The Daily Mail, a notable British tabloid, is suing Gawker after the latter posted “My Year Ripping Off the Web with the Daily Mail Online,” an expose of the paper’s sourcing habits.
In it he said: “Unlike at other publications for which I’ve worked, writers weren’t tasked with finding their own stories or calling sources.
“We were simply given stories written by other publications and essentially told to rewrite them.
“And unlike at other publications where aggregation writers are encouraged to find a unique angle or to add some information missing from an original report, the way to make a story your own at the Mail is to pass off someone else’s work as your own.”…
The Mail Online claims that its “reputation as an ethical, upstanding, and law-abiding company has been impugned”
Gawker’s response:
We’re not surprised that the Daily Mail doesn’t like what James King had to say about his time working there, this baseless complaint doesn’t even attempt to refute the vast majority of the author’s detailed anecdotes about his experience as a Daily Mail writer
There seems little doubt how the Mail generates content: the “writethroughs,” of day-old stories found elsewhere, are published for all to see. The expose seemed damning, and the Mail’s response to it at the time was remarkably self-damning. But the devils are in the details, lawsuits are very expensive to fight, and Gawker is known to be getting tired of them, so here we are.
My favorite thing about The Daily Mail is its ludicrously incompetent photoshopping.
