… Peretti’s craving for the quick viral fix will not be satisfied by the nourishing fare put out by prestige hires like Doree Shafrir and Matt Buchanan. Either before or after acquisition, Buzzfeed will collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.

– Nick Denton, in a comment on his own post on Gawker about its new commenting system

So the first person to leave a comment on a Gawker network post will now be in charge of policing the thread of commenters who reply, maintaining a high level of discussion and recruiting other voices to participate and bring more page views. And there will be multiple comment moderators and threads per post. Free labor!

In a conversation with longtime blogger Anil Dash, Denton said he’s tried throughout his entrepreneurial career at Moreover and Gawker to cultivate good conversations online, at scale. Lots of things haven’t worked.

For instance, the gamification of comments — basically, giving people badges for repeat participation — were a wrong turn, because they encourage insular communities and aren’t a motivator for the most interesting people.

And while Facebook’s embedded comment system might help control for blog-comment trolls on sites like TechCrunch, Denton said, it makes conversations more boring by discouraging new and anonymous commenters. Those people often share the juiciest information.

“The most interesting comments, they don’t come from people with Klout scores. They don’t come from people with a history on our sites,” Denton said.

The ultimate goal of the new system, Denton said, would be to attract people like American Apparel’s Dov Charney or NBC’s Brian Williams — who are at the center of news on Gawker sites — to chime in themselves.

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But it’s always good to remember that most of the world has no idea who Denton is. Hence the utility of this 11-minute profile on NBC’s “Rock Center,” which aired last night.

Here’s Denton’s description of it, via Facebook: “Some internet insiders disdain the dumb questions of network television. Their contempt is misplaced. The dumb questions are almost always the interesting ones.”

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

For obsessive Gawker watchers and redesign doom-mongers: the 35.6m uniques in Jan 2012 is record and 55% up from last April’s nadir.

– Nick Denton, via Twitter, almost a year after Gawker’s controversial redesign

Can you please have the post of Brian Williams’ email to Nick Denton taken down immediately? That was sent in confidence as friends and absolutely never intended to be public. A speedy removal would go a long way in maintaining the trust and respect we have for your site.

– An email from NBC’s PR department requesting that Gawker take down its posting of an email from Brian Williams to Nick Denton, criticizing, among other things, the site’s recently reduced postings on the weekends; the request was added to the original post

Superior writers, videographers and other content makers want to work with their own kind and for their own kind.

– Nick Denton, in his memo to staff on the Gawker empire in 2012

Nick Denton has something for you: The Gawker Media owner is pawning off Fleshbot, the porn site he has operated for eight years in addition to sites like Gawker, Gizmodo and Deadspin.

In addition to, but not really “along with” — Fleshbot, which is most definitely not safe for many workplaces, has always been kept at a distance from Denton’s other properties, at least when it came to advertising and PR.

It’s not that other Denton sites are prudish — ask Brett Favre — but they’re still in the business of attracting mainstream advertisers. And Fleshbot could never do that.

“As GM has grown, its sales strategy and technology platform have ceased to effectively support Fleshbot’s needs. We think someone else could be a much better partner to grow the site with us,” editor Lux Alptraum wrote in a “for sale” post yesterday.

As with all things Denton, the move will touch off a little wave of speculation about What It All Means, etc. I figured I’d kick things off this morning by asking him myself, via IM.

Denton: “Just hadn’t fit for a long long time.”

Kafka: “y i know. so why not anytime in the last tk years?”

Denton: “Oh, I don’t know. Because I’m slow to realize the inevitable?”

Thanks to AVN for spotting, and Jim Romenesko for aggregating.

Meanwhile! In other Nick Denton news: Denton held a party in his Soho loft last night, to toast the new editors of the Guardian, the U.K. paper that’s trying to establish a footprint in the U.S. (join the club). Had you been there (I wasn’t), you would have seen bold-faced names like the New York Times’ Bill Keller, New York magazine’s Adam Moss, (rhetorical) bomb-thrower Naomi Wolf, and some of the folks who spend time figuring out how to Occupy Wall Street. “Best party ever,” Denton types.

