Lonely Planet scandal symptomatic of where journalism is heading

News.com.au reports Lonely Planet is reeling from claims by one of its authors that he plagiarised and made up large sections of his books and dealt drugs to make up for poor pay.

Thomas Kohnstamm, whose book is titled Do Travel Writers Go To Hell? said yesterday that he had worked on more than a dozen books for Lonely Planet, including their titles on Brazil, Colombia, the Caribbean, South America, Venezuela and Chile.

In one case, he said he had not even visited the country he wrote about.

“They didn’t pay me enough to go Colombia,” he said. “I wrote the book in San Francisco. I got the information from a chick I was dating - an intern in the Colombian consulate.

“They don’t pay enough for what they expect the authors to do.”

The only surprising thing about this story is that he actually interviewed someone with local knowledge about Colombia and didn’t just relay on the internet to produce the book.

Lonely Planet are notoriously bad payers which, like many publishers, relies on the fact that many budding journalists, writers and book editors are willing to work for peanuts in an industry where demand for jobs far outweighs supply. I remember applying for a job as guide book editor at Lonely Planet several years ago, a role which included commissioning writers and photographers, compiling the information and editing the book. I withdrew my application when I found the role was paying just $35,000 - a mere graduate salary for position which pays anywhere from $50,000 to $70,000 at larger publishers.

Lonely Planet isn’t alone. Community newspaper groups, street press, trade publications and small publishers are cutting costs big time resulting in poorly payed, poorly resourced and overworked journalists who are unable, and often discouraged, from taking the time and expenses to be thorough.

The result is press release and Google journalism, which is fast becoming the norm, rather than some journalistic atrocity highlighted on Media Watch - imagine what Hemingway would think.