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and Eater is offering $25 to food bloggers to shut down their blogs and $100 to Gourmet feature writers for their unpublished work.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?