The penalty is very high, $140 million. Gawker media has to pay to celebrity wrestler Hulk Hogan for publishing (in 2012) a short clip from sex-tape involving Hogan and his friend’s wife. The incident occurred in 2006 and was taped without Hogan’s konwledge by the then husband of Heather Clem, the woman in the affair. Her (then) husband is a radio personality Bubba the Love Sponge.
Gawker Media runs a number of blogs, well known are Lifehacker, Jezebel, Gizmodo, Gawker.com.
Image credit: Sean MacEntee (Source: Flickr)
Although, in general, most of the blogs don’t fall into any category of mainstream news media like reuters or BBC, but the one’s like Gawker, Techcrunch, Mashable, TMZ often broadcast upto-date news or stories due to their large networks or communities they already established, and often regarded as reliable. Top blog sites get millions of traffic a month.
But as the broadcast goes public, so they have to follow certain rules of journalism. Publishing someone else ‘privat moments’ is a bit outside journalism, like invading one’s private sphere. It can’t be a way to get more publicity to draw more traffic. Higher number of traffic (visitors) means more revenue for websites. . But the story in question can’t fall into any branch of journalism.
Ging back to the case, as Gawker could not afford to pay the penalty, it went bankrupt and auctioned itself. Univision Communications is buying the Gawker Media for $135 million. That’s truly pathetic.
So think and stop, before you post other people’s sex lives online. It can be very costly.
PS. By the way, like many stunts in action films, this type of ‘stunt’ news can fall under a new category ‘stunt journalism’. However, stunt journalism is far different from ‘whistleblower’ like Wikileaks.
One more thing guys, take care of ‘spongy love’ affairs. They can really roll things many thousand kilometers 🙂