Now the Daily Mail is suing Gawker
The Daily Mail has hit Gawker with a defamation lawsuit over a first-person piece Gawker published by a former Mail Online writer.
The piece, published in March, was written by James King, and it slammed Mail Online for allegedly shoddy practices of journalism that amounted to little more than outright theft of other outlets’ content. King’s piece was unflatteringly titled, “My Year Ripping Off the Web With the Daily Mail Online.”
The Mail claims in the suit that this thorough evisceration of its supposed methods of business damaged its “reputation, goodwill, and business.”
King was a freelance writer for the Mail for a little over a year, ending in July 2014, though both he and the Mail agree that they offered him a full time position — which he turned down. During that time he writes that he was charged with “aggregating” stories from around the web, adding little to them except a bit of the Mail’s style.
Here is a particularly damning portion of the article:
"A May 2013 New York Times story about the Mail's growth gave me additional confidence that I was joining a somewhat credible publication, and I started to get excited about the prospect of working for a news outlet with such enormous reach. That excitement quickly faded when it became clear that the only thing about the Mail's ethics that had changed was that it now attempted to disguise its plagiarism as aggregation."
The Mail’s lawsuit, which was filed in New York, disputes this. It says that “editors at The Mail had to repeatedly remind Defendant King of the need for proper attribution and to add hyperlinks to articles on which he worked during his time performing work for The Mail.” The Mail is clearly trying to paint King as someone outside the norm of its practices, and someone who ignored attempts to help him get in line.
The suit even alleges that King’s responsibilities were cut back after editors found out he had plagiarized an article — though the fact he was offered a full-time gig muddles this claim up.
In a statement to the Erik Wemple Blog, Gawker media responded with the following: “While we’re not surprised that the Daily Mail doesn’t like what James King had to say about his time working there, this baseless complaint doesn’t even attempt to refute the vast majority of the author’s detailed anecdotes about his experience as a Daily Mail writer.”
This isn’t the first legal drama to hit Gawker recently. The company in in the midst of a lawsuit filed by wrestler Hulk Hogan. Hogan is suing suing Gawker for publishing a “highlights reel” of his leaked sex tape. If Gawker is found guilty, it could be forced to pay as much as $100 million in damages.
Business Insider has reached out to Gawker for comment.
You can read the court filing here.
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