This week's online travel news, as cartoonist Walt Kelly might have put it, is us. Not only is this column ending after more than five years of covering the interactive travel business. So is its competitor, The Industry Standard's Tech Traveler newsletter. When you consider the anemic demand for travel-related information in general, you're left to wonder if the battle between commerce and content hasn't been won. I take comfort in the words of Rich Jaroslovsky, the president of the Online News Association and a former colleague of mine at Dow Jones.
Good content is.
He ought to know. The idea of the Internet in general, and the World Wide Web specifically, was to democratize the flow of information. Whichever stories get accessed the most, you keep. The others get dumped. Indeed, if it were up to readers, every travel story would be about nude beaches and cheap theme parks - hardly a balanced diet of information.