Gawker does goooood
I reluctantly subscribed to Gawker two days ago, reluctantly only because my Google Reader feed is out of control and they are notorious for posting. A post this morning made my increasingly chaos-theory-proving Reader worth the headache.
A Gawker blogger made fun of an article in the Washington Post about a “generation guru,” a woman paid obscene amounts of money to explain to adults how us kiddos think and work and all that rot. Gawker pulled three excerpts from the article, with the longest one hitting 93 words. Unlike some reposting, however, the Gawker blogger put in commentary and analysis instead of just block quoting the article. Fair usage, right? Guess not, at least not for the Washington Post. The journalist, Ian Shapira, is furious that his hard work is being ripped off and making someone else money while pulling the best (ie funniest) bits and he said as much in a response on WP’s Outlook and Opinion page.
Gawker’s Gabriel Snyder brought the pain in her take on the whole thing to my utter delight. Railing against the old media’s stifling style, she calls Shapira out on actually just being upset that Gawker got to write the funny piece he couldn’t. Ouch.
Then, like any good story, the end shocks and awes. Washington Post had actually sent Gawker the story! So they would blog about it! AND they send stuff all the time! Fancy that!
This whole journalism cat fight puts the new (blogging) vs the old (newspapers) perspective in a different light. Blogging isn’t as esteemed as being printed on dead trees, but that whole mindset, for me at least, is changing. ESPECIALLY when such smackdowns occur with newspapers coming out so bruised and bloodied.
