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The 101 Best West Coast Experiences Special Section 2024

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Guide To The LA Travel Show

January 13, 2014 / 5:00 AM PST / KCAL News

LA Times Travel Show Los Angeles Convention Center 1201 S Figueroa St. Los Angeles, CA 90015 (213) 741-1151 www.latimes.com/travelshow

2014 is upon us, so make it your resolution to travel more this year and start your journey with a visit to the Los Angeles Times Travel Show. Hosted by the Los Angeles Times, the must-attend SoCal event, taking place January 18th and 19th at the L.A. Convention Center, encourages any wanderlust. Catharine Hamm, Editor of the Times Travel section, says that "travel provides endless opportunities to collect experiences and develop a deeper connection to the world." If you are a travel enthusiast or just interested in traveling, visit the Travel Show to share stories, gather tips, and be inspired to plan travel for the coming year.

In the LA Times area, you can learn from award-winning journalists through a full schedule of mini-seminars on topics including visiting Europe, "Postcards from the West," international sports events, music festivals, travel tech, traveling on a budget, and travel safety. Head to the Flavors of the World kitchen as internationally acclaimed chefs will be serving up cooking demos (with samples!) of regional fare. And, when you're ready to book your travel, American Express Travel Representatives will be on site to help you and create personalized itineraries, while special show-only packages and giveaways will be available from various destinations and tour companies. Short films, reader submitted vacation movies, and live cultural performances fill the weekend schedule.

In addition to helping you dream up and eventually plan travel, the event will also feature a lineup of celebrity speakers including Alyssa Milano, current UNICEF Ambassador and host of "Project Runway All Stars;" Adam Richman, host of "Adam Richman's Fandemonium" and author of "America the Edible;" Henry Rollins, author of "Smile, You're Traveling;" and Arthur Frommer, acclaimed publisher of more than 340 Frommer's travel guides.

Advance tickets are available for $8 (using code Travel2014); $10 at the door. LA Times members can access two-for-one ticket discounts.

For tickets and more information, visit www.latimes.com/travelshow .

View Guide To The LA Travel Show in a full screen map

Katie Bodell is the Blog Editor for Trekaroo, the largest family travel website in the U.S. She is also a freelance writer, a happy wife to her best friend, and a mom to three sweet California girls. See more on: Trekaroo | CheapOair | Google+ | Twitter .

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High-speed rail board supports new recommendations for L.A.-to-Anaheim segment

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The California High Speed Rail Authority’s board of directors supported new recommendations for a planned rail segment between Los Angeles and Anaheim, clearing it for a critical environmental review after the initial proposal received pushback from the community.

The final environmental report is expected to take more than a year to finish, outgoing Chief Executive Brian Kelly said at Thursday’s board meeting, calling it the “final requirement we have on environmental documentation for phase one of the high-speed rail system” in compliance with federal grant obligations.

The first phase to connect the state includes a 494-mile rail line from Anaheim to San Francisco. Construction is currently underway on a 119-mile stretch in the Central Valley.

Recommendations for the 33-mile rail segment from Los Angeles to Anaheim includes four mainline tracks that would be used by the bullet train, other passenger rail and BNSF freight trains. It eliminates the initial plan to develop a freight facility for BNSF, which owns the railroad stretch from Los Angeles to Anaheim, in the city of Colton that would have housed trains not in operation. The idea received pushback from the Colton community and from BNSF.

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California’s high-speed rail is a decade off-schedule and is expected to cost $100 billion more than initially planned.

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The recommendations include a train maintenance facility at either E. 15th Street in Los Angeles or E. 26th Street in Vernon, at-grade crossings in Anaheim where the highway and high-speed rail line would be level, and no intermediate stations. The proposed line would include underground, above-ground and surface-level portions.

The budget for these new recommendations would be about $6.9 billion instead of the previous estimate of more than $9 billion. The drop in cost is due in part to the loss of the Colton facility.

The authority said it’s working to extend construction from Merced south to Bakersfield and plans to showcase mockups of the train at California’s State Fair in Sacramento in July. While progress inches forward, the board continued to stress the need for a clear vision amid the many challenges.

