One of the things that has always got to me about print journalism is the fact that it is all so damn commercial. It costs a lot to put out a magazine. The wages of all those Henriettas will add up and book publishing is no better - after all, someone has to pay for those long lunches. The upshot is that things either have to mass market (think Harry Potter and the Child Psychologists Pension) or appeal to advertisers. Then you just end up with PR guff about the world’s blandest places.

The internet has no such restrictions. There is virtually no appreciable cost to the internet, so online publications don’t have to appeal to anyone – except themselves. True, this means that much of their output is utter crap: the internet is awash with blogs that really should remain locked away in a depressive’s diary. Excruciating minutiae of day to day life of the Facebook generation, just waiting to be discovered, without effort or talent. Fortunately, there are some gemstones locked away in the deep strata of the internet. The problems is finding them. Using a search engine would seem like a good idea, but one of the new virtual growth industries is search engine keyword optimisation. Companies lecturing other companies on how to make their websites appear more interesting to search engines, so that punters are lured in. Here’s a tip: make the website interesting to punters and they will recommend you!

One such website is The Travel Rag, a collection of eclectic stories from the bad side of town. This is real travel, the sort that most of us do but few journalists seem to write about.

In Ganja, guns and sex in the city, Greg Samsa writes about the real Phnom Penh, not the Phnom Penh that tour companies visit for two days before heading off to Angkor Wat. This is a city where “Pizza is available with ’smiley face’ for an extra fifty cents, or ‘extremely smiley face’ for a dollar”.

Travel Rag editor Chris Ord goes seriously bush in Jungle Fever, a tale of tribes in Papua New Guinea and showing that you don’t need to deal with bugs to see the wild side of life, Leisha Grebinski writes about the freaks of London’s Camden Market.

Have a mooch and find some gems. This is a site for real travellers.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 23rd, 2007 at 8:10 am and is filed under Steve projects, travel stories, travel websites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.