Examiner Travel Tips Advice: Free Trips to New York State Fair!

When at the New York State Fair, be sure to check out the meat goats!

​It's hard to characterize the San Francisco Examiner. You get an impressive breadth of coverage of local events by very hard-working reporters, lunatic fringe national coverage and editorials, and, well, this.

But we weren't sure what was going on when we spied today's "Travel Tips." Beside hyper-local weather reports, tide measures, and air-quality indexes were the following none-too-local stories: Southwest Airlines has cut its fares for passengers flying from the Northeast to Florida, and Amtrak is offering free rides to the New York State Fair. That's in Syracuse, by the way, which is a long way from just about everywhere but Syracuse. Was this some sort of error? Was this copy intended for the Washington Examiner? Nope. Our San Francisco Examiner newsroom source explained it all.

These not-local travel tips are compiled by a local freelancer, who turns in five items a week. The "When in Syracuse..." nature of the items does "occasionally" spark newsroom debate, according to our source.

"I'm not always in agreement with the philosophy, but the idea is, people might fly to New York on vacation, see relatives, etc." says the newsroom employee. In other words, five items a week is a lot.

The Examiner notes that traveling to incredibly dangerous places can be incredibly dangerous

​It has not gone unnoticed, meanwhile, how often the Examiner "Travel Tips" are merely State Department warnings about heading to unstable nations far, far from the Farallones.

"The call will go across the newsroom, 'Hey guys! It says 'Be careful in Afghanistan!'" notes the Ex employee.

You probably didn't need to read the Examiner to know that. But, then again, no other paper in the San Francisco Bay Area would have informed readers about snagging that free Amtrak ride to the New York State Fair. In Syracuse.

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