Lonely Planet Writer: Bad Seed

I just saw this article on CNN about a LP writer that plagirized, didn’t goto the countries, and was a general arse.

Thomas Kohnstamm, who has written a book on his misadventures, also said he didn’t travel to Colombia to write the guidebook on the country because “they didn’t pay me enough,” The Daily Telegraph reported.

“I wrote the book in San Francisco [California],” he is quoted as saying in the Telegraph. “I got the information from a chick I was dating — an intern in the Colombian Consulate.”

My questions for this arse hole are:

1) Why did you take the job if you didn’t think it would pay you enough?
2) Lying, cheating - and now you get another book published - who is publishing it? Do you believe him this time?

Anyway - this guys sounds like a 1st class jerk. Yeah - it slipped through Lonely Planet’s editorial staff. I can’t blame them, considering the volume of data that produce, stuff like this is bound to happen.

It goes to show you, you don’t necessarily need to travel to a place to write about it factually these days. The data is there, it just needs to be brought together in an easily understandable format.