“I want to make sure that we don’t look at this as another commuter rail, and that we think about the bigger picture as we go along,” board member Lynn Schenk said. “We have to look to the future to make sure that this is going to be high-speed rail: San Diego, L.A., Central Valley to the Bay Area.”

Board Member Martha Escutia asked for a deeper understanding of how contracts are procured for different construction and production projects.

“I see the schedule of all these multimillion-dollar ... contracts and I feel very reluctant to vote on this because I just want to make sure that the process is fair,” she said, stressing the need for impartiality.

Kelly said that the “procurement process we run is open, fair, transparent.”

“If any board member wants to review the scoring, we can make that available to the board members to do so,” he said.

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April 6, 2024

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Colleen Shalby is a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. She has covered education, the pandemic, the vaccine rollout and breaking news throughout California. She was part of the team that was a 2020 Pulitzer Prize finalist for coverage of a dive-boat fire off the Santa Barbara coast. Shalby grew up in Southern California and graduated from George Washington University. She previously worked for PBS NewsHour and joined The Times in 2015.

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Times Insider

A Travel Series Gets a Post-Quarantine Reboot

Travel editors are aiming to keep 36 Hours recognizable, but fresh.

By Katherine J. Igoe

Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.

By early 2020, The New York Times’s 36 Hours column had been running for nearly two decades. The series — one of the Travel section’s longest-running — offers readers a recommended itinerary for a weekend trip in a bustling location. It is, by nature, destination-oriented, offering travel guides for a variety of places like Berlin, Milwaukee and Yokohama ; accordingly, it was the first column put on pause when the Covid-19 pandemic began.

Now, 36 Hours is finally back. And to kick off the reboot, the editors chose a particularly nuanced, challenging location: New York.

The column’s return has been long awaited. During the height of Covid, the Travel desk primarily focused on pandemic-related news and service journalism: how and where to travel safely, how to navigate a country’s evolving restrictions and how to spend free time at home . But through a combination of site metrics and reader comments, the Travel editors noticed that readers were still interested in far-flung travel articles.

“We’ve slowly started to add back in stories — first domestic, close-by travels, staycation-type pieces,” said Amy Virshup, the Travel editor. “And we’ve gradually been widening our geographic horizons again to include domestic travel and international travel.”

In November 2018, when Ms. Virshup wrote about the future of the Travel section , she shared her plans to “reboot our travel journalism for the digital age.” The pandemic supercharged these plans, and the new 36 Hours column includes new features that make it more digital-friendly. Each column starts with a bulleted list that quickly identifies key spots on the itinerary. The column also now features a downloadable Google map with pinned locations — great for those following the guide on their phones.

The Travel desk collaborated with two editors on The Times’s Digital News Design team, Gabriel Gianordoli and Sarah Almukhtar, who reimagined the format and feel of 36 Hours, creating a custom template for the series and developing some of the new features. The two teams worked closely together to ensure that the rebooted 36 Hours was more interactive and easy to navigate.

Now, readers can immerse themselves in the story, skim it for the main points or, if they’re on the go, skip to the bulleted list to find interesting landmarks. “If you don’t really care to follow in the footsteps of our writer as they go through this journey through the city,” Ms. Virshup said, “you can choose your own adventure.”

But the tone of the series — voice-y, personal, intelligent — is the same. When 36 Hours began, writers documented their own experiences as visitors. But the series evolved and is now often written by locals of the destination. Identifying the right writers and highlighting a diversity of perspectives are the most important aspects of crafting the series.

Once a piece is assigned, the writer and editors discuss what to include (food, culture, nightlife, history) and how to factor in time to travel from spot to spot. The photo editor Phaedra Brown sends a local photographer a list of locations to shoot. (The rebooted column features more photos than ever.) Photos are taken as close as possible to the publication date so that the column presents the destination at its most authentic, said Suzanne MacNeille, a senior staff editor who has worked on 36 Hours since 2013.

