Taste of Prague Podcast, Ep 3 - Mark Baker

Taste of Prague interviews Mark Baker. Mark who now? Yeah, while he may be invisible to many, Mark is a writer of guide books for the Lonely Planet, Fodor’s and Frommer’s, covering mostly Central and Eastern Europe. So if you’re walking past the Charles Bridge and can’t get through because of the crowds, well, that’s kinda Mark’s fault. No, really, he wields a lot of invisible might, steering travelers in the right places and making sure that enjoy the destination to the fullest. We see his guides in the hands of the guests of our Prague food tours all the time. Let me put it this way: the man who covers Slovenia for the Lonely Planer got „knighted“ by the Slovenian government. I will make it one of my top 2020 priority the same thing happens to Mark in the Czech Republic.

Mark is a fascinating guy. Hailing from Ohio and having majored in journalism at the University of Miami, he worked in Vienna for The Economist group and Bloomberg when the Berlin Wall fell. Then he got to Prague on a writing assignment and… well, never left would not be entirely correct, but he’s still here 28 years later. He was one of the founders of the iconic Ouky Douky coffee shop / book store that was the ground zero for the exact community and young local intellectuals (heck, I was one of them) in the Holesovice district. He is also the author of multiple articles about Central and Easter Europe for the likes of the BBC, the Wall Street Journal or the National Geographic. Finally, he has a fantastic website with long-form posts about his experiences living in and traveling through Central and Eastern Europe. It’s a true wealth of information and great writing: don’t blame me if you spend long minutes or hours browsing through the posts.

But back to the interview. When you think about it, writing guide books seems to be the perfect job: somebody pays you to travel and you write about it. But of course, on second thought, this ain’t no vacation. So this episode of the podcast tries to look into the mechanics of writing a guide book. Who is it for, how is it researched, what is the brief, and how do you write it. And also, we look at the future of the printed guide book in the age of the internet and the smartphone app. Mark also has a few comments on the Czechs and Czechia, having lived here - on and off - since 1991.

Here’s some of the things we talked about with Mark:

How do you land a job as a travel writer for a big publisher?

Is writing guide books a viable job going forward?

What have been the major changes since Mark started writing guide books?

Who pitches a destination to write about? The publisher or the writer?

What is the „refresh interval“ of guide books? How long does it take for a guide book to be updated?

Is there a target group defined when you write a guidebook? An „ideal reader“?

How is research travel for guide books organized? How does a guide book writer research for his own research trip:

Do national tourism boards get involved in the guide book creation?

Is the guide book author free to choose his POIs?

Do travel writers get writer’s block?

Do editors get in the way of a guide book author?

Do locals ever get to have a say what’s in a guide book?

Has the definition of the „assumed user“ changed to include multiple ethnicities, genders, travelers with mobility issues?

Do guide books contribute to „over tourism“?

How have the Czechs changed since the early nineties?

What is the one thing Mark misses from the US?

What is the guilty pleasure Mark likes to eat?