have a clear roadmap. I just had this idea in my head that I want to travel, I want to tell stories, I want to work with magazines. That's literally all I had.

Now, in hindsight, looking back, I realized that that wasn't enough information for me to design a very clear plan for what I'm going to do in the next year. What are all the things and all the important things I need to do to start making this happen for me? So, six months came and went, it was time for me to return from my trip around the world, and I came back stateside, all my friends and all my peers continued climbing the corporate ladder, they were making VPs, and I came back to the states and I was just flailing. I was like, “Oh, my God, what have I done with my life? I have no idea what to do now.” 

It was a very low moment for me, a moment of doubt, a moment where I wasn't really sure what to do next. And somehow in that very low and difficult time for me, what happened was, I got a moment of clarity that I'm really grateful for, in which I realized that what I need is a plan. I need a plan. I need direction. I need guidance.

So, one night, I sat down, and I wrote on a piece of paper, 10 things that Yulia will become by the end of this year, and I wrote out what are the 10 things that I wanted for myself in that moment in my life. As I wrote out those 10 things, that became the basis for my dream that I will share with you in the following lesson. That became my roadmap, and my blueprint and my plan, and I now knew what I needed to do in order to get to that vision with those 10 points. I knew what I needed to do now and I started working in that direction. By the end of the year, most of those 10 points became true, and they became reality.

This is why we need to visualize. This is why we need to create a very clear vision for ourselves, a dream for ourselves that we then can design bullet points on the plan in order to get to that vision. Okay? I’m very excited for this next part of the module. Let's get started.

[OUTRO]

[00:17:26] YD: Did you hear something that resonated with you in the episode today? Maybe you were listening in and you're like, “Oh, I felt that, I've wanted that before.” If you've resonated with what I had to share today, then maybe our reimagined Intro to Travel Journalism Program is for you. It gives you all the systems and the knowledge you need to get a footing in the travel media industry and send your pitch out.

We are bringing together an amazing group of storytellers who wants to get their travel stories published. We already have a bunch of people joined and ready to go, and we're only missing you. So, go on over to travelmedialab.co/class. Read every detail that you want to better understand what this program is all about. But hurry, enrollment ends this Sunday, May 22nd. So, if you've been looking for a sign to take action on your dreams, this is it. Don't wait. Join us today and I will see you inside.

[END]