Here’s the host (sitting on the back of the sofa), along with fellow online heavyweights Jacob Weisberg (Slate), Arianna Huffington (duh), Janine Gibson (guardiannews.com) and Henry Blodget (Business Insider). “152 million global uniques,” Denton boasts.

Except not really.

Here’s a video featuring Gawker Media boss Nick Denton; Curbed’s Lockhart Steele, who helped Denton build his business; Rex Sorgatz, a “microcelebrity” once covered obsessively by Denton’s blogs; and Reuters columnist Felix Salmon, who writes about Denton a lot. Also featured: Samantha Ronson, who knows Lindsay Lohan.

If you don’t want to spend a couple minutes watching Salmon narrate the event (and you should, because Felix is an entertaining person even when he’s sober), Sorgatz has the concise version.

Next week Denton’s Kotaku gaming site will start showing complete episodes of “Retro Game Master,” a long-running Japanese reality/comedy show.

I’m a little fuzzy on what the show actually entails, but as far as I can tell it involves a dude trying to master ancient, NES-era games, and it’s apparently a big hit in Japan and a cult favorite on the Internet.

Gawker Media has bought the rights to the first 12 episodes of the show, which have been dubbed in English, and has the ability to show more if it goes well, says Kotaku editor Joel Johnson. The idea is to treat the show both as “live” TV — a new episode will be made available each Thursday, at 8 pm ET — and as traditional Web video — Kotaku readers can watch the show on demand whenever they like.

Gawker has already made a significant commitment to video, via its Gawker.TV site. But that site is pretty much dedicated to other people’s viral videos and TV clip compilations that Gawker’s staff assembles. Here the company has gone ahead and purchased the rights to videos it will have exclusively in the U.S. (Eric Spiegelman, last seen on this site working on his “Old Jews Telling Jokes” series, put the deal together for Gawker Media).

This is an experiment for Gawker Media, and the publisher hasn’t sold advertising against the show yet because it doesn’t know how it’s going to perform. But if it does work, you should expect to see more full-length shows on different Gawker Media sites says COO Gaby Darbyshire.

So how much does it cost to purchase the U.S. Web video rights to a hit Japanese TV show, anyway? “Not very much money,” says Darbyshire. “Put it this way — it was not an extravagant experiment to make. Surprisingly small.”

If you didn’t know any better, you’d think the publishing impresario was feeling just a titch…defensive.

But Thursday night, Denton hosted a gathering of 100-plus chitty-chatty newsish media types at his SoHo loft, and there he seemed quite confident again. Midway through his cocktail party, he dimmed the lights, clambered up on a windowsill and toasted his sales team, his technical team and his writers. As well as former New York congressman Chris Lee.

And then he played us this movie, which shows quite clearly what he’s trying to do with his properties. He wants to morph them from “blogs” into something more ambitious, but also older: He wants them to be like TV.

A Day in the Life of Gawker Media – FINAL from source/record on Vimeo.

Gawker was told about the flaw in the method it used to store user passwords to its commenting system more than two years before it was hacked, the Guardian’s Charles Arthur reports.

A Gawker user posted a message on Get Satisfaction and received a promise to “improve it,” though no such improvement ever took place.

Well, we know how that turned out. A hacker group called Gnosis gained entry not only to the commenting system, but also to pretty much everything the Gawker team used to run its collection of sites.

Gawker was hacked. Gawker founder Nick Denton apologized. But the damage wasn’t limited to Gawker and its users.

Soon Twitter and LinkedIn were dealing with hacking attacks on their sites. Then Yahoo and World of Warcraft developer Blizzard forced users to change their passwords. And finally the collateral damage reached all the way to the New York Times.

