Sophomoric Pranks Do Not a Journalist Make
Last week gadget blog Gizmodo admitted to pulling a prank at CES 2008 in which they used a device to turn off TVs on the exhibit floor and during company presentations. In their post about the prank Gizmodo apologized ("It was too much fun …
Context & Ripple Effects
The arc runs fast: Gizmodo confessed to killing TVs across the CES show floor with TV-B-Gone clickers on January 10, the CEA answered within a day by stripping its credentials, and by January 13 exhibitors were being told to disable the IR ports on demo Macs. ReadWriteWeb's piece is the judgment layer on that sequence — an argument that the apology and the 'banned for life' bravado do not add up to journalism.
The story travelled unusually wide for a trade-show stunt: Scobleizer praised Brian Lam's turnaround, Webware picked at who gets called holier-than-thou, and Gizmodo itself reframed the ban as civil disobedience. That spread matters because it turned one blog's prank into a referendum on whether traffic-chasing stunts are compatible with press credentials.
First-order effects
- Gizmodo works CES 2008 without floor access after the CEA's ban, trading exhibit-hall scooping for the audience that comes with the martyrdom framing of its 'banned for life' post.
- Exhibitors change behavior immediately: the Macworld advice to disable IR ports shows vendors treating every demo display as vulnerable to a $20 consumer clicker.
Second-order effects
- Rival gadget blogs face a forced positioning choice — condemn the prank to protect their own credential relationships, or match the stunt traffic — with editors like Scoble publicly rewarding the apology as reputation management.
- TV-B-Gone-style devices get free marketing from the coverage, pushing show organizers toward RF/IR hygiene rules and hardened demo setups as a standard cost of exhibiting.
Third-order effects
- Trade-show press credentialing becomes an enforcement tool against blogs rather than just an access pass, drawing a line between accredited outlets and stunt-driven ones as the blog era professionalizes.
- If prank-as-coverage keeps paying in traffic, the industry drifts toward a split press corps — credentialed reviewers versus provocateurs — with ethics debates recurring at every major event.
The trend: Consumer-electronics blogging is colliding with traditional press-access norms, and trade bodies like the CEA are using credential bans to decide where stunts stop counting as journalism.