Unless you were in a drunken stupor, you couldn’t have missed the past week’s media furor surrounding the revelation that the alleged Rob Ford crack video does exist.
You may, however, have missed this wonderfully erudite, and catty, exchange between Gawker.com’s features editor Tom Scocca and Toronto Star publisher John Cruickshank over which outlet deserves credit for first breaking the story.
Scocca took umbrage at Cruickshank’s claim that the revelation was because of “work of a scale and seriousness that can only be undertaken successfully by what is now called ‘the mainstream media,’ which does conveniently overlook the fact that Gawker reported on the video first.
The series of e-mails perfectly summarizes the difference between old and new media, skirting across everything from local law to paywalls and even “the virile ring of 1980s news papering.” A fun and fascinating read.