We also learned that many of the people whose passwords were disclosed used simple ones. Topping the list: “123456.” And we all learned a little about the dangers of using the same password everywhere.

No comment yet from Denton, although I’ll certainly update if I hear back from him.

And in case you didn’t pay enough attention to all this, and why it’s not a good idea to share passwords across multiple sites, here’s a great cartoon from XKCD that illustrates the dangers:

However, we’re starting to get more information about how the McDonald’s incident appears connected to hacking incidents at other sites. Chicago Business is reporting that the company responsible for McDonald’s email marketing is Silverpop Systems, and that it had been operating under a subcontract from Chicago-based Arc Worldwide.

So who else is a customer of Silverpop? Yesterday I received an email from someone who’s a customer of deviantArt, a social network where artists share their creations. DeviantArt has a base of 13 million users. Got an account there? You’d better change any passwords that overlap with other sites. The site advised customers that their accounts were compromised, and blamed Silverpop.

It could extend much further yet. Silverpop has more than 100 clients, and not all of them are publicly disclosed, though here are a few, found on its client quotes page and its case studies page: Stamps.com, Pitney Bowes/Mapinfo, Encyclopedia Britannica, Santander Consumer Finance and watchmaker Fossil. There’s no word how any of those other companies are affected, if at all.

Silverpop CEO Bill Nussey said in a blog message to customers that the FBI is investigating the incident, and that only a small percentage of Silverpop customers have been affected. He also said that Silverpop was “among several technology providers targeted as part of a broader cyber attack.” Stacy Kirk, a Silverpop spokeswoman, wouldn’t say anything beyond what’s in Nussey’s message.

I’m beginning to wonder if there’s some indirect connection between what happened to Silverpop and what happened to Gawker. I’m speculating here, but it’s no stretch of the imagination that numbering among deviantArt’s 13 million users are some of the 1.5 million people whose accounts were compromised in the Gawkergate affair. And the FBI is investigating both. Thomas Plunkett, Gawker’s technology chief, told me by email that there’s no evidence of a connection. Then again, as Business Insider tells it, he hasn’t yet had his meeting with the FBI.

Maybe I’m looking for connections that aren’t really there, but it’s really not hard to see how the breach at Gawker could turn out be the start of a domino effect that’s much larger than anyone has yet realized. There certainly is a lot of grumbling about changing passwords today.

If you know more more about any of this, get in touch!

Below is the email to deviantArt users.

From: deviantART.com (address deleted)
Date: Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 5:54 AM
Subject: RE: Email Notice

Silverpop Systems, Inc., a leading marketing company that sends email messages for its clients, told us that information was taken from its servers. This was probably part of a sweep by spammers. As a result, email addresses belonging to deviantART members were copied. Corresponding usernames and birth date may also have been removed.

We can assure you that nothing occurred on our systems with respect to this incident and no access was gained to private information on deviantART’s servers.

As a member of deviantART, you certainly have a right to know when an incident of this kind occurs. Unfortunately spammers are an unavoidable part of living on the Web.

The likely result of this event might be an increase in spam to your email. Experts have told us that there is an increase in email scams out there on the Internet and you should be cautious. Only click links or download attachments from people you know, particularly if they ask for personal information, and be sure that your email service provider has adequate spam filters.

Because we value the information that members give us, we have decided not to rely on the services of Silverpop in the future and their servers will no longer hold any data from us.

Denton being Denton, he made his mea culpa in a relatively obscure corner of his blog network–an open comments thread with Gawker readers. And if you had a bit too much of the wrong kind of skepticism, you might think that this photo Denton posted to the thread was a bit cavalier:

But nope, says Denton. That’s real contrition: “Okay, here you go. That’s me on the left and Tom Plunkett, our CTO, on the right. We’re looking appropriately glum. It didn’t take any acting.” (Also worth noting that Denton was responding directly to a reader request for “a photo of yourself wearing a dunce cap or something of that nature. With a big ‘I’m sorry’ sign.”)

