Spendthrift Shoestring

Why Stella Mwangi will win Eurovision

 

I visited Oslo last week to research a story for Gadling. I had a great time despite the sticker shock that unavoidably accompanies any stay in Norway. I left Oslo full of thoughts about contemporary Norway, about the fortress-like feel of central Oslo, the cultural milieu of various immigrant neighborhoods, and the relative difficulty involved in tracking down local contemporary design.

I also left Norway completely convinced that Stella Mwangi will win Eurovision outright. Mwangi won the Norwegian national final on February 12 with a song called "Haba haba." The robust local reception of "Haba haba," its familiarity as a pop tune, the attractiveness of the live performance, Mwangi's charisma, and what has thus far been poor competition all work in her favor.

1. “Haba haba” is simple, apparently heartfelt, and very catchy. In Norway, the song is an enormous hit. I heard it on the radio on the order of once an hour. That sort of saturation suggests deep popular affection for the song. Another index of its local popularity: "Haba haba" managed to keep Lady Gaga's "Born this way" off the top spot on the Norwegian iTunes singles chart. I believe that Norway was the only country monitored by iTunes that denied Gaga the top iTunes singles position two weeks ago.

2. "Haba haba" calls to mind several different musical genres: disco; children's rhyme; Boney M (is this a genre?); even gospel. (For the uninitiated, Boney M were responsible for a gold mine of golden pop songs in the 1970s and 1980s. Many of these were reworked traditional songs.)

3. The dance is also very catchy. Lionel Richie once said that the sign of a good pop song was not the artist’s ability to sing it but rather its audience’s ability to sing along to it. This principle can be extended to a dance routine. If a dance routine makes ordinary people not particularly blessed with an ability to dance want to try their hand at the moves, that suggests potential for a massive hit. (That said, the choreography needs to be reworked a bit. The routine needs to be tighter and there are several moments where the backing singers appear to be scurrying all over the stage without direction.)

4. Mwangi possesses great charisma, both on stage and off, and is receiving heaps of media attention. Last Thursday, she was on the cover of the mass daily tabloid VG after the vice-mayor of a small town posted some rather unfunny jokes about Mwangi on Facebook. Mwangi was also on the cover of leading gossip magazine Se og Hør last week. Inside, a feature included many pages of photographs of Mwangi with her family and boyfriend. In short, she's a very appealing readymade media figure.

5. Her competition thus far isn't very good. As of Wednesday night, 18 (of 43) participating countries have released their selections for Eurovision to the public. Few of these songs possess any sort of spark that might in turn inspire excitement across national borders.

Readers versus "Clients" in Travel Writing

Recently, I have noticed a handful of travel writers referring to both outlets (that is, publications) and promotional entities (hotels, tourist boards, and other publicity-oriented outfits) as “clients.” This is interesting. And troubling. What does a client do? A client pays a provider for a service. Usually, travel writers recognize their outlets, or publications, as clients, and publications pay for completed work. In this more or less traditional set-up, the writer’s sense of responsibility is to his or her readers, filtered through the priorities of the overseeing editor.

But if the public relations firm, tourist board, hotel, or similar entity becomes the client, then the travel writer's job is indistinguishable from marketing. If a travel writer serves a promotional-entity-as-client—as opposed to working with the promotional entity to get to a particular destination or obtain a particular experience—then the job of the travel writer shifts. Instead of aiming to serve a readership, the writer comes to work for the promotional client. In the process, the traditional ethical dance between media support and journalism is sidelined entirely.

I can imagine several bloggers I know (and like) reading the above and thinking, "yeah, so what?" But this is actually a significant issue. However chummy we might get with each other, travel writers and publicists have different objectives. Let's never forget this.

My point isn’t that travel writers shouldn’t also write marketing materials for tourist boards or move into destination branding or offer advice, solicited or otherwise, to the hotels or tourist boards comping them. The point is that these sorts of assignments are essentially marketing activities (or, in the final case, friendly recommendations) and should be understood as such. Readers are not well served by travel writers who are simply filtering the marketing priorities of hotels and other promotional entities into their published work.

What’s really going on here? It sometimes feels as if a coziness with public relations firms has given way to a more intimate, boosterish relationship with hotel chains and tourist boards. In my harsher moments I’d wager that this intimacy is the natural product of an increasingly blog-driven travel writing landscape in which traditional journalistic priorities have been junked. But I wonder ultimately if we as travel writers have simply fallen in love with perks of our profession, forgetting in the process that our job should not be first and foremost to score a week at this or that insanely lovely resort.

In order to puzzle through this last theory, I’ll share two experiences—both of which involved a few nights at insanely lovely resorts.

