Great and even-handed article in the New York Times (go figure!) on The Line Between Homage and Parody at Disney (ESPN’s parent company), focusing on the new movie, Enchanted. One bit jumped out at me:

Because Disney’s characters are so well known, tweaking them even slightly could result in indelible damage. A decade ago, Disney updated the birds in the Enchanted Tiki Room attraction at Walt Disney World and still hasn’t heard the end of it.

Count me in that group – the new Tiki Room, featuring Iago from Aladdin, is beyond annoying, and of course by changing the attraction, they eliminated the nostalgia angle for those of us who went there as kids.

But that aside, I generally enjoy a little self-parody. House had a scene earlier this season where Dr. House is using the janitor as a sounding board, and the janitor says out of nowhere, “It’s lupus,” a reference to the fact that that disease is suggested – and, until last week, is wrong – in every single episode. If you can make fun of yourself, you can show viewers/readers that you don’t take yourself too seriously.

As for whether the Princess Line was a good idea or not – well, aside from the cited $4 billion in revenues, ask me when my daughter is four or so. I think my wife already made her an appointment at the Bippity Boppity Boutique for sometime in 2010.

OK, I’m back after the week’s hiatus, and I’ve got a backlog of three books to review and some restaurants to write up. But in the meantime, just to remind you I’m here, check out this New York Times profile of the Trinity College sophomore who did the play-by-play on the fifteen-lateral touchdown play this past weekend. Why would I link to this article? Because the kid’s a William Faulkner fan, and this summer read my favorite Faulkner novel (and one of the greatest American novels ever written), Absalom, Absalom!, that’s why.

Back with more in a bit…

So it seems like half the blogosphere has been talking about and talking up a New York magazine piece about Gawker.com, a popular blog offering news and gossip about New York City celebrities and the local media; it’s also the lead blog in the same network that includes one of my daily must-reads, Deadspin. I found the article entertaining, but shallow and lacking a critical element. Writer Vanessa Grigoriadis completely missed the burning question around Gawker in particular and Web 2.0 in general: Where is the line?

Web 2.0 writers write and publish anything they want. There’s no editorial control. There’s no code of ethics, at least none visible to the outsider. The sourcing requirements are thin at best. If something incorrect or defamatory is published, it’s up to the subject to complain and force a correction – and we all know that a correction is never as good as not running the article in the first place, since you can never make all of the article’s readers unread what they read.

One Gawker piece that Grigoriadis highlights as an example of what makes Gawker so … Gawkerish was a verbal attack by a Gawker writer on a child:

Two weeks ago, Gawker writer Josh Stein jumped on the 4-year-old son of satirist Neal Pollack, calling him a “horror” and “the worst” for providing his father with some cute quips about expensive cheese at a gourmet store; Pollack responded by sending an e-mail blast about his feelings to his friends, but Gawker got hold of the e-mail and relentlessly dug into him again and again.

You wouldn’t see that type of attack in a mainstream news source because to a lot of people, this type of content is inappropriate and unprofessional. If the writer decides it’s okay to trash a four-year-old kid, his editor will take it out. The editorial structure does not guarantee us quality content – the latitude given a number of tenured baseball writers makes that clear – but it does give us some modicum of professionalism and, if nothing else, a very low probability of libel because the publication’s owners are sufficiently afraid of being sued. The article does mention that Gawker is moving to a pay-for-performance system for its writers – more page views equals more compensation. This makes sense on a business level, but won’t it encourage an even lower standard of reportage? Again, Grigoriadis leaves the question unasked.

Gawker also has another feature that wasn’t mentioned in the article, the Gawker Stalker, where readers send in celebrity sightings. This is hardly a new concept – celebrity-trash magazines have been doing this sort of thing for years – but the easy frequency of these reports should raise questions about whether these people, some of whom are only barely celebrities or public figures, have any right to privacy, or whether this feature reveals enough information to get a real stalker started. These questions lack easy answers, but they are important; Grigoriadis was too busy writing her loveletter to Gawker to pose the questions, let alone offer a (gasp!) criticism.

Finally, Grigoriadis paints an unpleasant picture of the staff writers at Gawker. Managing Editor Choire Sicha says “Not a week goes by when I don’t want to quit this job, because staring at New York in this way makes me sick.” Editor Emily Gould says she spends most of her time in therapy talking about Gawker, and says of her job, “I could be ruining my life.” If everyone who works there is miserable, why do they work there? Does it say something about the job, the company, the industry? We’re given no insight as to why they’re all so cranky.

(And apropos of nothing, really, isn’t the photo of Gould flipping the bird to the camera some solid unintentional comedy? The middle-finger salute lost its power to shock about fifteen years ago; it’s something you see little kids do because they think it makes them grown-up. When you see an adult do it like that, it’s not cool or counterculture; it’s a sign that the bird-flipper is either out of date or unoriginal.)

