Skift Take
There is a mini-boomlet in the world of quarterly (or less frequent) artisanal travel and lifestyle magazines worldwide: Boat, We Are Here, Suitcase, Trunk, Cereal and others, which all go for deeper immersion than top-10 listicle-heavy commercial travel magazines. We are fans of these too.
You can find out pretty much anything these days: all you need do is tap your question into keypad. That's particularly true of travel. A quick search online for a city, and there's a glut of facts and figures, news stories, headlines and interviews.
And yet, as if to counteract this, there is a growing body of beautifully designed, weighty magazines that are very much about digging deep into a place. The geographical place first, but also the happenings, the history, the beauty and the deprivation. They are locally focused, yet global, rather than parochial; and it's not a coincidence that some of the most successful versions are labours of love.
Boat Magazine is aptly named. The office, run by husband and wife Davey and Erin Spens, is based in London, but it moves to a new city each issue. They gather up the most talented writers and photographers they can find, take them to the city they're featuring, cover their travel, food and living costs in lieu of paying them for their work, and – in Erin's words – "set them loose". They migrate for at least five weeks, and live together while collecting the content for their issue.
When Boat began, it had a strap that read 'the antidote to lazy journalism', but Davey and Erin quickly scrapped that because they didn't want to pit themselves against anything. They just wanted to do more. "Once we talked to more people and [heard] their stories, the cities were so different to how they were portrayed on the news," says Erin. They've had four issues so far – first Sarajevo, then Detroit, London and Athens. They've just had a special-edition newspaper about Derry-Londonderry, this year's UK City of Culture. N
