Jason Chen, an editor for Gizmodo, had his house searched by the cops this past Friday. I’m sure you can guess what it was about. They had a search warrant (pictured above) and in turn, they took a substantial amount of his property. There’s a lot of talk about how this isn’t legal, and how this is a Shield Law issue, but none of that really matters right now. Fact is, that’s all stuff for the lawyers to sort out later.
What’s interesting to note is how much coverage this has gotten over at Gizmodo:
This is from yesterday’s front page. You’ll recall that yesterday was Monday, three days after the search warrant was filed. And it’s not even tied to the big iPhone 4 blitz at the top of the site. Funny how that works.
Prior to becoming a writer for Apple Gazette, I spent some time as a copy editor for a magazine here in town. As a copy editor, part of my job was fact checking. So when I did some research about today’s story, I had a feeling that Nick Denton had put his foot in his mouth once or twice before about bloggers, journalism and all that. Turns out, I was right:
Mr. Weisberg then asked Mr. Denton about how he monitors and fact-checks the content on his sites.
“We don’t,†Mr. Denton replied flatly. “We aim to get the truth over time. The verification model is post-publication rather than pre-publication. Our readers correct us and we apologize and we change it. We don’t have time to check it all before.â€
Maybe this was one of those times you needed to do a little checking before you jumped in with both feet, hmm?
One thought on “Jason Chen – Blogger for Gizmodo – Gets a Visit From The Police”
I believe Apple is acting like the big bad mean corporation they are. They are trying to set example for others. If this keeps on going, all the tech/gadget blogs will become only re-post of the official gazettes of the companies. I think the bloggers/journalists and other media altogether should boycott Apple’s news and news conferences to stop this type of bullying. The media is what made Apple successful and popular as it is now compared to what it used to be few years ago.