I can’t say I’m a huge Web 2.0 guy, at least not in its current, no-adult-supervision incarnation. I love the interactions that I have with readers in chats, in ESPN Conversations, and here on this blog, but there are plenty of times I’d like to see some limits on what gets put out there. In August of 2005, a commenter on the sports blog redreporter.com created a post of his own where he out-and-out accused Roger Clemens of testing positive for steroids, claiming that there were “multiple sources inside MLB” who confirmed it. There are no links, no quotes, and the writer doesn’t even use his real name. The user who runs the blog comments at the bottom, more directly accusing Clemens of using steroids, also under an alias. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, and I’m not a lawyer, but this is a pretty straightforward example of libel, and the problem with it is that once it’s out there, it creates a group of readers who will say with confidence that Clemens tested positive for steroids or used steroids, despite the fact that the entire story originated with a complete and total fabrication. Is this the model we want for the next generation of journalists? Should writers enjoy the reduced accountability that comes with writing pseudonymously? And is this the type of “source” from which we want the next generation of readers to get their news and analysis?

I understand that it’s easy to sit back and pick apart what a writer didn’t cover in a long article, and as I said above, I found it entertaining. But I am surprised at the apparent lack of intellectual curiosity on Grigoriadis’ part. Gawker and Web 2.0 are stepping far over an ethical line that the last generation of media were not willing to cross. Who’s right? Is Gawker co-founder Nick Denton concerned with these questions? Are the writers? I’m not any the wiser after reading Grigoriadis’ article, and that, more than anything else, is why I found it lacking.

The Big Lead is one of a small number of blogs to earn a place in my RSS reader, but boy, did they ever whiff today with their comments on the Jammie Thomas decision, where the Minnesota woman was found to have illegally shared – not just downloaded – over 1700 songs via file-sharing networks:

this is some bullshit – the woman who downloaded songs lost in court. Isn’t the greed of millionaires astonishing?

Um, no. No, no, and how-did-you-tie-your-own-shoelaces-this-morning-NO. Sorry guys, I love the site, but you’re way off base here.

We’ve seen an appalling decline in the respect that people have for intellectual property. Musicians make money by creating something and selling it, and the fact that it’s no longer sold as a physical good doesn’t make taking it without paying for it legal or ethical. It’s theft, and people who do it should be punished.

But what Jammie Thomas did was worse: She didn’t just download songs – the RIAA hasn’t really gone after those folks – she shared the songs on her hard drive, making them available to anyone else on the same file-sharing network. This really isn’t any different from running a CD piracy operation, except that the number of people who could obtain copies of songs or albums from Thomas was not limited by production or distrubution constraints: Anyone who could find his way on to teh Interwebs could steal music with Thomas’ help.

I had more sympathy for file-sharers seven or eight years ago, when there were no legal digital downloading services, meaning that to purchase a single song you wanted, you had to drop $15 or so on an album that included eleven songs you probably didn’t want. (Why this wasn’t considered an illegal tying arrangement is beyond me, but I’m not an antitrust lawyer, either.) Now, however, if you want to purchase a specific song, it’s probably available on iTunes and it costs a buck. So if you want the song, suck it up and pay the dollar.

So what exactly is “bullshit” about this? She violated federal copyright law, and she stole profits from record companies and royalties from musicians. Given a chance to present her side of the story to a jury – and I can’t see why a jury might be predisposed to favor the record companies – she could not convince them of her innocence. The RIAA pointed out that the file-sharing took place via her IP address, with the MAC address of her cable modem, via a username she’d used before on other services, and from a password-protected computer she owned, and the songs were found on her computer’s hard drive. It is, as the defense argued, possible that someone spoofed her IP address and MAC address, and that same person could have sniffed her username/password for other services and used it on the file-sharing network. But the defense also claimed the songs ended up on her hard drive because she ripped them from CDs, which doesn’t seem to me to tie to the evil-hacker theory. Someone knew the songs were there and set up this elaborate scheme to expose them on Kazaa, framing Thomas in the process? I don’t think so. She’s a thief, and she’s going to have to pay for what she did. At least she can take solace in the fact that she’s not facing criminal charges or jail time, since what the jury found her to have done is a federal crime.

And I really don’t get the “greedy millionaires” bit. If someone produces something of value, and it’s stolen, does he then have less of a complaint? Is it less of a crime? If I pick Mark Cuban’s pocket and walk away with $500, is it okay because he’s a billionaire – and is he “greedy” if he wants it back? I don’t get it. Theft is theft. And as someone who makes his living by producing intellectual property – which, unfortunately, I often find reproduced illegally on various message boards – I find this kind of theft, and any defense of it, particularly appalling.