In more important news: Denton’s sites, which stopped posting yesterday afternoon as a result of the attack, are now back up again. And if you’ve ever left a comment on one of the sites, you should go there and change your password, then do the same at any other site where you’ve used the same login/password combo.

A few other notes:

• Gawker Media says that readers who used Twitter or Facebook logins to leave comments on the blog network haven’t been affected. But people who used the same login on Gawker as they have on Facebook or Twitter may very well be in trouble. Which may be one reason so many Twitter users I know are now promoting a bogus weight-loss berry.
• There’s a Google document that contains some of the hacked email/login info, and something called Hint has been emailing some hacked commenters with a reminder to change their passwords. (Who are they? Why do they want to associate their yet-to-launch site with a security breach? Anyone?) But not finding your info on the document and not getting an email doesn’t mean you don’t have a security problem. Play it safe and change your password now, regardless.

If you’re in a hurry, though, you can get a good sense of Denton, at least in present tense, via this clip. It’s an abridged version of my onstage chat with the Gawker Media founder at an Interactive Advertising Bureau event last month, and the editors have done a nice job of distilling it down to seven minutes. Bonus for you guys: This thing is so well-edited that I don’t appear in a single frame.

And if you’re in a real hurry, here’s the money quote, which I extracted from Denton by asking him if he thinks what Gawker does is “journalism”:

In the U.S., traditional media has killed itself. And it’s provided a great opportunity for organizations like us, because they have cared too much about the journalism, about the Pulitzers, about the respect of their peers–and too little about the entertainment of their readers.”

If you’re looking for more detail from our talk, which included Denton lavishing praise on Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs but refusing to shed any light on the Gizmodo/iPhone 4 case, check out David Kaplan’s summary at PaidContent.

Which means that corner of Deadspin is going to be very, very popular today.

As well as unprofitable, says Gawker Media owner Nick Denton.

“These things are always money-losers,” Denton says via IM, before referring me to Gawker Media marketing director Erin Pettigrew for more.

But while I wait for her to get back to me, I can make some educated guesses to explain why lots of traffic won’t mean lots of money for Denton today.

• It’s hard to serve ads into traffic spikes. Or at least that’s what Denton always says about his most popular posts, like the iPhone 4 prototype that Gizmodo showed off to Apple’s dismay, or a sorta-sex tape featuring “McSteamy” from “Grey’s Anatomy,” etc.
• In this case, Gawker is very likely to serve up the Favre post without any advertising, anyway. When I interviewed Denton onstage at an Advertising Week event last week, I asked him specifically about how advertisers feel about “athlete dong” photos, which his readers love. His answer, in short, was that advertisers are understandably squeamish about this stuff, and can opt out of posts that contain it in advance. Have to assume this is one of those cases.

Requisite to-be-sure: Denton runs a for-profit business, and he won’t run athlete dong photos or anything else unless he can make money doing it.

So while those individual pageviews that the post generates won’t make him money, those visitors may well end up visiting other, dong-free posts on Gawker sites today, which will have ads.

And of course, the post will give Gawker and Deadspin that much more publicity, as mainstream media outlets that would never stoop to running athlete dong photos find time to talk about the site that did. (Cough.)

UPDATE: Sure enough, both the Favre post and the rest of Deadspin are currently ad-free. Via e-mail, Erin Pettigrew explains why that’s so:

In the case of major ad/edit adjacency issues such as this, we have a cadre of tech tools to handle the display conflict. Usually the decision is made to prevent ads from showing next to NSFW or similarly questionable content and then the tech solution is put into place to effect that immediately after. The tech tools range from removing ads on a per-post basis to scanning post content for particular topics against which we can negatively target ads.

If the adjacency affects takeovers and sponsorships where ad inventory cannot be otherwise rerouted, we communicate the scenario upfront to the client and involve them in the decision-making. The same tech solutions then apply.

