BOMBSHELL: Here's the Real Reason People Hate Henry Blodget
Business Insider CEO and editor-in-chief Henry Blodget proved today that he's a giant troll with a trolly post addressing anti-Semitism ... Click through for THE REAL REASON PEOPLE HATE HENRY BLODGET!!!. [Seriously, go on and click, we promise there won't be any slideshows.]
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Ahh, you made it. So, here's why people are so mad at Blodget:
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His Journalism
Haters: MG Siegler, NYU's Jay Rosen
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Reason: Slideshows, the preferred and clicky format of the majority of Business Insider posts. You know, the type of slideshows that offer up a juicy headline and then hit you with a picture of a monkey as they divide the story into eight parts. "Whatever, that’s their decision and it seems to be working out for them. All I know is that as an author, I would hate this," wrote Siegler while pointing out the utter ridiculousness of putting a picture of a gorilla next to a Steve Jobs article on Business Insider. Siegler adds, "Both the reader and the writer lose as a result of this nonsense. But Business Insider wins, I suppose."
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More Journalism
Haters: Gawker
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Reason: Well, there was this one time Henry Blodget pasted an entire Wikipedia article as an article. As Hamilton Nolan notes, about 96% of Blodget's 5,000-word post on the Afghanistan shooting and the My Lai massacre were cut and pasted from the My Lai Massacre's Wikipedia entry. "What the fuck are you doing over there, Henry? Everything okay?" wrote Nolan. "Also, not one commenter mentioned the fact that you just pasted an entire 4,800-word Wikipedia entry, complete with photos, at the bottom of your 200-word post."
Even More Journalism
Haters: Reuters' Jack Shafer
Reason: If Business Insider is on your Twitter feed, you may be alerted several times a day that the world is verging on a catastrophic collapse. Shafer took to this back in December when Business Insider actually reported on that freak elevator crash in Manhattan--calling the story "sick linkbait." Shafer tweeted, "You know what I'm saying. Tweets abt BI rewrites of stories abt crushed human beings are unseemly linkbait. To each his own."
More Journalism
Hater: Instapaper's Marco Ament
Reason: We've gone over the slideshows and whatnot already, right? Well, apparently the only thing that's more annoying than Business Insider writing obnoxious stories is, according to Ament, when Business Insider rewrites your story into one of their annoying stories and then reminds everyone that you wrote it. Ament wrote:
But what offends me even more than rewriting my titles and burying my links is how their layout so strongly implies that I’m a Business Insider writer and I endorse my name and writing being splattered all over their site
Why wouldn’t I want to be associated with Business Insider? It has nearly everything that offends me as a web reader and writer: linkbait headlines, more ads than content, more sharing buttons than original words, top-list “slideshows” that make readers click for every item and defraud advertisers into thinking that their pageviews are legitimate, Tynt messing with copy and paste, Vibrant Media’s double-green-underline ads, generic images slapped next to each post (often poorly Photoshopped®), and tabloid coverage of every rumor and inflammatory non-event so they can fight all of the other tabloids for Google’s pennies...
And, if given the choice, I wouldn’t trade 8,891 hits [the traffic he gets from BI] for my name and writing being used on their site like this.
Not to Beat a Dead Horse But... More Journalism
Haters: Lots
Reason: CAPS LOCK HEADLINES. Sensationalism. Silly stories. Take your pick.
When Henry Blodget Defends His Journalism
Haters: Everyone Above
Reason: Well, this was Blodget's excuse about copying and pasting that Wikipedia entry:
I originally embedded the Wikipedia entry on My Lai here, because it's Creative Commons (like all of Wikipedia) and because I figured readers might be interested. But then Gawker freaked out about it and sent people over here to flame me.
And there's this from today's lesson in trolling:
@dearsarah I certainly wasn't trying to "incite" anything. I actually wanted to hear some smart thoughts on this. (And I did!)
— Henry Blodget (@hblodget) May 29, 2012
This poor excuse then prompted articles from Gawker like "The 6 Best Pages of Henry Blodget's 6-Page Article About Zuckerberg (UPDATE: Real Time Arguments From Nick Denton)" and "The 8 Most Interesting Things From Business Insider's Story About the 8 Most Interesting Things From Gawker's Story About The KKK." Which we thought were at least mildly funny even though Nick Denton didn't think so.
..... and there's his being banned from an industry he writes about or and there's... THIS!.
