I think by now we know there is no love lost between me and the Gawker media empire. Recently a story has been racing around the web about Gizmodo's most recent shenanigans. I'm obviously not linking to the Gizmodo story, but here's the brief summary.
Gizmodo published an article with the headline above, written by intern Alyssa Bereznak. It told the story of her meeting a gentleman via dating site OKCupid who later turned out to be Jon Finkel, a hedge fund manager and former Magic: The Gathering world champion. The thrust of Bereznak's tale was that she felt that Finkel's Magic interest (he's still a regular player) and "past" was something that he should have told her about earlier, as if he had some kind of horrible disease.
Predictably the internet reacted with rage, attacking Bereznak for being the worst human being to ever live and Gizmodo horrible for publishing the story.
One wonders why Gizmodo, whose audience is purportedly made up of the people Bereznak's article is ridiculing, would choose to publish such a story.
Here's the answer:
Yup, that's over 900,000 page views, which is around ten to fifteen times what the average Gizmodo story gets for pageviews. Quite simply, Gizmodo published an inflammatory article knowing the reaction it would cause. Gawker is not the first or last media outlet to behave in this way; this type of activity has been used since media was invented. How we respond to it, however, is a choice that is always available to us. Choose wisely.
