★ Why I No Longer Read Gawker Blogs [Updated]

Before you read this post, please note the comment below from Brian Lam who is the Editorial Director for Gizmodo. He writes:

http://gizmodo.com/5489744/hey-you-rss-readers

That’s it. that’s all he wrote. That post is a link to an article on Gizmodo w/ a link to their full RSS feed which is: http://gizmodo.com/vip.xml.

So I’m corrected. The other aspects of my post are still true but Brian did completely correct me on the partial RSS issue and I’m apologizing for the drastic complaint.

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Two years ago, I unsubscribed to Engadget and started exclusively reading Gizmodo for all of my gadget news. The reason was the Engadget was too dry, lacked great commentary and failed to make me laugh. Gadget news can be pretty dry and Gizmodo did a great job acting a fool and it was entertaining. Oh and I also removed Engadget coinciding with Ryan Block leaving as his posts were always phenomenal and I didn’t see a reason to stay after that.

Then CES 2009 or maybe it was 2008 that Gizmodo ran around CES with an IR hacking tool turning off televisions all over the show floor. They were semi or completely banned from CES after that. That was pretty much strike one.

I’ve also been an avid reader of Valleywag back when Owen Thomas was the editor and I have to admit to being an avid reader of Fleshbot back when Violet Blue was there. iO9 was interesting when I started getting into video games early this year.

No more.

• Fleshbot got too fleshy as the articles hit a lower reading level and the talent I loved were “fired” in a complete restructure
• Valleywag went down hill and they now stalk Mark Zuckerberg and make fun of the wrong people. Owen Thomas left and it just went down hill.
• Gawker.com was always honest about what they covered and presented so, even though I don’t like their content, at least they haven’t changed what they write about

Then there’s Gizmodo…

It started with CES hijinks and continued with untagged NSFW posts that contained nudity but I click through and two giant exposes breasts are on my computer monitor then they started reviewing sex toys then iPhone 4 happened.

Gizmodo broke the law, they screwed up and they took chances. They continued public complaining about not being invited to WWDC or to Apple press events and they continue posting false articles about Apple.

Gizmodo is victim of Nick Denton’s “pay based on page view” model where bloggers get paid on how many views they get on posts so Gizmodo talks about Apple negatively, reports falsely and posts NSFW posts containing nudity to increase page views.

I’ve been “through” with Giz and Valleywag for a while now but then the last straw came:

Every Gawker site started only publishing partial RSS feeds. This was it for me. I consume my entire day’s news on the iPad on a train with no Internet connection. I have to take 5 minutes every morning, sending every Gizmodo post to Instapaper via NetNewsWire on my Mac then download all of those posts to my iPad and Gawker has put zero effort into making their posts look nice on Instapaper so the news story is buried between links, ad links, login links, register links and more because either they intentionally made it hard for Instapaper to scrape content or they are just being lazy.

The fact that Gawker sites force me to send stuff to Instapaper because of partial RSS feeds (basically feeds that don’t display the entire text of a story w/ images) and then make those scraped posts look like crap, it forces me to read Gawker’s nudity filled, inaccurate, link-bait posts on my computer on company time because I couldn’t read them on the train because it looked like crap.

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This is why I’m removing all Gawker sites from my RSS feeds and going back to Engadget. I’ll give them a go again if they finally decide to hire back the real journalists that were fired, improve their content, switch to full feeds and make Instapaper work.

If they don’t do that, I’ll never go back.

Disclosure: I’m a contract blogger for GigaOM Media. These views are personal and are not weighted by, nor do they reflect the views of my employer. This post would have gone up if I was not working for a competing network. I should haven’t to say this but it’s something I gotta disclose.