Dear Students in Travel & Sports Writing, May 2019 to Jump Start Our
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Dear students in Travel & Sports Writing, May 2019 To jump start our discussion of these nonfiction styles, you will read several essays and complete two assignments this summer. In the packet below, you will find eight essays: 1. “Inside the Mad, Mad World of TripAdvisor” (Vanderbilt pp. 1-11) 2. “The No-Stats All-Star” (Lewis, pp. 12-27) 3. “Take Nothing, Leave Nothing” (Winchester, pp. 28-34) 4. “House of Hockey” (Swift, pp. 35-45) 5. “Trapped” (Ralston, pp. 46-61) 6. “The Unabashed Beauty of Jason Brown on Ice” (Lockwood, pp. 62-66) 7. “How an Extreme Athlete Uncovered Her Own Genetic Flaw” (Yong, pp. 67-74) 8. “Colin Kaepernick Has a Job” (Browne, pp. 75-93) 9. YOUR CHOICE … Find an article in either the sports or travel genre (Outside/Backpacker/National Geographic/Sports Illustrated/Sporting News are a few magazines to help start you off). Article should be at least 750 words. When you have read the essays, please choose two or three of the essays. You will write a brief essay (two or three body paragraphs) analyzing them in relation to one another, both comparing and contrasting. Consider, as you write, what standards readers should use to evaluate short nonfiction texts, and make use of those standards in your analysis. Please type this response. Also, write a 1+ page reflection on your choice essay. This is a conversational response piece, but should be well-edited and well-thought out. These are questions you might consider responding to: Why did you choose it? How many articles did you consider before choosing this one? What about the writing style connected for you? What is the author’s purpose? How is organized? What made this article stand out to you? Your responses are due on the first day of class. If you have questions, feel free to email me -- better earlier in the summer than at the last minute. Enjoy the summer! Brian Parsons [email protected] Inside the Mad, Mad World of TripAdvisor By Tom Vanderbilt in Outside (March 13, 2015 The Koryo Hotel does pretty well on TripAdvisor, all things considered. The Internet never—and I mean never—works. The towels are “thin,” the sheet thread count low, and the milk powdered. Watch out for the “giant mutant cockroach snake hybrid“ in the shower. Guests even have to pay for the pool. Still, the Koryo, a pair of dull beige towers connected near the top by a sky bridge, is the number-one-rated hotel on TripAdvisor for Pyongyang, North Korea. Despite its many faults, it garners three and a half out of five “bubbles,” in TripAdvisor parlance (so as not to be confused with the star systems that signify quality in hotels and restaurants), across nearly 90 reviews. Perhaps this is no surprise. People come expecting the worst, and with expectations so dismally calibrated, something like hot water starts to sound pretty amazing. Reviewers carefully note that many of the hotel’s quirks—you can’t walk out the front door unaccompanied, for instance—are out of the manager’s hands. (You’ll have to take that up with the Supreme Leader.) It may not be the Ritz-Carlton, the sentiment goes, but considering the fact that you are staying in the marquee property in the showcase capital of the world’s most repressive regime, it may be best to, as one reviewer counseled, “just chill out, have some beers, some expired Oreos from the gift shop and make friends with the other tourists.” The fact that so many people are so earnestly reviewing a hotel that they have not themselves chosen (accommodations are selected by government-sanctioned tour operators), in a situation in which management is hardly likely to care, in a country where the Internet-driven wisdom of crowds is a remote fiction, speaks to the curious power of TripAdvisor, which, in its decade and a half of existence, has changed travel as we know it. The reviews demonstrate the abiding urge to share and the faith that sharing—even for that one-more-grain-of-sand 13,786th reviewer of the Bellagio Las Vegas—will make someone else’s experience, or quite possibly everyone’s experience, that much better. No matter your destination, you will, at some point in your research, visit TripAdvisor. The company, with the humble mantra “real hotel reviews you can trust,” has become—on a rising tide of 200 million user reviews and counting—a travel-industry Goliath, able to turn obscure hotels into sold-out hot spots, carry new flocks of visitors on digital word of mouth to quiet destinations, even rewrite the hospitality standards of entire nations. For travelers the impact has been equally profound. What begins as a simple search-engine query becomes an epic fact-finding mission that leaves no moldy shower curtain unturned, a labyrinthine choose-your-own-adventure—do you read the one-bubble rant?