James Del, LTD

I was eating lunch with a media-industry friend the other day and the conversation turned to Michael Arrington’s recent post “When Will We Have Our First Valleywag Suicide?” (asking when the personal attacks on the blog Valleywag would lead someone to kill themselves). Though I’d say Arrington’s prediction is improbable, I wouldn’t say it’s totally impossible. Which led me ask the related question: if it’s possible for a blog to cause a suicide, it is just as likely for a blog to cause a murder?

That’s a point Arrington missed that I think is worth noting. Though a blog-based attack on an individual may seem one sided and unfair, in the Gawker Media situation I think the blogger incurrs as much risk as the people being blogged about. It may seem far-fetched, but I think it’s just as logical to imagine the person on the receiving end of nasty Internet attacks turning a gun on his attacker as it is to imagine him turning a gun on himself.

Let’s look at the facts:

* Every day, Gawker Media sites collectively post dozens of negative items about individuals. Many of these items are about people who aren’t frequently in the public eye and aren’t accustomed to any attention, let alone negative attention.

* The subjects these sites often target are writers, tech nerds, and other thin-skinned introverts: the type of person most likely to snap after years of keeping emotions bottled up.

* Bylines accompany each Gawker post and identify the author. So, unlike anonymous posts on a message board, finding out information about the person directly writing about you isn’t hard and the victim even knows where the writer works (a low security, first-floor storefront). These bloggers aren’t guarded national TV pundits with chauffeurs and security — they’re young people making relatively little money and taking public transportation.

So, when you have a collective group hurling dozens of harsh items a day at vulnerable people, statistically it’s just a matter of time before one of your targets snaps. It’s simply a numbers game.

Being a friend of Gawker’s publisher Nick Denton for years, I can safely say that Gawker’s tone will not soften. He’s a businessman above all else (a brilliant one at that) and unless it’s good for traffic to start being nice to people (it’s not), there would be no reason to do so.

In truth, very few Gawker writers work out of our office space. Nick is almost NEVER there, and if he is, it is usually a brief visit to confer with the tech team or something equally as trite. Sheila comes in occasionally, as does Richard, though the former typically writes about books and the later about silly celebrities and alt-gay German boy bands. I’ve never met Ryan, Hamilton, Nick or Maggie, and only recently did I realize that Alex is a dude.

The truth is, if anyone were to come to Gawker HQ, they’d see a lot of non-descript young people sitting at various desktops and laptops. Even if someone were to show up to take down a blogger, there’s no telling who does what. It’s not like Ray has Hot Wheels at his desk and Dash has a dildo sticker on his laptop; in fact, most bloggers don’t even have their own dedicated workspace in the office…it’d be incredibly easy to mistaken one of the supergay IT warriors for a gossip writer.

No. If you want to take out a Gawker author, don’t come to SoHo. Check the outerboroughs…remember, these folks are getting paid on the pageview scale-of-doom, so you’ll likely find the lot of them huddled in tenement style flats outside of Kew Gardens or the fringes of Bushwick. It would take some of these people so long to get to the office, their time is better spent lounging around their shared studio lofts in feety pajamas, frantically refreshing Nick’s del.icio.us page waiting for a new story to come in.

Oh an another thing, this post is totally freaky. Numbers game? You sound like fucking Gary Oldman. Take crazy somewhere else man…we’re all stocked up here.

James Del, LTD

There Will Be Blog