Gawker Puts $1000 Bounty On Nikki Finke Headshots

You’ve got to hand it to Gawker for turning the process of writing blog posts into fun and profit for all. They’ve complained in the past that the photo of Finke to the left, which Defamer’s Richard Rushfield says looks like an “audition photo for the role of the evil headmistress in a 1940’s film,” is one of only two available on the Web (here’s the other).

Rather than resign themselves to that fact, they’ve made a contest of it: the first person to bring them a recent photo of Nikki Finke wins $1000.

From Rushfield’s post:

Everybody complains about the weather but Gawker is ready to do something about it. We hereby offer a $1000 bounty to the first person who can produce a web-ready, usable, recent photograph of Nikki Finke, sparing media consumers of the future another thousand go-rounds with Evil Headmistress.

We encourage bounty seekers to pursue the prize through all legal and honorable means; please no urban ninja tactics and remember the laws of the land still apply, even to Hollywood picture-takers. But surely someone out there has or will seen her, or seen a picture and can help save the web from this terrible drought.

Maybe there’s a future trend piece here! TMZ has reportedly been paying for tips forever, and Eater is offering $25 to food bloggers to shut down their blogs and $100 to Gourmet feature writers for their unpublished work. Web publications are discovering that it takes money to make money, as Dilbert’s boss might say? But Gawker’s known that for a while.

Finke, of course, has been in the headlines lately both for recently selling her site to Mail.com and for viciously taking down The New Yorker over a recent profile of her. She dismissed New Yorker EIC David Remnick as a “New Jersey dentist’s son,” and said the reporter who wrote the piece, Tad Friend, was “easy to manipulate.” Surely she deserves a better photo to go with that mystique?

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