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...

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…