Posts tagged guidebooks

The decline of print publications is back in the news. With the advertising market gone sour, budget problems are bad and jobs for professional writers are disappearing faster than ever.

Oddly, print people continue to blame paltry internet revenue on the biggest, most successful internet companies that are only peripherally related to their own problems. In this week’s Time Magazine cover story a former Time editor talks about search engines, portals, and aggregators piggybacking on their content. But “Piggybacking” is a gross oversimplification of what search engines, portals, and aggregators do. Yes, search engines treat words as crawable, indexible, representable objects, but what percentage of these words come from the pros? It’s a speck.

A better focus of print media’s attention would be topic-specific websites (travel, entertainment, health, music…) who are wooing readers away with original, albeit often poorly written copy from their user bases paired with user ratings and algorithms. In travel, readers who used to rely on well-written copy from print media for things like hotel and restaurant reviews have in short order turned to aggregated review and rating sites like TripAdvisor and Yelp.

The question we asked ourselves is this: why can’t good writing be part of the equation? Solid editorial content can thrive in the midst of user ratings, algorithms, and the social internet. We wonder whether traditional media feels so threatened because the web has shown that many smart people on the ground can collectively create something much more meaningful than a few people in a (corporate) ivory tower.

We’ve set out to put this idea to the test… and here are some of rules we’ve chosen to follow…

1. Start from the premise that the quality of the content matters.

Sounds obvious, but have you read the reviews for a hotel on TripAdvisor lately? Have you read a guidebook and realized that the writer never visited the place in question? Not all writing is equal. No trip becomes a Trazzler trip without the intervention of an editor who read it and liked it enough to publish it. We have worked hard to set up our site so that users are encouraged to only submit trips for places about which they have something substantial to say. We have been blown away by the quality of the submissions.


2. Rely on a combination of free and paid writing.

Create a system to reward the best contributors, not with meaningless contest prizes but with real freelance writing contracts and jobs that pay a professional rate. We could hire more writers for less money—as so many sites do—but we decided early on that we wanted to dedicate a high percentage of our budget to hiring those writers who embrace the idea of Trazzler and have a one-of-a-kind contribution to make (see #1). We will continue to do this. In fact we have a long, long list of Trazzlers that we want to work with in the future. (Are we paying out as much as we’d like? No! We haven’t raised as much money or started making as much money as we’d like. But we’re getting there, stick with us…)


3. Surface the best writing.

Create tiers that reward good writing and deep-six bad writing. If there are multiple submissions on the same topic, showcase the best writeup first. We believe this is good—not only for readers—but for writers as well. Who wants to write a solid, intelligent piece and have it languish in a literary sludge pit?

Note: An interesting article to follow this with: Clay Shirky’s Why Small Payments Won’t Save Publishers.

We knew there was a huge, untapped creative force out there, but we’ve just been blown away by the quality of the submissions that we are receiving (both from prospective writers/freelancers and regular users). Are we on to something here? We think so.

A lot of writers have wondered what our plans are. Are we really going to hire people to write trips? The answer is a resounding “yes”—in fact we already have. Most of the trips on the site were written by professional writers and we intend to always dedicate a high percentage of our budget to community leaders, content managers, and freelancers.

But we will also always have a special place in our (metaphorical, editorial) heart for users who trazzle and swap trips with friends and contribute for the sheer joy of writing and sharing their travel wisdom. In the coming months we will develop ways to reward you, as well, through prizes and contests.

We’re just getting started, so the more users we get, the more we can build up the kind of permanent funding that would allow us to hire a constant, steady stream of contributors (subtext: please tell your friends, family, enemies, mechanic, dental hygenist, etc. about Trazzler.com).



So you can get a feel for what we like, I wanted to share a few of our favorites from the last batch of stellar submissions.

We loved motospike’s SE Asia trips. The mom in me is especially glad he braved “Death Highway” and lived to write about it.

Best international trip
Scarfing Spicy Pad Thai on Khaosan Road, Bangkok (motospike)

And on the local front, we have a special weakness for people sharing their favorite spots close to home…

Best local trip
Jumping in the Lake with Man’s Best Friends in Austin, Texas (laura)

And we also were quite taken by the quality of many of the photos submitted…

Best photos
Living Like the Garifuna in Cayos Cochinos, Honduras (changeling)
Motorcycling the Death Highway in Vietnam (motospike)

And, finally, we love writers who take a risk and write about something that 95% of the general public would probably never consider doing. This personal, quirky stuff so often falls through the cracks in traditional travel writing. There’s just not space for it. We’ve got plenty of room here.

Best “you’ll never find it in a guidebook” trip
Craning at Containers Piled High on Terminal Island, California (lars)

So come right in and write for that 5% who love to do the same stuff that you do (I’ve got a trip about driving through a steel mill in Cleveland coming soon—I have a feeling Lars would dig it).

More soon…

—Megan