Taste of Prague Podcast, Ep 8 - Journalist Joann Plocková
Taste of Prague interviews Joann Plocková, freelance travel and design journalist
Taste of Prague Podcast · Taste of Prague food tours
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Show Notes
Influencers, as a new phenomenon in travel and food, never cease to fascinate me. And I am not talking about the Kardashian lookalikes that will try to sell you anything from energy water to teeth whitening products. I am talking about the people who you may not follow, or even know about, but influencer the way you eat or travel even without you realizing it. And when you think about it, journalists are the prototypical influencers. So you read an article about a destination and though hmmm, that sounds nice… maybe we could go there next year, what interests me is who wrote that piece, who edited it and in what way, who decided to run it in the first place, and so on.
Which brings me to the guest of Episode 8 of our little podcast, Joann Plocková. Joann is travel and design writer who has written pieces for the likes of The New York Times, Monocle, AFAR (once about us, yay!), Financial Times, Conde Nast Traveller and others. And she also wrote a part of the Louis Vuitton guide for Prague and the Wallpaper guide for Prague. Talk about influencing the way you travel!
Anyway, Joann is one of the nicest writers we have ever worked with - she does not just phone it in (and believe us, we have worked with multiple journalists who hardly did anything but phoning it in, and they are, sadly, influencers too) and she takes her research and writing very seriously. She also happens to be a US expat who has been living in Prague steadily since 2007 and has a unique perspective on Prague and Central Europe as a whole.
We met in the great Ronin Coffee Spot in the Vinohrady district and chatted about her life as an expat in Prague, about the hustle of being a freelance journalist, about the success rate of her pitches (you’ll be surprised - she knows a thing or two about pitching), and about a thing that I have been discussing quite a bit: who actually writes the narrative about a destination, and can locals do anything about it? Like when Buzzfeed puts out a picture of the horrendous trdelník pastry and in a few weeks, it becomes the most Instagrammed food of Prague, while local foodies just shake their heads in bitter disbelief, is there anything we can do to change that?