Lonely Planet fires... well... everybody.

A sad day. To all the wonderful writers and travellers that made those incredible books so important to our industry. THANK YOU!! We wouldn't be here without you! Before HW we all used to complain and praise in equal measures the content and or lack of content in the hallowed Lonely Planet. Your books inspired literally millions of people to travel. It gave them the way, the how and often the why or why not so ingrained in our travelers culture. This is what happens when a VC buys an under performing assest. Cut costs, sell inventory, try new markets or expand and cut costs by purchasing other under performing assests then combine them and cut costs. Sounds eerily familiar.

Hang on to those old LP guides! Found one from 1982 in our library it is a treasure we will never give up.

I wonder what they are going to do now? A media company that doesn't create content?

The thorn tree forum is well used. I suspect the web and content strategy will be like the Huffington Post. More accurate(?), more opinionated and more useful to the new world of instant information and hand held devices.

Well, from the LP point of view the potential monetization of the new style of content aquistion will be huge. Fresh content, blog updates, favoured authors and advertising. They need to capitalize on their brand. How many travel bloggers have emerged since the sale to the BBC? How many have emerged since the sale to NC2? The largest employer of "backpacker bloggers" prior to the web was the LP. They laid of 100 writers and editors. They will now be able to scrape content from tens of thousands on whatever campaign they launch. The potential value of leveraging their brand and using the hordes of travel bloggers to creat content is huge. Just ask Matt Drudge or Arianna Huffington.

So hard to believe that the company that ostensibly created the travelling writer missed the initial opportunity to cash in on the travel blogger phenomenom.