The News For Travel newsletter is now a fortnightly magazine dedicated to travel and leisure. It features articles on local events, travel destinations, leisure activities, dining reviews and much more. This is the first issue since the death of Mike Wrightson, chief content officer at the N&A group which publishes the News For Travel magazine. His wife Lynsey was one of the main founders of the newsletter, and along with him, Steve Shuter, has also taken over the editorial policy and structure.
“We wanted to keep the style and feel of the original, but we needed a better platform for carrying this content,” said Steve Shuter. “The new structure allows us to make more creative, engaging and accessible material available to a larger audience, which is very important to our readers.” The result is that the new News For Travel features more unique content than ever before, and also a focus on younger people, as well as more international travel tips for the future. In this article from the newsletter, he talks about his wife’s passion for fashion and her views on how fashion should change to cater for younger people’s needs.
“Ladies, you may think that wearing the same old clothes on a tropical island is not a great idea, but it’s exactly why it is a good idea – because in the real world nobody dresses the same way on different islands. It’s actually very inconvenient if everyone dresses the same way, but when it comes to the real world, you can’t have your cake and eat it too!” He goes on to say that he loves travelling, but he would never want to go to Jamaica on a tropical island where everybody looked the same, acted the same, spoke the same language and generally acted like children. Lynsey and him decided that they wanted to bring in the young, international audience with an updated take on travel brochures and traditional magazines, so they brought in the writer from New York, Steve Shuter, who is now the country’s foremost expert on eco-tourism and writes for numerous publications that appeal to the younger generation. They were looking for someone who could help them write up a marketing plan for their upcoming trip, so that they would attract more young travelers and get more young tourist dollars for the island.
The News for Travel section features a piece on eco-tourism, which is a big trend right now in the travel industry. This is a perfect fit for a magazine that targets the next generation of travelers, since it is an issue that will not only be remembered for the memorable vacation it provided for them, but it is also a topic that will one day affect how the rest of us go about our vacations. Eco-tourism includes things like going green at certain destinations, learning about conservation and energy efficiency, growing organic vegetables or using sustainable seafood, and other new ways of traveling green. For the July 2021 july 21st trip, Lynsey was hoping to gather some “really important leads” for his business, so he says he got off the phone and began calling around to different eco-tourism hot spots. He had previously written some pieces on the subject for the New York Times, and hoped to compile all of the information he had gathered into one cohesive piece.
What he did find, however, was that most of the people he was talking to weren’t quite as sold on the idea as he was. After talking with some people for nearly an hour, he says he was left feeling like the news for travel marketers was not all that good. The bulk of the responses were from people who are against the concept of eco-tourism and want more people to go back to where they came from. One hotel executive, for instance, told him that he didn’t agree with the idea of eco-tourism because it might put people off visiting his hotel if they were worried about environmental damage, and that he didn’t see the need.
That caused Lynsey to reflect a bit, and write her piece for Slate Magazine about what she felt was the need for this sort of travel. She wrote that she felt that while eco-tourism isn’t the right way to go, it was important to read up on all the different ways that traveling can be eco-friendly. For example, she noted that she likes to take long bike trips in rural areas, as long as they’re accompanied by a guide who knows the area. She also noted that she likes to go for days without sleeping, drinking or using the public transportation. As long as she’s careful with her environmental footprint, she feels that eco-tourism is a great idea. And while reading her Slate article, I got the sense that she agrees with that point of view.