The North Olympic Peninsula has captured the attention of travel writers everywhere and kicked off the year with a bang, landing the region in a The New York Times’ story about “The 41 Places to go in 2011.”

Diane Schostak, executive director of the Olympic Peninsula Visitor Bureau, said 2010 was one of the top years for media exposure, with an estimated value of more than $10 million.

The value is calculated on how much would have been paid for advertising based on the circulation and prices of a newspaper or magazine.

The New York Times article that came out this year will be included in the total for 2011.

The article highlights Olympic National Park, including the Hoh Rainforest and the seven-day-a-week access to Hurricane Ridge.

A photo of lodges in the park also accompanies the article, which appeared in a Jan. 9 special section.

The article can also be viewed online at http://tinyurl.com/37pcjef.

International attention

“In addition to national press, we also had some great international press in 2010,” Schostak said.

A group of eight German travel writers came through the Peninsula in the summer to check out the sites.

“That group was so funny because we got up and were having breakfast at Lake Crescent and I mentioned we couldn’t go through Forks without including some Twilight stuff, and we’d go to LaPush and then go through the Hoh Rainforest and have dinner at Kalaloch,” Schostak said.

Twilight side effect

“But then they stopped me and said, ‘Wait a minute — we’re here for the Forks story.'”

So the group dropped all the plans for the day and spent the day in Forks doing Twilight tourism.

Tens of thousands of fans have flocked through Forks to visit the town where the fictional characters of Bella Swan and her suitors, werewolf Jacob Black and vampire Edward Cullen, thrive.

Schostak said that even some media who never mention Twilight — such as The New York Times, might be influenced by the book.

“Even if they don’t consciously know why they know where the Peninsula is, sometimes that is the reason that people know where we are,” she said, “so it helps us even when people don’t come directly for that.”

The national park attracts international attention, too. A Japanese hiker has done about six articles on trails in Olympic National Park, Schostak said.

Pitching the Peninsula

Although some advertising is done on a regional basis, articles are key to drawing people to the area, Schostak said.

“You could spend the money to buy an ad in these publications, but when it comes down to it, people are going to look at the articles before they look at the ads,” she said.

Mary Brelsford works directly with writers, making pitches and getting information out for the Visitor Bureau.

She said that she works with Adventure Media — which feeds pitches to more than 9,000 writers and editors.

The stories they did accounted for about $8.8 million of the exposure the Peninsula received in 2010.

Another $3.25 million was through the efforts of the Olympic Peninsula Visitor Bureau working directly with writers.

The North Olympic Peninsula also is featured in the French version of the Lonely Planet travel guide and one other time in The New York Times in a feature titled “12 Unexpected History Trips.”

This New York Times piece focuses on the Makah Cultural and Research Museum and the history of the tribe at the tip of the Peninsula.

Kayaking, Olympic National Park, hotels in the area and historical tours of Fort Worden are just a few of the other things featured in the articles that have been published as nearby as Seattle and as far away as Europe, Brelsford said.

Another effect that isn’t always calculated is when an article is picked up by other publications — for example a Seattle Times story about family-friendly vacations included the Olympic National Park.

That story was picked up by more than 300 other publications in locales ranging from Portugal, Brazil, England and others around the world to the United States, including Baltimore.

“It just went everywhere,” Brelsford said.

“It just kept popping up on our Google alerts,” she said speaking of a feature on Google that lets one know when a search term pops up on a new website.

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Reporter Paige Dickerson can be reached at 360-417-3535 or at paige.dickerson@peninsuladailynews.com.