Conde Nast Discovers That The Streisand Effect Reaches Russia Too

from the did-they-not-realize-this? dept

A bunch of folks have been submitting this positively bizarre story of how publishing giant Conde Nast (who publishes, among other things, GQ, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker and Wired) basically tried to completely bury an investigative piece recently published in GQ about Vladimir Putin. Conde Nast basically tried to do everything possible to make sure that the article was not seen in Russia. Beyond the obvious things of not publishing it in Russian editions, it didn't put the article online and basically buried it within the US GQ issue it was published in. It's not mentioned on the cover at all.

Now, there have been plenty of reports about how journalists who have been critical of Putin have an odd history of dying young -- but it's not clear if the goal here was to protect the reporter (who's pissed off that this whole thing happened, and doesn't want CN protecting him). The bigger issue have been that the company feared how its Russian magazines would be treated following the profile. But, if that's the case, why do the report at all?

In the meantime, of course, with NPR breaking the story of how much trouble Conde Nast went to hide the article, they've pretty much guaranteed that the article gets just that much more attention in Russia.

Filed Under: gq, putin, reporting, russia
Companies: conde nast

Reddit, Sears, Grills That Cook Babies... And The Streisand Effect

from the have-at-it dept

Adam sends in a link to a Reddit story where it comes out that someone (not entirely sure who) decided to push Reddit to take down an earlier story. Apparently Sears.com had some oddity in how content on its e-commerce site was displayed, and with a little URL-hacking some folks were able to create a Sears.com e-commerce page for a barbecue grill designed to cook babies: Pretty amusing, and obviously something that Sears wasn't all that happy about. Sears's explanation for what happened doesn't quite make much sense, but what would you expect?

We discovered earlier today that someone visiting our site had defaced a limited number of product pages

It wasn't so much "defacing" from the sound of it, as it was a bug in the way the site was set up, but, what doesn't make much sense is that someone then forced Reddit to remove its original thread discussing Sears' URL hackability. It's not at all clear who specifically got Reddit to take down the thread, though an admin admits that he was told to take it down. The obvious list of culprits, of course, would be Sears and Conde Nast (owners of Reddit).

Still, it should come as no surprise that the Reddit community doesn't take kindly to the idea that someone (whoever it might be) can dictate that a Reddit thread get deleted when it's not spam. So, now they've been pumping up this particular story about Reddit pulling down the thread, giving the whole story much more attention. Wouldn't it just have been better to fix the URL-hackability and let things be?

Filed Under: reddit, streisand effect, url hacking
Companies: conde nast, sears