Gawker Media: M2A1

Gawker Media M2A1: Case Study: Gawker Media Is Gawker Media an Ethical Company? In my opinion, Gawker Media cannot be regarded an ethical company. Being a gossip website, the company has on several occasions violated the privacy of others and jeopardized the operations of several entities. To begin with, it is clear that Gawker Media could go to any length to get that which it really needs to maximize page views.

For instance, in an attempt to get a 'hot story,' Gizmodo, which is an affiliated site of Gawker, offered to buy an unreleased Apple phone an engineer working for the company had lost. The company then went ahead and published photos of the phone -- in the end being "rewarded with roughly twenty million page views" (McGrath, 2010). In Apple's opinion, this was akin to dealing in stolen property.

By releasing photos of Apple's future phone, a prototype (Apple would obviously have wanted to keep such a device under wraps for competitive reasons), to the public, the company effectively leaked out what, in my opinion, was privileged/proprietary information, thus effectively jeopardizing Apple's operations. It is clear that the company engages in checkbook journalism -- which has been variously defined as the act of seeking out information and paying for such information if it meets a certain criteria. In my opinion, checkbook journalism is largely an unethical practice.

In the opinion of Michael Wines of the Times, in reputable journalism, paying for information is a cardinal sin…" (Goldstein, 2007, p. 118). It is important to note that for a company to be regarded ethical, its owners, founders, or sponsors have to adhere, or be seen to adhere, to certain ethical standards. Taking into consideration what most of those who have interacted with Nick Denton, the proprietor as well as founder of Gawker, say, he does not fit the description of an ethical executive.

In the words of McGrath (2010), "there exists in the collective media a caricature of Denton as an evil, soulless, Machiavellian puppeteer: the wizard of Blogs." This, as McGrath (2010) further points out, is an image fed by, amongst other things, Denton's approach to issues and management style.

Further, as one of Gawker's former employees says of Denton, "other people's emotions are alien to him." It is not difficult to see why one wouldn't expect Gawker, a company Denton runs, to be an ethical company that adheres to some strict ethical standards of conduct. Sale of Remnant Advertising Space to Shady Buyers and Others If I were offered employment by Gawker as a marketing manager, I would most definitely offer for sale remnant advertising space to interested buyers at a discount.

As I will explain below, interested buyers do not necessarily include shady buyers. In basic terms, remnant advertising, as Mares and Weinberg (2014, p. 110) points out "is ad space that is currently being unused." In the case of Gawker Media, failure to offer for sale such space could result from insufficient advertiser numbers and a high cost of the said space. It is important to note that in addition to being finite, advertising space also has a lifespan that is largely definite.

For this reason, failure of sell available slots results in certain wastage of advertising space. As Gawker's Media marketing manager, I would avoid a situation where the company losses out on revenue by filling unsold advertising space with fillers that do not generate any revenue for the company. Further, I would not offer such space for free as this would defeat the purpose of selling advertising space in the first place.

In that regard, therefore, I would offer remnant spaces at a price significantly lower than that charged for normal advert slots. Thus in my opinion, selling such slots at a huge discount would still make perfect business sense. In seeking to ensure that I do not injure my ethical beliefs, I would come up with a systematic process of selecting those to be offered remnant advertising space.

This I would also be doing to ensure that Gawker Media is seen as a company that does not condone shady and unethical business practices. The process would be designed in such a way that it locks out shady characters out of the offer. In this case, I would categorize those to be offered remnant advertising space at a discount into three broad groups; i) those already advertising with us (i.e. our existing customers), ii) charitable organizations, iii) startups whose annual revenues are below $50,000 dollars.

It should be noted that those already advertising with us would be given the first priority as it is assumed that they already have in place ready budgets. According to Mares and Weinberg (2014), failing to sell empty inventory when print deadlines beckon results in guaranteed losses. For this reason, the authors point out that most publications see the sense in accepting lower prices for such inventory. This is the very same thing I would be doing by offering for sale remnant advertising space to interested parties.

The Pros and Cons of Incorporating Overseas There are several distinct advantages of incorporating overseas. One of these is that setting up an offshore corporation could result in some tax savings. Denton's company could have been incorporated in Budapest so as to benefit in terms of tax avoidance. As a matter of fact, regardless of the rules in place, "greater tax savings may be achieved by the use of an offshore company rather than a company incorporated in one's country of residence" (International Business Publications, 2012, p. 114).

There is also the need to protect that company from vengeful lawsuits and harassment. According to the International Business Publications (2012), a company incorporated overseas is, in most cases, seen as being rather difficult to pin down with regard to trivial lawsuits. The nature of Gawker's operations is likely to leave it exposed to various lawsuits, i.e. from those who feel that their privacy has been violated in some way.

In essence, "the adversary is forced to sue in both the onshore and offshore jurisdictions which may be time consuming and costly, thereby reducing eagerness to sue" (International Business Publications, 2012, p.