Be a travel writer: Explore foreign lands. Get down on your luck. Deal illicit drugs. Sleep with natives. Write about them.
The D'uh awards: Colombia is a country, but not spelled Columbia. Thomas Kohnstamm was Zora O'Neill's editor at Rough Guides and they wrote for Lonely Planet during the same time period. Hard to be a smart guy when the facts aren't correct, huh?
The Thomas Kohnstamm story. Become a travel writer. Go abroad. Pose for many photos in exotic places. Have sex with waitresses. Get down on your luck. Deal drugs. Get pistol whipped. Run out of time for research. Find remaining travel information on the web or other travel books. Finish travel guide. Write five more. Write a tell all. Tell the New York Observer, “Don’t treat travel writing as gospel.”
Not that Kohnstamm hasn’t been excoriated. He’s been compared (unfavorably) to Jason Blair, a car crash, a Victorian xenophobe, although she seemed to posses a more cutting sense of humor. In short, Thomas Kohnstamm has become the bane of the travel-lit industry. Aaron Hotfelder at Gadling catalogs the five sins Kohnstamm committed: entitlement; self-promotion; leading travelers astray; regarding the affair as a college prank; and, giving bad name to legitimate Lonely Planet writers.
In a minor mea culpa, Kohnstamm sat in for a friendly Q & A at World Hum, where he explained the mix-up when he admitted to a reporter he never went to Colombia by failing to mention that he only was hired to write the history and culture section of the guidebook. He also let it be known he was merely joking when he wrote that a lack of research time forced him to plagiarize other guidebooks for less-than-important details.
Low pay = lazy researcher?
Lonely Planet claims that authors are conducting a full review of Kohnstamm’s texts that remain on the market. So far, nothing has emerged. The plot of Kohnstamm’s tell-all takes place while he was researching a guide for Brazil, an edition now out of print, Lonely Planet says. 
For Lonely Planet, the biggest rub with Kohnstamm’s book is his insistence that poor pay forced him to cut corners. (“I guess the subsequent loss of complete objectivity is the price Lonely Planet pays for not giving writers enough money to do comprehensive research,” he writes.) In fact, Lonely Planet executives have told everyone within earshot that LP leads the industry in writer compensation.
That may be true, but veteran travel writer Chris Taylor declares that pay rates have, in fact, fallen in the past two decades as the industry has become more cut-throat. Taylor points out that in 1994 he was paid $17,000, plus expenses, to update Lonely Planet’s Cambodia guide. Another author told him that in 2002 he updated a guidebook on a country of similar size and cost, only to be paid $11,000, plus expenses. Taylor alleges that Lonely Planet’s internal writers’ forums burst with tales about how poor pay has forced authors to cut corners on research.
To Robert Reid, another Lonely Planet veteran, Kohnstamm overdoes the pay issue. Advances vary from book to book, he says, and writers who barely break even in some places, find that other destination updates offer an easy way to bring home a more robust paycheck.
In his review of the book, Reid claims it seems less a tell-all about the travel guide industry than a vehicle for Kohnstamm to air his personal demons. Having met Kohnstamm once at a LP-funded workshop, Reid doesn’t think he did the botch job he claimed.
Freebies are us?
Reid does, however, take him to task for his cavalier attitude towards receiving free hotel rooms and other freebies. Zora O’Neill, who was edited by Kohnstamm at Rough Guides, claims the book is a bit sensationalist and a little ridiculous – written as a primer, she says, for young guys who hope writing guidebooks is a means to getting laid and scoring drugs. But the book pretty much hits it right on head with the low pay and – yes – the admission that guide writers grab freebies. That’s a big no-no at Lonely Planet, and among U.S. journalists of all stripes. (Reid claims in 15 years, he’s taking nothing more than a couple of cups of coffee, even when he was working for himself.)
So, where’s the disconnect? Brave New Traveler Editor Tim Patterson argues that Kohnstamm’s book proves that professional guidebook writers are a dying breed as, increasingly, assignments are going to younger, less experienced writers. Although the big houses continue to publish, they’re already falling behind those guides which have moved online. (Not so fast, says Reid, who has dabbled with online travel guides and calls his move, “a proud swashbuckling tale in money-losing.”)
Kohnstamm not only opened some dirty secrets at Lonely Planet, Taylor argues, but peeled back and exposed the entire industry’s rot. Wither guide writers or not, the demise of the guide book industry coincided with the rise of the internet, which has forced publishers to rush new titles and updates out each year. In the drive to prove its relevance in the age of mass travel, the guidebook industry now spends its time stuffing bookstore shelves with the same destinations slightly repackaged each season. With their eyes off the prize, the guidebook industry lost the one thing people could always trust: on-the-ground knowledge. When travelers of all stripes can now do so much trip pre-planning on the internet, the industry refused to stand by its laurels. That's when they began cutting corners on research.
It’s true that the guidebook industry remains relevant for those people needing information for a two-week adventure in well trodden areas, like the Rome’s and Bangkok’s of the world. There you won’t be let down. For those so-called wanderers on the lookout for out-of-the-way places, beware.
A most inferior battle
I wonder, however, if this flap really isn’t an internal strife, an industry-wide civil war. Unlike other incidents of reported plagiarism, the most vociferous critics in this case were guidebook publishers or guidebook writers. Like newspaper editors sulking over declining readership but failing to make any structural changes to their publications, guidebook writers working for the big houses can’t seem to break out of the Five W’s. This just-the-facts template of most books, while extremely helpful when your bus pulls in a 10:30 pm to a dusty outpost, can sap the life out of anywhere. Readers demand different narrative styles; most guidebooks don’t provide them.
I think that’s why most travelers long ago gave up on finding any pulse inside guidebooks. It’s been a long time since people treated them like gospel. This must be incredibly difficult to come to grips with for a company like Lonely Planet, which used to have such an intimate relationship with its readers. With guidebooks reading more like tax forms, travelers have lost interest. It’s funny that it takes a book like Kohnstamm’s for the industry to face the facts that everyone knows.
It’s not a perfect solution I have. But after reading two anonymous comments at the bottom of the New York Observer piece on Kohnstamm, one finds at least two “people” relating to him not through his admission, but through the sheer force of his outsized personality.
I’ll post the second: "Kohnstamm...where do I know that name? Ah yes, now I remember. I bought his Costa Rican phrase book when I took a trip there a few years back. I also remember doing some nice drugs and getting laid left and right. Best damn trip of my entire life. So was it because of the phrasebook? If so, then I hope this guys sells a million books and they give him a freakin' medal. Thanks Kohnstamm!"
Kohnstamm may not be the best role model or even business model. But maybe the industry could learn a little from him.