Saga raises debate about checkbook journalism
(NEWSER) - Nick Denton, the big cheese at Gawker Media, paid $5,000 for the iPhone prototype Gizmodo showed the world last week—a fact notably absent from the company's published account of how it acquired the phone. He got 3.6 million unique visitors for his trouble, but no massive ad-revenue bump (Gizmodo's ads are sold in advance), so by the time he finished paying legal fees, bonuses to his writers, and the additional bandwidth cost, the scoop actually cost him $20,000, he tells David Carr of the New York Times . More»
