January 14th, 2008
Gizmodo's main rival Engadget silent about CES monitor prank
Truthfully, many of us in the online “press,” as well as in dead-tree media, probably spend a bit too much time analyzing ourselves.
In the blogosphere, one of the more egregious examples of this is our examination of whether or not that unnamed Gizmodo blogger was just having fun using a, well, gizmo to shut off monitors at the Motorola and Panasonic booths at CES- or whether his actions were childish and commercially harmful electronic vandalism.
Seemingly, everyone weighed in, including most all of Gizmodo’s direct and indirect competitors. Here in our shop, some of us got in on the action.
But unless I am overlooking something, Gizmodo’s most direct competitor has remained totally silent about the incident. Not a peep about it on Engadget.
Having formerly worked for another site in the same stable as Engadget is, my take is that Engadget chose not to get into the fray as to not stoop down to the level Gizmodo did here.
From Ryan on down, Engadget properly views themselves through a serious journalism prism.
That said, It would be unthinkable for any Engadget blogger to do something as childish as the Gizmodo blogger does. So for Engadget to go on at length about childish pranks, it would be as if Foreign Policy magazine wrote about Paris Hilton rather than Paris, the city.
Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
