The Hanover Collaboration

Though mechanisms that I’ve spent the past 44 or so hours trying to figure out, our humble The Hanover Collaboration got a link from Gawker, the digital crackpipe that keeps Manhattanite gossips foaming at the mouth.

Other than a shared sense of snark and a decidedly liberal bent, it’s hard to imagine a webpage less like us than Gawker. Though we’ll occasionally sound off on entertainment news, it’s never in the tasty sound bites of successful blogs, and never, ever focused on stories surrounding the Empire State’s 13-mile urban suppository.

Quite frankly, the whole confluence of events that got The Hanover Collaboration posted there is nothing short of a Internet miracle. No one who writes here seems to know anyone working at Gawker, and up until Tuesday, we were pretty sure personal acquaintances made up 100% of our reader base. So the only way I can imagine they found us was a not-especially-likely botched Google search*.

Combine that with the long odds that I’d a) come across a link to a relatively mundane Reuters story about Dita von Teese b) choose to click on it c) check out her Wikipedia page d) notice the plagiarized passage and e) find time to put all the pieces together in a two-paragraph blurb during work hours [that last item is not unlikely at all – ed.], and you’ve got yourself one heck of a coincidence.

As a strange addendum, the only reason Gawker linked us was to take yet another stab at literary pincushion John Frey – you know, the guy that lied to Oprah? But the thing is, Frey, unlike Reuters, didn’t plagiarize; in the tradition of Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain and pretty much anyone else to ever write a memoir, he just made stuff up.

A more deserving butt of Gawker’s jibe would have been Harvard pariah Kaavya Viswanathan, though not being from Manhattan, she’d normally be outside the scope of that website. So as I see it, the only reason we appeared in Gawker at all was because yet another intern f’ed up*.

*Actually, after an email exchange to Gawker editor Alex Balk, it looks like I was the only one f’ing up in this last case. And, someone sent the link to my Reuters/Wikipedia story to Gawker’s tip line; let the speculation begin.