Writing & Content Strategy
How a state tourism board found the right writer to tell stories that had been waiting too long to be told — and what happened when the writing actually did them justice.
The Virginia Tourism Corporation needed editorial content for a Black heritage travel initiative — itineraries that would direct visitors to historic sites, cultural landmarks, and community-rooted businesses across the state. The ask was straightforward. The execution required a lot more than a listicle.
Heritage travel writing fails when it treats history as backdrop. The itineraries needed to give readers a reason to go — context that made the destinations feel worth the drive, not just worth a checkbox. That meant doing the research, reading the history, and writing copy that treated readers as people who wanted to understand something, not just visit something.
The work also required a consistent editorial voice across multiple itineraries covering different regions of Virginia — a harder problem than it sounds when the subject matter shifts from Reconstruction-era churches in the Shenandoah Valley to Harlem Renaissance figures from Richmond's Jackson Ward.
The stories were already there. They just needed someone willing to go find them instead of writing around them.
— On the VTC Black Heritage Trail project
I wrote and edited a series of heritage travel itineraries for virginia.org, covering Black history and culture across the Commonwealth. Each itinerary included destination copy, historical context, and editorial framing — written to hold together as a piece of writing, not just a formatted list of stops.
Every itinerary went through a research phase, a drafting phase, and an editorial pass for consistency of voice and accuracy of detail. The goal was copy that could stand up next to serious travel journalism — not filler content that happened to be about heritage.
The itineraries went live on virginia.org and became part of the Virginia Tourism Corporation's ongoing heritage travel content. The project was part of a broader initiative at JMI that earned the AFAR Travel Vanguard Award in 2022 — recognition for innovation in travel media and content strategy.
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