Andy sez: “Average working folks don’t have the time to take a week off of work, unpaid, to travel Europe or any other place. …If it really was a money issue, the decision to go on one of these trips cannot realistically be justified from a financial perspective. To my knowledge, not a single writer went on the Europe trip with a story assignment in hand. …going on the trips is a serious opportunity cost for a day to day operating freelance writer. If you, or Lew, or any other such full-time writer is really concerned about financial issues, you know you would certainly make a lot more money if you stayed at home and wrote instead of dawdling around Europe for a week or ten days.”

Which leads me to believe that you really don’t get this whole gig. You CANNOT do this all by telephone. I just laid out some serious coin for a trip to Germany and Belgium, and another one last year, and I want to get a trip to Ireland in yet this year. All out of pocket. I’ve covered half the cost of the Germany/Belgium trip already, and when the checks come in for four other stories, I’ll have it paid for. The Ireland story will pay for itself even more quickly. Last year’s trip…will probably never be covered, but it was necessary, and really set up this year’s trip. I DO justify these trips I pay for myself financially…or else I don’t go.

I’m not taking a week off of work: I AM working, and I don’t just mean the laptop hours on the plane or in the hotel room before breakfast. Stories don’t come from nothing: you need material to write. If you can’t get huge amounts of story material from walking the streets of a city with a totally different beer culture from the one you’re used to; from eating what the people there really eat with the beer, not what you’ve been told they eat; from seeing how people drink beer, order beer, think about beer, and react to what you ask them about beer; if you can’t get enough material to pay for a trip from all that, you’re doing something seriously wrong, or you’re not applying yourself to selling enough stories.

These trips are something I need for education, like going to conferences or training sessions, or research trips for authors. They provide me the deeper experience and broader perspective that make me more valuable to an editor, a better presenter to an audience. Travel is essential for this “job,” and I think one of the most apt things we could do to keep the memory of Michael Jackson alive is to raise money to endow a yearly award of a travel stipend to a young and rising writer.

I’m just slack-jawed at how little you seem to get out of these trips. I’ll work a trip notebook for years, multiple stories, yarns spun at beer dinners and lectures. This is gold, Andy. Maybe you’re spending too much time on the trip talking to the other writers about whether you should be on the trip, because as you’ve proven over the past two months, you could just as easily do that from your computer at home.

I do disclosure when I accept a trip and then write a story about it. But I’ve reached the point where I turn down most of these trips because I’ve got my own agenda, and it usually doesn’t coincide with the folks doing the trip.

“People do it [go on trips to breweries in Europe] not for business reasons or journalistic information seeking reasons but because they are fun.”

Sorry, Andy, you’re wrong. At least in my case (and Steve Beaumont’s, and Stan Hieronymus’s, and Ron Givens’s, and Greg Kitsock’s…) I don’t go on the trips to have fun, just to go on a trip. I go to learn, and I usually learn a lot.

Oh please don’t say that. It bores me to tears, and I’d bet I’m not the only one. This discussion has rendered some of my favourite beer blogs unreadable recently.

Let’s discuss something more interesting. Let’s see… I know. How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

I don’t blame you for staying outside. It’s beautiful here, too, and I’m doing the same. I’m certainly ready to let the issue drop, too. In fact, I hate that it keeps coming up. I think it’s already well settled that press junkets, free dinners, etc. are all a part of the symbiotic relationship of journalists to the people they write about or the sector they cover. They certainly are in every other part of the newsroom, so I don’t think there should be separate rules for beer writing. As far as I can tell, you may be the only one who’s bringing up this issue. And I think readers already know that the press get access and freebies that they don’t. It’s what allows us to bring that experience to them to read about. Do you honestly believe our readers don’t know the way the world works?

If I took your class statements out of context or misinterpreted what you meant, I do apologize for that. Having grown up poor in an affluent community, I’m very sensitive to class issues and tend to be pretty thin-skinned about them.

To me, the value of the Bavaria trip was not about an individual article, or two or three, but about the educational value it will add to my overall knowledge of what I’m writing about at some point in the future. I suspect all of us have been on countless, seemingly endless, brewery tours. Yet I usually take something new away from each one, and each can be interesting or rewarding in unusual, not immediately obvious ways. The longer I’m in the beer business in some fashion (which is going on 16 years – plus being an advocate since the late 70s) the more I see how my cumulative experience makes me a better, more informed writer as the years tick by. Even going to a dormant hop field in the dead of winter had its hidden charms. When will it come up? It already has in one or two things I’ve written, but indirectly. So the trip helped inform me in ways perhaps our hosts didn’t expect or which benefited them, but knowledge is knowledge. And I for one will try and learn anywhere and everywhere I can. If it’s fun, so much the better. But the fun is ephemeral. What I saw and experienced stays with me far longer.