It’s the classic airplane ad next to an airliner crash scenario for which publishers need to develop contingencies. For this particular scoop, the decision was indeed to clean the Favre post pages of ads.

I saw your note about spikes — you are correct that we aren’t able to instantly match ad demand to the surge of inventory supply caused by traffic spikes. This is because our inventory is 100% directly sold versus hawked by real time auction marketplaces. More pageviews does not directly equal more dollars! Also, note that our ad bookings close weeks to months before creative hits the websites. So, unless a spike is ‘scheduled,’ it can’t really be sold.

This one comes from Christopher Mascari, a Gawker Media marketing guy, and it illustrates the blog network’s traffic from social media sites. Less than a year ago, Digg was the single most important social site for Gawker, Gizmodo, Jalopnik et al. Now it has been eclipsed by the likes of Facebook, Twitter and, a little surprisingly, StumbleUpon. And note that Reddit, Condé Nast’s “Digg clone,” is catching up as well:

The other big takeaway from the data is the story that many publishers have been telling in the past year or so: Social traffic is becoming as important, or more so, than search traffic from the likes of Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO). Last fall Gawker was getting 10 million visits a month from social sites; now that number is up to 20 million. And Facebook, at 7.7 million visits, now represents more than a third of that number:

Within the next several weeks, the New Yorker magazine will be publishing big pieces about a pair of digital icons located on the East and West coasts–an assessment of the turnaround at AOL by staff writer Ken Auletta and a profile of Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg by Huffington Post senior contributing editor Jose Antonio Vargas.

For the Zuckerberg piece, Vargas was given a lot of access by the Silicon Valley social networking kingpin, including rare interviews with Zuckerberg’s inner circle and also longtime girlfriend and full-time med student Priscilla Chan.

And Auletta–whose big New Yorker takeout on Google (GOOG) turned into a book that is now being turned into a movie–will be assessing the turnaround efforts at AOL (AOL), which is now being led by former Google exec Tim Armstrong.

The Internet icon has seen troubled times in recent years, including a spinoff from Time Warner (TWX), which should make for interesting fodder for Auletta.

Also in the tech-topic kitty at the New Yorker, sources said: A profile of troublemaking Gawker Media impresario Nick Denton by Ben McGrath, which I am hoping will include his terrific tour of Chinese markets near where he lives in Manhattan’s SoHo.

You can see what Denton is up to by visiting his “beta” sites, which are open to the public: beta.gawker.com, beta.deadspin.com, etc.

Check out the difference between Gawker.com’s current homepage and the beta version and you’ll get the basic gist: Instead of a river of stories floating down the middle of the page, there’s one big one, a couple of secondary ones and then a menu bar linking to the rest of the site.

But if you really want to see where Denton is headed, make sure you find one of his pages featuring super-sized art. You can get a sense from these screenshots (click to enlarge), but it’s really best to visit the individual pages, where you’ll see that these images take up the full width of your screen:

This is where Denton wants to end up: stories–and ads–that fill up your screen. Sound familiar?

“Web media needs to move to TV metaphor–with full-screen imagery and other content interrupted with full-screen ads,” he tells me via email.  “Everything right now is so, um, bitty.”

Which is funny, because Denton’s last redesign shrank lots of elements on the page so he could cram more stuff in. You’ll still see evidence of it today on his sites, with the occasional headline-only story. And if you look around the blogosphere, you’ll find plenty of people following suit. (Even All Things D has introduced something we’re calling a “newsbyte.”)

But plenty of Web-ad sellers have been pushing super-sized stuff for some time now–see the ginormous ad units that the Online Publishers Association pushed out last year or Yahoo’s (YHOO) transformation of its login page.

And in the last few months I’ve seen a new ad unit on Huffington Post and Business Insider that fills my entire screen with a short video ad before sending me along to my “free content.” Just like, um, TV.

