The blogger was fired and escorted out of Conde Nast’s headquarters for telling Gawker that Conde Nast’s Internet service wasn’t working.
Andrew Krucoff, if you’re reading this, Simply Fired might want to talk to you. Gawker explained how he became abruptly unemployed from his four-month position as a freelance research analyst with the big publishing house:
Last week, while emailing with us on a totally unrelated matter, he forwarded along an internal notice that Conde’s internet servers were down – just to explain why he’d disappeared from instant messenger. We posted that memo, made an innocuous joke about how our traffic would likely fall and VF staffers would have more difficulty killing time. We did not first ask Andrew for his OK, because we didn’t think something so inconsequential would be a big deal.
As it turns out, MediaPost reported, it was a big deal:
Once Conde Nast management discovered the culprit’s identity, he was promptly escorted from the building. The entire incident is recounted on Gawker, including Krucoff’s reason for leaking the information–that he was explaining why he wasn’t available online to a Gawker editor….
You’ve got to wonder what’s really happening when mainstream media companies are so threatened by the blogosphere that they consider it treasonous to reveal a Web service outage.
After receiving the forward from Krucoff on October 20th, Gawker “speculated” on the impact of a net outage at Conde Nast:
Whatever will Nasties do with themselves all day? Because God knows putting out one magazine a month can’t possibly keep busy, say, the 106 people listed on the Vanity Fair masthead.
David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