The conflicts of interest and whether of not readers deserve to know about them is much broader then beer; it’s happening right now in every single sector of our society. I’m much more worried that a General who painted rosy pictures of how the war was going while on the Pentagon payroll than whether or not Lew got a free trip to St. Louis courtesy of A-B. I know that doesn’t necessarily make it alright, but in perspective, the practices that you believe need a professional forum are almost all universally accepted practices for professional journalists in every corner of the world, from food writers, film reviewers, sports reporting to being embedded in Iraq. Once beer writing is a legitimate position and every newspaper, general news magazine and think tank has one, then that debate might make more sense, but until then I’d rather work on the other issues keeping beer off the table of the mainstream media, so to speak.

Best,

J

P.S. – I’m sorry we missed you at Augustiner in Salzburg. The train got Peter and I there about a half hour passed the rendezvous time and we, too, found out they weren’t open for lunch. We didn’t know how to contact you, so we waited a short while, then headed out to Trumer.

There’s a lot here and I’ll need some time to digest it all before properly responding (and it’s just too nice outside today to spend any time on the computer). But I thought I’d offer a few initial thoughts. I think the issues raised here and in numerous other blog posts (I am beginning to agree with Stonch over at Alan’s site that the discussion is growing pretty old, especially with little action to show for it) are quite diverse and required examination in each of their own rights. We have a number of ethical questions to debate and answer as journalists, ranging from the acceptance of samples, free meals, and press credentials, to free travel, to doing outside consulting/writing/or other work directly for a brewery, importer, or distributor, along with a host of others. I think all I’ve called for, despite some arguing here and there, is for the discussion to happen. I’ve certainly been accused of being too rigid both here and elsewhere and I’m not entirely sure that is a fair assessment as I’m mostly calling for the debate. I have my views and they are nuanced (I wouldn’t call them black and white). My focus so far has been on the bigger picture issues that really only affect a small number of beer writers, perhaps three dozen total, if that. Far from class conflict, that itself is an issue of social if not class stratification. Average working folks don’t have the time to take a week off of work, unpaid, to travel Europe or any other place. So let’s not get too rose colored political/economic glass on the topic. If it really was a money issue, the decision to go on one of these trips cannot realistically be justified from a financial perspective. To my knowledge, not a single writer went on the Europe trip with a story assignment in hand. Some may have been able to return and write about it in the papers/websites they write for, but in reality, going on the trips is a serious opportunity cost for a day to day operating freelance writer. If you, or Lew, or any other such full-time writer is really concerned about financial issues, you know you would certainly make a lot more money if you stayed at home and wrote instead of dawdling around Europe for a week or ten days.

I’m pretty sure you’re aware of the straw man you’re setting up with respect to this class argument. I’d also suggest you took the comment about who should be writing when things don’t pay well pretty well out of context. Without belaboring the point, my statement is simply this, if you cannot make a full-time living as a beer writer without bending certain ethical rules, then perhaps it would be better to practice the trade in a part-time fashion, backed up by a different, better paying job. That doesn’t mean that poor people shouldn’t write about beer (which, if that was your point, was pretty insulting, especially when directed towards someone whose law practice is entirely focused on defending indigent people). As I’ve said elsewhere, we could all make a lot more money if we simply let PR reps write our copy. I don’t think any of us thinks that is a good idea.

And let’s also not oversell the importance of trips in terms of doing our jobs as writers. Sure, it’s good to learn about places we might not otherwise know, but a trip to a handful of small breweries in Europe is hardly make or break in terms of our overall reporting. People do it not for business reasons or journalistic information seeking reasons but because they are fun. When viewed in that light, I think the importance of the trips and the justification for attending them wanes considerably.

And in terms of nuance, and in demonstration of my lack of a black and white perspective here, I think there are differences to be considered between certain types of trips (especially in light of who sponsors them). My efforts over the last few weeks, months, and years (insufferable as they may appear to some) have been focused on creating some thought, debate, and hopefully action on a topic that has too long (in my mind and others I have personally discussed the issue with) lay dormant.

As I’ve said, there are dozens of issues that people writing about beer should be thinking about on an individual basis. And those people will inevitably have very different views about what is proper. For me personally, I have little interest in the free samples, free meals, and even free festival or media credentials issues. Why is that? Because I think there are some much bigger picture issues (starting with free trips and going forward into writers who have a direct financial relationship, almost always undisclosed, with the brewers, importers, distributors, and restaurateurs that they write about) that I think should be discussed. I think these situations are rife with conflict and that readers deserve to know about them. I don’t think that is a particularly radical view, others probably do (especially those who supplement their writing income that way). I keep saying it and I mean it, I think it would be valuable to debate these issues in a professional forum for those of us who engage in the trade on a regular basis. Just because I may disagree with some views, I may be persuaded by others. I’m not looking for an organizational yes man Jay, just the debate.

Best,

Andy Crouch

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