—in which the perfect hotel always seems just one more click away. For all the power of the service, it raises deep questions about travel itself, including, most pressingly, who do we want—who do we trust—to tell us where to go? “The future,” Don DeLillo once wrote, “belongs to crowds.” Are we there yet? Many years ago, when the Internet was still just hobbyist bulletin boards in a handful of homes, I went backpacking with a friend across Mexico. Like everyone did back then, we carried a Bible-worn copy of Let’s Go: Mexico, which represented pretty much our entire universe. Its recommendations were usually decent but were based largely on one college student’s legwork. Who knows if he actually looked at the room or just hurriedly scanned the lobby? What was her standard for “clean”? The first night in Mexico City, our hotel had small creatures in the walls, unmentioned by the guide. Asking around, we eventually landed in a cheap and obscure place. That’s how it worked: We were in an information-poor environment. We gleaned recommendations from the gringo grapevine. You never quite knew what to expect, but wasn’t that why you were traveling? Barbara Messing, TripAdvisor’s chief marketing officer, remembers those days, too. “There was that community of travelers in East Africa or South America who were circling the hotels in Lonely Planet that were really good or telling you what was closed or had good breakfast,” she recalls to me by phone from the company’s headquarters, near Boston. “That entire offline community got imported onto TripAdvisor.” And how. The site now has reviews of hotels, restaurants, and attractions in more than 45 countries, with contributors (all unpaid) adding their comments at a rate of 115 per minute. Some 890,000 hotels are listed on the site, and TripAdvisor boasts one of the largest collections of user-contributed travel photographs in the world. (The collection of shower-drain photos alone could fill a museum.) On its myriad forums, even the most banal query (e.g., “Does this resort have 110v plugs in its rooms?”) seems to excite a flurry of replies, often within 24 hours. Though the site sometimes seems like a place people go to air complaints, as Messing tells me, “In general, our reviewers are a happy bunch.” For hotels the average rating is above four bubbles. Because people use the site to plan their trips, she says, the ratings can be as much about “thanking the community for pointing them in the right direction.” In other words, reviews of TripAdvisor itself. These days, you can hardly visit a restaurant in a beach town without seeing the TripAdvisor owl in the window or finish a bike tour without being implored, via follow-up e-mail, to leave your feedback on the site. “It hasn’t changed travel like jets changed travel,” says Henry Harteveldt, an industry analyst with Atmosphere Research Group. But “it has changed the satisfaction we can get from a trip and the ability to better understand the destinations.” Where travel is concerned, Harteveldt says, “information becomes instantly static and stale. With TripAdvisor, you know if a hotel that a few years ago was fresh and wonderful is still fresh and wonderful—or has become tired.” More important, he says, it “has empowered the consumer by making hotels and other related businesses far more transparent.” Sure, guests always had the ability to complain to the front desk or on one of the comment cards left on the nightstand, but that information went no further than the management. (As Heads in Beds author and former hotel employee Jacob Tomsky notes, “We used to confidently toss comment cards in the trash”—or, as they also referred to it, the “t-file.”) Now one’s smallest observation—the ecstasies of the rainfall showerhead, the disappointments of the room-service toast—has a global audience. Mount McKinley, Alaska (5 bubbles) "An excellent mountain. Beautiful and majestic." "Loved the pure beauty, the surrounding glaciers, mountain ranges and heaps of snow. Nothing to dislike unless you do not like snow or beauty." (3 bubbles) "Denali Park big disappointment. I was expecting animals running around everywhere.... Not going to happen. When you do see them you will usually need binoculars.... You can sit in your home and see much more on a TV screen [than] you will ever see there." Those reviews carry demonstrable weight. A study by Cornell University’s Center for Hospitality Research found that for every percentage point a hotel improves its online reputation, its “RevPAR” (revenue per available room) goes up by 1.4 percent; for every point its reputation improves on a five-point scale, a hotel can raise prices by 11 percent without seeing bookings fall off.