So Denton is either on to something here or maybe even a little bit behind the curve. That can’t be right, can it?

Like earlier this month, when Denton settled a libel suit filed by motorcycle-maker Confederate Motors. His blog network’s only comment about the case is an oblique “correction” on his Jalopnik car blog, noting that Confederate does not appear to be “unable to do business” in New York.

MediaPost and media law blogger Ben Sheffner seem to be the only two outlets keeping tabs on the case, and you can get the full download at their sites.

But the very short story is that Confederate sued Gawker over an April 9, 2009, post (now deleted, though Google shows traces) about some of its vehicles.

Things Confederate (Really! I know!) didn’t like included an assertion that its bikes are “so unreliable you’ll have to push them” and that “we heard the Alabama-based company was being sued so heavily in state courts by disgruntled owners that they were unable to do business here.”

The Jalopnik post seems to be the sum total of Gawker’s concessions to Confederate. Gawker COO Gaby Darbyshire tells MediaPost her company didn’t pay Confederate a penny and that it settled only “because it was too trivial an issue to take to court….One must pick one’s battles.”

Sounds reasonable! Especially when there are much bigger battles looming on the horizon.

This week, BoomTown took a big jet plane east to check out the doings during Internet Week in New York, as well as to moderate a keynote panel at the Digitas Digital Content NewFront with media moguls Martha Stewart of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (MSO) and Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post.

While still exhausted from the D: All Things Digital conference last week, how could I turn down such a pairing?

I could not!

No surprise, the two delivered a rocking show for the large crowd, including Stewart saying she would be all digital if she were starting out today and Huffington noting that she did not kill newspapers.

Here are video interviews I did with both before the panel, as well as some shots from a party Gawker Media threw at its lower Manhattan HQ for Internet Week, including a short chat with its terminally hyper CEO, Nick Denton.

Enjoy:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100610/kara-visits-the-big-apple-geeks-plus-martha-and-arianna/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100427/all-you-need-to-know-about-gizmodo-the-iphone-and-the-cops/ http://allthingsd.com/20100427/all-you-need-to-know-about-gizmodo-the-iphone-and-the-cops/#comments Tue, 27 Apr 2010 11:00:26 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=18755 Who knew Act II of the Gizmodo-iPhone story would be as exciting as last week’s news?

But while this saga is almost designed for bloggy hyperbole — Cops! Busting down doors! Confiscating iPads! — the legal issue here is pretty straightforward.

It boils down to this: Does the San Mateo District Attorney’s office believe that Gizmodo Editor Jason Chen committed a crime by buying a prototype iPhone for $5,000?

If they do, then the California shield law Chen’s bosses at Gawker Media are citing won’t do them much good. Because the law doesn’t give journalists the ability to commit crimes.

But if authorities are really pursuing the guy who sold Chen the phone, then the shield law should protect Chen and his employers. Because keeping the cops from busting down your door so they can uncover your sources is one of the things the shield law is supposed to do.

That’s about it. Really.

Of course there’s more to chew on, if you have an appetite. For instance, if you want to know why a prototype iPhone that was supposedly left at a bar could be considered stolen goods, you can consult bloggers John Gruber and Jeff Bercovici, who believe this to be the case.

So does Apple (AAPL), according to the Wall Street Journal:

Stephen Wagstaffe, the chief deputy district attorney for San Mateo County, said Apple contacted authorities and “advised us there had been a theft,” which led to the search warrant and an investigation.

You can also feel free to spend time speculating about less important parts about the tale. Like why Gawker Media owner Nick Denton, who says his only loyalty is to his readers, sat on this engrossing story for three days.

One line of questioning that that doesn’t deserve a single brain cell: “Do bloggers count as journalists?”

Denton threw that one out yesterday, suggesting that the case somehow pitted The Man vs. The Web (and everything Good). And I’ve seen some people who should know better take him up on it.