Stories include lodging and dining options at various price points: An expensive dinner spot might be accompanied by cheaper alternatives or followed by an inexpensive breakfast the next day. And since 36 Hours features a location only once every three years or more, recommendations work for many seasons and circumstances — and will still feel fresh if Covid-related restrictions delay travel once again.

“What’s nice about 36 Hours is it’s really offering a weekend you can do,” said Tacey Rychter, an editor on the Travel desk who works on the column. “It’s not just the top attractions that you should go see if you’re a first-time visitor. It’s a layer down.”

This approach is reflected in the guide to New York. In the introduction of the column, the writer, Becky Hughes, admits that “you can’t see New York City in 36 hours,” and that the guide offers “visitors one slice of life in New York.” Travel editors expect readers to have commentary about how to experience the city in such a short time. But that’s the point.

“We’re asking people in the comments to share with us: Where would they send people? What are their favorite places to go?” Ms. Virshup said. “There are many, many New Yorks.”

LAist is part of Southern California Public Radio, a member-supported public media network.

This archival content was written, edited, and published prior to LAist's acquisition by its current owner, Southern California Public Radio ("SCPR"). Content, such as language choice and subject matter, in archival articles therefore may not align with SCPR's current editorial standards. To learn more about those standards and why we make this distinction, please click here .

How NYT Travel Spent Its 36-Hour Winter Vacation In DtLA

Photo by Joey Maloney (Used with permission) A story called 36 Hours in Downtown Los Angeles ran this week in the New York Times 'Travel' section naming DtLA as a self-contained destination for people who otherwise might not be interested in the sprawl and scale of Los Angeles in total.

"New York-like in its density and mishmash, the long-blighted center has become an accessible, pedestrian-friendly destination in recent years; Angelenos walk around en masse, using their actual legs. The immense L.A. Live entertainment complex is largely responsible for this comeback, but the studiously vintage bars and imaginative restaurants that seem to open every other day are also part of the revival," says The New York Times .

A how, what, when, where and why chronology of to-dos puts visitors on the path of the Downtown Art Walk, Chung King Road, and the "Tokyo-ish Nokia Plaza." Food lovers are encouraged to devour bacon-wrapped matzo balls and other "hybrid concoctions" that have been "criminally neglected until now" at Gorbals, and teases with tales of Nickel Diner's maple bacon doughnut, "meat-centric comfort food" at the Lazy Ox and dim sum at Empress Pavilion.

For shopping it's a trip to the Fashion District for discount designs and an adventure through Santee Alley " where cheap meets weird in a thoroughly Los Angeles way ," as well as a tip for a personalized, three-hour shopping tour, notes the NYT. After that, it's a picnic atop Walt Disney Concert Hall, a jaunt through the MOCA, and then time to take in a show at The Redcat, The Mayan or The Smell.

Need a drink after all that walking? NYT turned to the "old-timey new bars that exploit the wonderful history of old Los Angeles ," like the Varnish, Edison, Crocker Club and Seven Grand (with La Cita thrown in for contrasting measure) before retiring to lux accommodations at the suggested JW Marriot, Ritz-Carlton or Hotel Figueroa.

What would your 36-hour tour through downtown include?

Sign Up For Paid Writing Opportunities

L.a. times travel section: $75 to $800 for travel writing.

The L.A. Times seeks submissions from freelance writer’s for their travel section. They accept submissions in a variety of departments, including guidebooks, features, “Las Vegas”, campground reviews, hikes, etc.

They pay $75 to $800, depending on which department you are being published in. For example, the guides pay $350 to $800. The “Need to Know” section is 150 words and pays $75.

All of their articles follow their standard ethical guidelines for journalism. “Freelancers must therefore approach their work without conflicts and must adhere to the same standards of professionalism that The Times requires of its own staff.”

They have very thorough guidelines on their website, which details the various requirements for each department of the travel section. Be sure to read the entire guide carefully before sending a pitch. Read the guidelines here.

The L.A. Times also accepts submissions to their “L.A. Affairs” column, which is about the current dating scene in the region. Learn more here.

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