Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Despite the many miserable prognoses for the future of the media business, a few stubborn entrepreneurs still see fit to venture into content-driven companies. Among the crop of new players in media is Skift, a 10-month-old travel publication that merges content with data services while targeting a crossover audience of business readers and consumers.

Skift, which is already among the top three or four online travel industry trade publications in a space that has lagged behind the times, today announced that it has raised an additional $1.1 million in seed funding, adding Advancit Capital, Ironfire Angel, Mesa+ and others to an investment roster headed up by New York’s Lerer Ventures. (Disclosure: Lerer Ventures is also an investor in PandoDaily.) The round brings Skift’s total funding to $1.5 million.

Skift was brought into the world by Rafat Ali, who founded paidContent in 2002 as one of the first blog media companies. He later sold paidContent to Guardian Media, which subsequently sold the blog to GigaOm in 2012. After a couple years’ respite since selling paidContent, Ali saw an opportunity in travel, the world’s biggest industry, noticing that the publications that covered the industry had not been subjected to the same waves of disruption that, say, the tech and finance media had.

Social and mobile, for instance, were still largely foreign concepts among travel industry publications, which include TTG, Travel Weekly, and Business Traveller, all of which are freighted with legacy baggage from their print magazine backgrounds....