As somebody who does a lot of writing and used to write news copy, this is a story I've been following for a while. In my mind it's easily the biggest story in

As somebody who does a lot of writing and used to write news copy, this is a story I've been following for a while. In my mind it's easily the biggest story in journalism this year. The internet has made everybody a publisher, from your cousin who thinks Elvis isn't dead to that MIT scientist with 17 degrees. And they're all online. It's also created an instant feedback loop, where you instantly measure how "good" your publishing is by tracking clicks, page time metrics, and referrals. It even provides a zero-overhead revenue model. The money's not what publishing used to be, but hey, you can tap into it without having to do much. Finally, because of the previous items, it has destroyed traditional journalism. What do I see when I consume journalism today? I see fear. Everybody knows it's dead and internet eyeballs is the only thing that does anything. The person and their emotional connection over Twitter, FB, YouTube and the like is the brand, not the paper or magazine. Everybody knows that. This means the old guard is gone, the people who used to sit in an office and tell you that your story was crap. They cost too much in overhead and nobody cares if your story was crap as long as you correct it the next day. (It's all self-correcting, right?) So instead of news, we now have celebrities who give their personal impressions of how it all makes them feel. People reward or punish publishers by their ability to draw them into some event and make them feel one way or the other. This reporter (I use the term loosely) knew how to do a great job of that. He also knew that the emotional content far outweighed the rest of it. People loved him. His publisher loved him. Until they didn't. The only reason he was fired, the only reason BigNetCorp X would care if they're screwing you over or not, is because enough other people were able to raise a big enough rukus that it couldn't be ignored. He could have kept doing this for years as long as he was willing to scale his fabrications in accordance to how much of a PR stink people could have made. While interesting as a stand-alone story, my feeling is that each of these just makes the next bunch more clever. It's not a very good time to be alive for people who like journalism.