But that’s a facile phrasing and Denton knows it. Because there’s zero question that people who work for a news organization — that’s what Gawker Media is, whether you like it or not — and use blogging tools are journalists. Or at least there’s no question that they get the same protection that “traditional” journalists do.

If you’ve got a lot of extra time on your hands, you might ponder what legal carve-outs like shield laws mean in an era when everyone can be their own private news organization. Whether they make a living at it — and can afford legal counsel — or not.

Luckily for Jason Chen and his employers, though, that’s not an issue here.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100427/all-you-need-to-know-about-gizmodo-the-iphone-and-the-cops/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100426/gizmodo-editors-home-raided-in-iphone-probe/ http://allthingsd.com/20100426/gizmodo-editors-home-raided-in-iphone-probe/#comments Mon, 26 Apr 2010 22:16:56 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=39287 The Apple (AAPL) iPhone prototype that Gizmodo revealed to the world last week reportedly cost the site $5,000, but it may set it back quite a bit more in legal bills over the next few months.

Deputies from the San Mateo County Sheriff’s department raided the home of Gizmodo editor Jason Chen last Friday as part of an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the sale of the prototype to the gadget site. And they came armed with a search warrant citing probable cause to search Chen’s home for property that “was used as the means of committing a felony.”

Among the items seized in the raid:

• All records and data located and/or stored on any computers, hard drives, or memory storage devices, located at the listed location including digital photographs and/or video of the Apple prototype 4G iPhone.
• E-mail communications pertaining to the sale of photographs of the prototype phone and/or the sale of the physical prototype 4G Apple iPhone.
• Internet history, cache files, and/or Internet pages pertaining to searches and/or research conducted on Apple employee Gray Powell.
• Call records, contact lists, text messages related to the sale of photographs of the prototype iPhone and/or physical prototype iPhone and indicia that identifies the owner and/or operators of the computer or electronic device.
• Printed documents, images, and/or notations pertaining to the sale and/or purchase of the stolen iPhone prototype and/or the sale and/or transfer of trade secret information pertaining to the iPhone prototype.

Gizmodo parent Gawker Media is disputing the validity of the warrant, claiming it violates California’s Shield Law, which protects journalists seeking to maintain the confidentiality of their sources.

“Jason is a journalist who works full time for our company,” Gawker COO Gaby Darbyshire wrote in a letter to the detective handling the case. “Abundant examples of his work are available on the Web. He works from home, which is his de facto newsroom, and all equipment used by him there is used for the purposes of his employment with us. Perhaps you are not aware of section 1524(g) of the CA Penal Code.”

Section 1524(g) of the CA Penal Code is the California Shield law to which I referred earlier. Darbyshire argues it is “abundantly clear” that the search warrant used to raid Chen’s home violates it. This, of course, assumes that authorities don’t suspect Chen and Gizmodo of committing a felony (buying stolen property), which isn’t yet certain. It also assumes the court will view Chen as a journalist, which isn’t certain either.

As Gawker CEO Nick Denton said in a statement to his employees: “Do bloggers count as journalists? I guess we’ll find out.”

I’m sure we will, though it’s worth noting that Denton seems to have answered that question for himself last year.

“We may inadvertently commit journalism,” he told The Washington Post. “That is not the institutional intention.”

[Image credit: TopherChris]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100426/gizmodo-editors-home-raided-in-iphone-probe/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091027/nbc-grabs-a-high-profile-blogger-to-boost-its-local-site-eater-cofounder-ben-leventhal/ http://allthingsd.com/20091027/nbc-grabs-a-high-profile-blogger-to-boost-its-local-site-eater-cofounder-ben-leventhal/#comments Tue, 27 Oct 2009 22:00:38 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=12470 If you follow the New York blog and/or blog/foodie scene, this one’s for you. The rest of you folks can probably move on.

