This ‘Old-Fashioned’ Travel Tip Is My Favorite Way to Find Local Haunts

No one knows a place like the journalists who call it home.

I could’ve sworn I was close enough to touch the cupola of Florence’s Santa Maria del Fiore. In reality, I was perched at an open-air café table, cappuccino in hand, surrounded not by tourists, but by locals on their lunch break. The catch? The café was tucked on the third floor of a library. And that jaw-dropping view of the Duomo? It is arguably Florence’s best-kept secret, which I’d uncovered the old-fashioned way: by reading the local paper.

In our “always online” era, it’s easy to forget that some of the best travel intel still lives in print, especially in the publications that report on the places we’re desperate to explore. But I’ve learned I’m something of an outlier; a current-events junkie who prefers to find her way around a city by flipping through headlines instead of hashtags.

I blame my mother, a former travel agent with a near-supernatural talent for collecting every free leaflet, weekly, and tour pamphlet in sight. On her visits to see me in Charleston, South Carolina, my former home of 18 years, she’d amass such a mountain of printed matter that by the time I dropped her at the airport, my car looked less like a vehicle and more like a rogue brochure delivery service.

I now find myself doing the same. But what I really love is uncovering a destination’s local newspaper or regional magazine ahead of my visits. That’s how I stumbled upon that choice seat at Florence’s Oblate Library last summer. Rather than just Google “things to do in Florence,” I looked up “Florence, Italy English language publications” and came upon a search result for The Florentine, a gorgeous local printed monthly that covers the city’s news, arts, and culture. In the months leading up to my trip, I became a regular reader, which introduced me to a story on “Kid-friendly Cafes in Florence.” Voila: Biblioteca delle Oblate!

This above-the-fold habit of mine has paid off across the globe. Take Edinburgh, for example. Instead of blindly snapping up tickets to the Fringe Festival like a tourist on autopilot, I did a little intel work (i.e., subscribed to The Scotsman, the city’s daily paper), and combed through its coverage for the festival’s must-sees. Was it worth coughing up a few bucks for a short-term sub? Absolutely. That’s how I landed center-row for Daniel Foxx, the razor-sharp comic and online phenom who ended up being a highlight of my Scotland trip.

I used the same playbook for my trip to St. Lucia. Before touching down, I folded the St. Lucia Times into my morning media scroll. That scrappy little outlet gave me more insight into the island’s complicated relationship with tourism than any glossy resort brochure ever could, a fact that shaped my visit and pushed me to see beyond the gated and curated landscape of my bougie resort.

I’ll admit it, I’m biased. As the former editor-in-chief of Charleston City Paper, the city’s only independent alt-weekly, I’ve got a soft spot for local reporters. They’re the ones pounding the pavement, digging up stories that too often get repackaged by bigger outlets and better-known bylines. I certainly saw this happen in the Holy City over and over and over again. We’d do the grunt work on a story only to watch a national writer parachute in, piggyback off our reporting, and forget to cite us as their source. But the real reason I’ll always advocate for a steady diet of destination-specific local news? No one knows a place like the journalists who call it home. Sure, plenty of national pubs do a bang-up job highlighting global getaway spots—and I’m a part of that industry these days—but if you want to understand a place on a cellular level, to really feel its pulse, you have to turn to the locals.

That’s why I’ll be thumbing through the Cody Enterprise all month—Cody, Wyoming’s hometown daily, founded by none other than Buffalo Bill himself back in 1899. I’ve got Yellowstone on the docket, and when the local front-page reads “bison goring at the park,” you better believe I’m paying attention. I’d much rather get the scoop from the folks living there than from some content farm found half a continent away.

So, before your next adventure, try skipping the listicles and go straight to the source instead. Pick up the local paper, subscribe to a hometown rag, or dive into a regional mag. You might just uncover the best seat in the city—Duomo view included—and see a place not as a tourist, but as an informed, curious guest. Trust me, the headlines hit differently when they double as your travel itinerary.