I don’t necessarily want to suggest that there is something inherently wrong with Gawker Media and their stable of oh-so irreverant ad blogs, but they do have some issues.

As a matter of fact, I think any blog that exists primarily to gain audience so that the site owners can show them ads and only secondarily exists to entertain either reader or writer(s) is going to have some problems. Not mere conflict of interest problems, either, although those will likely crop up—I’m talking more about problems due to the requirements mandated by the owning body’s policies and the general problems coming from blogger tendencies that, frankly, give everyone a bad name.

Consider the recent snipe at Kotaku on Metafuture. Kotaku’s Florian Eckhardt linked to an article with a game designer and summarized it falsely. You can see, occasionally, Gawker-style ad blogs post something of questionable relevance or interest simply to meet quotas or deadlines. Clearly there is a demand to have X number of articles posted per specified time period and I suspect the relative quality requirements for these postings are loose, at least.

But X may actually be a pretty high number. If so that could suggest that these blogs get by because they have something new most of the time that readers log in but not necessarily something good. And in fact since most posts are links to other locations, that simply means that the quality of the on-site commentary is largely irrelevant; the implication is that readers are letting Gawker sites act as link filters (I’ve discussed being a link filter for friends and family before) and don’t care so much about what these sites actually have to say.

Given that perhaps it isn’t so surprising to find a Gawker poster getting the facts on a fairly dense and lengthy interview wrong. But it certainly isn’t good. I’m not suggesting Eckhardt needs to be dragged into the street and shot, but I would seriously consider some sort of repercussions from his employers for misrepresenting (sensationally I might add) someone else’s words.

And here’s where it gets worse: Since the speed and quantity of these types of sites are what seems to matter more than anything else, other sites will pick up the story as gospel truth withouth any fact checking or any research of their own. Consider Slashdot running the interview as a Kotaku story. Clearly the original story came from a different site (Evil Avatar in this case), but rather than bother following a link trail, the Slashdot story poster assumes that Kotaku should get the hit because they linked it.

I know bloggers like to think of themselves as the new face of journalism and all that crap, but it is exactly stuff like this that proves how very wrong they are. And the sad part is that the fix isn’t too terribly difficult anyway: Just click a few extra links to determine where the content originated and never link to or post anything that you haven’t actually read. I imagine it would be immensely frustrating to me if I wrote something and some Gawker-style blog picked it up and then everyone and their cat carried the link but attributed it to the Gawker blog and not me, just because they were the highest traffic site to run the story. It’s basic journalistic integrity and it is basically absent online. So much for ‘New Media.’