A celebrity gossip blog squarely targeting the lives of Silicon Valley eggheads, anti-socials and mouthbreathers has always been one of Gawker founder Nick Denton’s stranger and least accessible publication ideas, and it’s not so surprising that the once prolific Valleywag has gone from its own website to a mere tag over at Gawker over the last year or two. Odd to see Valleywag, then, announce a bounty of up to $100,000 for information about the forthcoming Apple Tablet… a bold play at relevancy, to be sure.
Valleywag writes:
We’ve had enough of trying to follow all the speculation around Apple’s impending tablet — how it’ll work, its size, the name, the software and whether it will save magazines. We want answers, dammit! And we’re willing to pay.
Apple has said absolutely nothing about its tablet, but everyone expects it to be unveiled in San Francisco on Jan. 27. So, that gives you to two weeks to play in Valleywag’s Apple Tablet Scavenger Hunt: If you can find the first genuine photos, video or — the holy grail — the actual messiah machine itself before then and they’re exclusive to us, we’ll give you a cash prize
Valleywag is even promising to go to “spycraft” extents to protect the anonymity of any Apple employees who break their NDA to collect on the bounty. Needless to say, any cash payout will only come when the veracity of their sources’ information is confirmed when the product itself is released.
But the whole thing might well land Valleywag in hot water. According to a lawyer spoken to by Techcrunch, the bounty could be actionable by Apple because Gawker and Valleywag are inducing breach of contract, since anyone who would actually have a tablet is almost certainly under an NDA.
Gawker generally has a fairly carefree approach to lawsuits in regards to their technology coverage. Internally, the rational is that if a company sues for something written or leaked about their product, merely going public about the lawsuit usually causes so much bad publicity for the company in question for trying to stomp down on the freedom of the press that they quickly back off, all the while generating more publicity and traffic for Gawker. It’s not a bad strategy, but it only works if a company cares about looking like the bad guys. Apple’s not that kind of company. In a legal showdown with Apple, Gawker — and any Apple employees short-sighted enough to risk their futures for a one-time cash payout — will have bit off more than they could chew.