Okay? Okay. Ben Leventhal, co-founder of the influential Eater blog, is headed to GE’s (GE) NBC Universal, where he’ll oversee “lifestyle content” for NBC’s growing local Web unit. More details here from Leventhal himself.

Eater is noteworthy because it’s a great read if you’re the kind of person who’s interested in an exit interview with former New York Times food critic Frank Bruni, conducted over a meal at Mario Batali’s Babbo. And also because it’s part of a larger network of blogs that Leventhal helped build up along with Lockhart Steele, one of the early architects of Nick Denton’s Gawker Media empire.

Steele says his sites, which encompass two other brands beyond Eater (real estate at Curbed, retail at Racked) and local sites in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, pull in a million uniques a month. Two years ago, he raised $1.5 million from a group of investors, including Denton, Spark Capital’s Mo Koyfman, real estate publisher Brad Inman and NetSuite (N) CEO Zach Nelson.

NBC, meanwhile, has been busily staffing up its network of local sites, which it overhauled earlier this year. The idea is to replace the lame extensions of its local stations’ lame newscasts with sites designed for people who actually use the Web–and to help the company break into the local Internet ad market that everyone wants a piece of but that no one has cracked yet.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091027/nbc-grabs-a-high-profile-blogger-to-boost-its-local-site-eater-cofounder-ben-leventhal/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091019/does-checkbook-blogging-pay-off-hard-to-measure-says-gawker-medias-nick-denton/ http://allthingsd.com/20091019/does-checkbook-blogging-pay-off-hard-to-measure-says-gawker-medias-nick-denton/#comments Mon, 19 Oct 2009 10:00:38 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=12186 Another scandal, another Gawker story, and another payday for the person who sold Gawker the news. No big deal, says Nick Denton, the blog impresario: We’ll keep doing it.

The specifics in this case involve the alleged Balloon Boy hoax and a 25-year-old student who says he was involved, unwittingly, in the stunt. Last week, Robert Thomas announced, via Business Insider, that he’d sell his story to anyone willing to pay him $5,000 to $8,000. Denton’s company wrote a check for the tale, though it says it paid much less than Thomas’s ask.

This is becoming standard practice for Denton, who announced in July that he was willing to pay for juicy stories, tips and other stuff he could publish. In August, he shelled out for video of “Grey’s Anatomy” star Eric Dane, his wife Rebecca Gayheart and another woman in various states of undress.

Seminaked semicelebrities draw more eyeballs than stories about delusional reality-show aspirants, apparently: The “McSteamy” clips have generated more than four million views this fall, while Denton predicts the Balloon Boy saga will ultimately do one million.

My question: Does paying for this stuff make sense? After announcing a year ago that advertising was going to fall off a cliff, Denton now says he’s been making good money after all. So does this kind of checkbook blogging produce more profit? Denton’s answer, via email:

Hard to measure profitability. Short-term effect. Balloon boy story will probably go to 1m views. But you know one can’t easily sell advertising into a spike. And video hosting costs pretty significant–though not this time.

Why you think just two bought stories? We paid 10k for that Photoshop expose a couple years ago. Not really a new thing.

A story is a story. We’re not squeamish about the means. And the paroxysms of the j-school ethicists add to the satisfaction.

You were expecting a more straightforward answer? Ha!

If you want, you can check out Gawker’s rate card, make some assumptions, and conclude that Denton can’t afford to pay his story-sellers that much and still end up in the black, even at one million page views. And I’m reasonably confident that Denton is very interested in measuring profitability and has worked out an equation that pays his story-sellers in proportion to traffic, but without breaking his bank.

But the last part of Denton’s missive–quivering ethicist strawmen aside–is what really rings true. He really does get a huge kick out of this stuff: Entertaining himself with his blog empire, tweaking enemies real and imagined, and shrugging about it publicly.

It would be wrong to say you can’t put a price on that. But whatever that price is, Denton can afford it.

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