1. In March, 2010 I flew to Barbuda to write two stories. Barbuda is a backwater delight, the sort of place that true-blue Caribbean aficionados adore. If it is known at all, it is known for its glorious beaches and its extremely expensive resorts. For one of my two publications, I was focused on how the island might be navigated on a budget; for the other, I needed to access the island’s high-end side.

I emailed the two very pricey resorts on the island. One responded within an hour. I was invited on the spot to stay for two nights. I did so. I loved my time there. The resort delivers an amazing experience. It is very expensive, granted, although its isolation, its physical beauty, and the personal attention offered to guests place it leagues ahead of your average five-star resort. I’ve since written about the resort on more than one occasion and I’ve also raved about it to luxury-minded travel writers. Why? Because the hotel is very, very good at what it does.

2. In the early spring of 2009 I flew to another very special Caribbean resort. The resort paid for my travel from New York, my accommodations, and all my meals. This was the first press trip I’d joined in almost four years. I decided to take it for a number of reasons, chief among these was the fact that the resort's stratospheric rates were so far beyond my budget that the press trip would likely be my only opportunity to visit. The PR firm organizing the press trip was really eager to get me on board and urged me to take the press trip before I was able to confirm an assignment.

My three nights went quickly and very pleasantly. Reviewing my unpublished notes just now I am reminded again what a special place it is, how much I would have loved to publish a piece about it. I also think, if you’ll forgive the immodesty, that my notes do a very good job at getting at what makes the place so extraordinary.

I had trouble finding a home for a publication. Though the resort is storied, it’s also several decades old. It’s tough to find space for a feature about a resort that’s forty years old, especially one that hasn’t had any major upgrades recently. After extensive surveys of luxury titles and dozens of query emails, I finally found an interested publication, a gay magazine. I contacted a gay couple I'd overlapped with at the resort to make sure they'd had a good experience at the resort as a couple. Satisfied that they had, I then emailed the head of the PR firm representing the resort and passed on my news. Her response came a full four weeks after my original email:

In the past [the resort] has shied away for targeting any publications that are very niche because they like the resort to have a balance of guests so my guess is they won't be keen on the gay publication.  Have you had any luck with other publications?

I was pissed off, sure, but I was also flabbergasted. This was 2009. A recession was on. The rooms at this resort in high season were close to $1000 per night. During my visit at the tail-end of high season, the resort wasn't anywhere near capacity. And the concern was over a "niche" demographic? What did "balance of guests" even mean? I waited a few weeks and wrote to explain my concerns. I never got a response from the head of the firm or anyone at the resort. The last thing I felt compelled to do was continue to try to find a publication for a story. In fact, after mulling it over briefly I realized that I wouldn't have felt ok writing about the resort at all.

Here's the question, finally, that I want to ponder. Had my connection, my loyalty, my sense of client service been to the resort first and foremost, would I have felt obligated to continue searching for a publication despite its outright hostility to "niche" markets? I don't know. And I hope I'll never have to find out.

Brazilian Consanguinity

At the end of December I scribbled a not-quite-bucket list, a list of 25 things I really want to do, experience, practice, labor over, etc. I've already made headway on item number four, the project of tracking down my long-lost Brazilian cousins. Through my sister and Facebook I have made contact with a real life Brazilian Textor. I will need to visit Brazil at some point to explore the family connection, but I'm pretty pleased to have gotten the ball rolling.

24 to go.

Cosmopolitan London

For eight nights now we've been bedding down in a furnished apartment on the edge of the City of London. Every single day has been enthralling. I know that London will disappoint me in time, that the particular frustrations of this city will someday gather around me claustrophobically, but for now I'm floating from one discovery to the next.

London's superdiversity is undeniable, and it's exciting. This characteristic of London has me thinking about working on a London project that would catalogue all of the city's many international communities and clusters. I've been wondering if in fact every country in the world is represented in London, and in turn if the world's many national and territorial cultures might all be accessible in London in one or another way—via cuisine, cultural celebration, embassy party, exhibition, or some other form.

It turns out that the city's deep cosmopolitanism has inspired a few projects along these lines. I discovered a project called The World in One City, which saw its creators Alex Horne and Owen Powell attempt to interview one London resident from each of the world's 192 UN-recognized countries during 2006 and 2007. They made it to 189, with just three tiny Pacific countries (Marshall Islands, Palau, and Tuvalu) outstanding. Then I discovered another project with the same name, a photographic essay by Philippe Sibelly from 2005 depicting one person from each of the 202 nations competing in the Olympics. (Londoners interested in Sibelly's project are in luck. An exhibition of Sibelly's project will open at the Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith this coming week.)

I'm thinking about how I might approach the subject of London's remarkable cosmopolitanism while I'm lucky enough to live and work here, what I might be able to add to the material initiated by the two projects above.