Outside This Internet, Nobody Knows You
Most of my friends work in agencies. PR, design, press, social media—it happened without any real planning and now that’s just the texture of my social life. There are worse arrangements. The benefit is a running feed of inside information: what actually happens behind the curtain of the campaigns and collaborations that look effortless from the outside. Lately, more of what I’m hearing is making me angry.
I spent years on this journal encouraging people to put themselves on the internet. Blog, tweet, make videos—whatever fit. A lot of them did. Fashion people figured it out fast. Small digital magazines about cars and music have grown steadily month by month. The group that seems to be losing the plot entirely is travel bloggers.
Up until recently there wasn’t much to criticize. You made friends with PR agencies and tourism boards, formed collectives, wrote and photographed and shared. Admirable, genuinely. Watching someone turn a passion into a livelihood alongside their regular job, visiting places the rest of us only look at in browser tabs—I root for every single one of you.
But I keep hearing stories. A travel blogger at a Michelin-starred restaurant ordered five separate starters just to taste each one, then pushed the bill to the tourism board. Another sent a list of demands—Business Class, five-star hotels, per diems, entrance fees, shuttles, room service—to her entire group and to an Asian tourism official, the day before the flight, without telling the PR agency managing the trip. A third was flown to a Pacific island for a week, vanished immediately, and only resurfaced in time for the return journey, ignoring the entire program that had been arranged specifically around him. Every time I hear one of these, my jaw drops a little further.
And then I think about the follower counts. A few hundred on Twitter. Traffic that wouldn’t impress the bingo night at your grandmother’s community center. A blog that’s been running two years. And they’re on the phone saying Do you know who I am?
to a PR coordinator who absolutely does know, and that’s the whole problem.
Here’s the damage you’re doing. To the agencies: it’s not their job to spend every trip justifying to their clients why it was a good idea to bring you along. To the tourism boards, who took a genuine risk on bloggers as a format and put real money into it: they’re going to think twice, then not at all. To yourselves: I know people already on the no-fly list at more than one national tourism office. And to every other blogger out there: these partnerships are still experiments for most organizations. When they weigh the cost—financial and psychological—against twelve Instagram likes, two Facebook shares, and a single retweet, they go back to television and print. That closes a door for people who would have handled it better, smarter, with some basic human grace.
The rules aren’t complicated. You are not Tavi Gevinson. You are not Susanna Lau or Yvan Rodic. And even they arrange these things with more style than this. Agree your terms upfront, with the people actually responsible. Business Class and five stars are pleasant when offered—not entitlements to be extracted. If a tourism board can’t afford what you think you need, decline. Saying yes to everything and then sending a conditions list the night before departure isn’t negotiating, it’s sabotage. Either you can deliver what’s expected or you can’t. If you can’t, step aside.
Outside this internet, nobody knows us. Nobody. We are minor-league celebrities in a very small universe—and often not even that. Anyone who has built an identity on that particular foundation is living in a fiction, and should be grateful that no one outside the ecosystem has noticed yet how far from reality the whole structure actually floats. Blogs matter. But only if we stop actively undermining that argument for the sake of a free meal we’ll feel embarrassed about in six months.
So I sit with my friends from the agencies at a small bar in Kreuzberg, we talk about other things, we order another round, and for a little while we agree to forget about the travel bloggers who make all of our lives unnecessarily difficult. Most of my friends work in agencies. It happened without any planning and there are worse arrangements. The access to their thinking—what they worry about, what they’re planning, what they actually see—is something I wouldn’t trade.