On The Internet, Nobody Knows You're A Dog, btw [21 March 2007 Edition]

This is one of my favorite truisms jokes about the Internet. It first appeared in the 5 July 1993 issue of The New Yorker. [wait -- "the Internet" has been around since 1993??? -- Ed.]

[Thanks to this site for the pic, which helpfully also has a magnified screen grab of the monitor (scroll down).]

And now, thanks to an interesting -- and, alas, long-overdue -- decision announced today by Gawker Managing Editor Choire Sicha, now on the Internet, everyone will know whether "this is Balk, btw" or that is "Rhymes with Memily".

Regular readers of Gawker [DHMBIB raises hand!], Gawker Media's [GM] flagship blog about media and New York -- or any of GM's blogs -- are familiar with GM's signature unsigned "royal 'We' " style of posting in the third-person-plural. Even though most GM sites have multiple editors and contributors, this anonyfiction has allowed each site to present its snarky opinions as if they were those of "the site" instead of the individual contributors. It also has encouraged GM's active commenter community to play a game of speculating who authored any particular post -- a game encouraged along by Gawker Editor Alex Balk's occasional interjections of "[this is Balk, btw]".

But in an out-of-the-blue post this morning, Gawker Managing Editor Choire Sicha announced that henceforth -- or at least until the policy is changed -- Gawker's posts will be bylined.

GM clearly does not have a corporate policy on this. Most of their sites are not bylined, and there is precedent for going the other way. Back in the "1.0" days of Wonkette [GM's politics-and-DC blog], only posts not written by founding editor Ana Marie Cox were bylined -- all others were supposed to be understood to be hers. Even though AMC's signature style -- who can forget the glory days of the "ass-fucking" and "Butterstick" tags??? [not related, you Last-Tango-In-Paris-thinking pervs!!! -- Ed.] -- could not be mistaken, AMC's policy was to let her readers know when someone else was posting on her site.

[Ana Marie Cox is still so revered by regular Wonkette readers that she is still listed as "Wonkette Emerita" on the site, even though her contract with Time (hey! blogging about disclosures!) surely limits her ability to post there...unless she's writing about "ass-fucking" or "Butterstick"...or both -- Ed.]

After AMC left Wonkette barely a year ago, the new editors of "Wonkette 2.0" -- David Lat and Alex Pareene -- announced as their first editorial decision that they were elminating bylines. Since then, all posts on Wonkette -- even those written by "guest editors" -- have gone "un-bylined", thus being attributed instead to "Wonkette". Wonkette's policy remains in place to this day. [N.B.: David Lat left Wonkette last summer. Alex has since been joined by Ken Layne from another part of the GW corporate family for "Wonkette 3.0" -- Ed.]

Contrast that with this interesting editorial judgment over at GM's music blog, Idolator. Several months ago, quite famously, Idolator editors Brian Raftery and Maura Johnston called out the anonymous author of the music blog Gerard vs. Bear for refusing to identify him[?]self. Like Wonkette's editors, Brian and Maura do not byline their posts, but they do identify themselves as editors. Their beef with "Gerard" was that "he" would not even identify himself -- making it impossible for readers to make editorial judgments about potential conflicts-of-interest in his posts -- even though "Gerard" 's [75% -- "75%", because "Gerard" does also post "his" own opinions about music matters] raison-d'etre appeared to be calling out other music bloggers on conflicts-of-interest. [Sadly, such conflicts are notorious in the world of music blogs. This public spat is what led us to make our own disclosures when we started DHMBIB 2.0 back in December 2006 -- Ed.]

So, while Idolator is calling on "Gerard" to identify himself -- without identifying themselves, post-wise, Wonkette has gone one way, and Gawker has now gone the other way. Now, one can make an argument either way about whether posts should be individually bylined for conflicts-of-interest purposes, or whether group-blog opinions -- and, consequently, conflicts-of-interest -- should be attributed to all editors of a site.

All of this is very "inside baseball", as either Brian or Maura [see how difficult this is??? -- Ed.] Idolator would say, and I probably wouldn't be writing about this, except for Sicha's curious pronouncement today, and GM's own conflicted history about this.

So, I wonder -- what prompted Sicha's change-of-heart today?

GM commenter "Chief Wahoo" speculated -- jokingly, I hope and assume -- in the announcing post that this change related to "Gawker" nominating GM boss Nick Denton in their "Worst Bosses" "contest".

But Eat The Press editor Rachel Sklar has a different idea.

Sklar posits that this is all a CYA thing for...wait for it...Sicha himself! As Sklar notes, Sicha used to work for GM, left GM to work for the New York Observer, and has recently returned. Any anonyposts about the NYO are thus automatically questionable. Plus, there's that whole "you're real journalists not just snarkers" thing GM has to deal with. Can you imagine the outcry that would result -- from sites like Gawker -- if CBS [for example] were to read its news with an unidentified "voice" instead of with "Katie Couric"?

What's my opinion about all this? Well, I respect and appreciate bloggers taking personal responsibility for their posts. I can understand why group-blog sites would want all of their posts to be "of the site", but I have greater respect for the notion of standing proud for one's words.

I applaud Sicha's decision -- even though either he or his bloggers were not taking [unsigned] it [unsigned] seriously [unsigned] by the end of the day.

I'm also curious -- will this be the new GM policy for all GM sites??? Or does this only apply to sites that might be, yaknow, conflicted about something???

*****

This post marks the debut of a new "feature" for DHMBIB. Future posts tagged "On The Internet, Nobody Knows You're A Dog" will focus on topics such as "you can't believe everything you see on the Internet" or "one of these things is not like the others", for example.