Lakshmi Sharath

Journeys and Jottings – Travel Blogging is not always about travel

Posted: 01 May 2016 02:00 AM PDT

A new month, a new journey and a new continent.

feet

Welcome to another edition of Journeys and Jottings. This month begins with an interesting trip to a country that I have not visited till date. I am heading to South Africa and am excited about this trip. But before that, a quick update on what April was all about .

I was so swamped with work (I still have a lot of pending work to finish) that I decided to cut down on travel, unless it was an assignment. I was also recovering from a terrible flu, a souvenir from my Ireland trip. I decided that I needed to look for an intern, who will work with me, learn a bit and also travel when the opportunity arises. And when I mentioned the opportunity on the social networks I was overwhelmed with the responses. Facebook, twitter, emails – it was heartening to see the response. I also realized that there was an opportunity to create an internship programme online for those who were interested.

But I was disappointed about one thing – when I asked some of the shortlisted candidates what were they looking for , the obvious answer was travel. To be honest, travel blogging is not always about travel. A lot of it is to do with blogging and that is why content is so much important. Yes, you need to travel to tell your stories but it is also important to focus more on the story and the craft of story telling . The stories are not about you but about the destination that you are in. No one wants to see a zillion selfies of what you are doing in the place you are travelling to – but what they really want to do is to see the destination through your eyes and to travel vicariously

For me everything – from a blog post to a social media update, a photograph to a video is all about content. And having worked in media all my life, I can tell you content is king.