Techcrunch's Michael Arrington fires a widely linked broadside entitled "Digg Should Sue Wired." At issue is Wired's article about successfully gaming Digg, Wired's supposedly overall negative attitude toward Digg, and the inappropriateness of Wired attacking Digg since it shares a corporate parent with Reddit, a Digg competitor. Unfortunately, every one of Arrington's conclusions is wrong. He's a smart guy, and one almost suspects the post was precisely engineered to draw response-traffic from knee-jerk hell-yeahs and naysayers alike. So, let's oblige him.
First, let's just dispose of the conspiracy theory. Wired and Reddit are indeed both owned by Condé Nast. Anyone who has dealt with Condé Nast — especially its internet tentacles — knows that it is a monolithic, lumbering, hydra-headed beast with (at least) a dozen different departmental channels for accomplishing anything online. They've gotten some of their magazine properties properly web-oriented in the past few months, but only just. The idea that such a tiny, rather toothless, and yet coordinated attack on Digg would occur via Wired on behalf of Reddit at the behest of Condé Nast is patently ludicrous. Not to mention that Wired, for all its faults, hardly seems the type of rag to submit itself to such tool-hood.
Arrington's first point is that Wired called Digg "the New Friendster" without mentioning their relationship to Digg competitor Reddit. What Arrington doesn't bother noting is that this was one line of a crystal-ball listicle entitled "Wild Predictions for a Wired 2007." There are also similarly negative predictions for Google, Myspace, and the New York Times. Should those also require disclosures detailing any potential conflicts with Condé Nast or its subsidiaries? I'm sure Si Newhouse himself insisted they put in that part about Myspace, just to piss off Rupert Murdoch.
So then, Arrington moves on to the newest Wired article ("I Bought Votes on Digg"). Arrington grudgingly admits that the Reddit connection is in fact disclosed, "albeit in a parenthetical in the middle of the story." Of course, that's how such conflicts are routinely disclosed, in this thing we call journalism. In fact, Arrington himself calls the article "a piece of investigative journalism," then turns round and roasts it for being investigative. That is, gaming Digg for an article about gaming Digg is "making the news," rather than reporting it. No, it's investigating the news, and testing and verifying the news you're reporting.
If anything, the Digg article is a welcome relief from Wired's far more typical brand of dewey-eyed futurism. It's never fun being the target of an investigative piece, but getting all hot and bothered over the investigation is a historically standard reaction from parties who strike at the methods because they don't like the results.
