Ask Rick Heads Up

Tomorrow at 4 pm Pacific time, Rick Steves will discuss “How newspaper travel sections work” with a San Francisco Chronicle travel editor. This pre-recording will be part of a future segment on his radio show, but Rick often solicits questions and comments from listeners ahead of time, to make the interviews that much more valuable.

I though Written Roadies might want to know about this opportunity to ask Rick (and unnamed editor) a question or two about the travel newspaper biz. You can send an email to radio@ricksteves.com (with a phone number of where you can be reached) or submit questions here. I noticed these two questions already submitted on Rick’s site:

1) For beginning freelancers, is there ever a demand for humor travel writing in newspapers?

2) As a travel journalist, I’ve witnessed first-hand the way that many magazine articles are driven by the advertising dollars they could potentially bring in to a publication rather than their benefit to the reader. Even magazines that claim to not accept free travel seem to adopt more of a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy with their freelance contributors. It has made me very skeptical of any advice or review I come across in a travel magazine. Are travel books inherently less biased because they don’t need to court advertisers?

No guarantee that these will make it to the actual recording, but I’ll try hard to remember to post about the interview once it goes live sometime in the next six months.