We're not pointing any fingers, really, more just wondering out loud and in print... but about a month ago, Gawker brought us the story of Emily and Michelle, crazytown roommates who couldn't understand why no one wanted to live in their four-bedroom Astoria apartment with them. Gawker poked good, clean fun at the girls, then later posted a video of their open house brunch. The Emily and Michelle story resulted in four posts and about 37,000 views on Gawker.
Fine, fun reportage of eccentric New Yorkers, we thought... until we found this...
Media Blog Seeks Fameballs - website4mw - 6 (Lower East Side)
Reply to: [email protected]
Date: 2007-11-28, 4:41PM EST
We are a popular, widely-read Manhattan media news and gossip website, and we're looking for young, ambitious, and (preferably) good-looking men and women in New York for a symbiotic relationship in which you do something degrading or shameful on the Internet, we then turn you into an object of incessant ridicule, and both of us enjoy the resulting increase in attention and web traffic, respectively, our readers' lust for public derision is sure to provide. As our readership is comprised almost entirely of gullible sycophants who are desperate for even the most inane forms of workday entertainment, our complicity will not be a problem.
If you're interested, please respond to this ad with your Name, Photograph, and a URL for your blog that nobody reads.
Please be discreet.
Now, we think that either:
1. Gawker really was that desperate for fresh content, or
2. the unhappy editorial staff wanted someone to find this so they could get fired before they all quit and still collect unemployment, or
3. it's entirely possible that this is not Gawker's ad. OK, not entirely possible, but somewhat possible.
UPDATE: The ad has expired but we took a screen shot for just this occassion: 