The Deputy Editor of the Boston Globe Suspended For Selling Hideous Tshirts Regarding Ben Edleman and #Takeoutgate

So I’ve been talking about this story the last couple days.  The cliffnotes version is that the Globe published that email chain of the Harvard Lawyer Ben Edelman going bananas after being overcharged 4 dollars by Sichuan Garden.   The story went viral.  The Globe then decided that this would be their Watergate moment. The event that catapults them from traditional newspaper to online viral juggernaut.  They continued to publish more stories about Edelman including supposedly a racist email chain that Edelman sent to the restaurant after this story went viral.

Email chain that Boston.com Published and then Retracted

Unfortunately Edelman denied sending the racist email and the Globe tucked it’s tail between it’s legs and retracted the story saying they couldn’t verify that it was true.  That wasn’t before the deputy editor Hilary Sargent who was covering this story for Boston.com started selling tshirts on Zazzle to commemorate her story with the hashtag #takeoutgate.   A move straight out of the Davey Pageviews playbook.  But as the Globe is finding out the hard way there is a huge difference between being the man and beating the man.   What started out as a great viral story for them has now ended in the suspension of their editor and an embarrassing black eye for the Globe.  They’ve almost done the impossible. They’ve given the moral high ground to Ben Edelman. They have come out looking like the bad guy with questionable ethics.   Here is what Ben Edelman told the Herald.

“Learning about Hilary’s now-deleted tweet and T-shirts has reinforced my sense that there’s more going on here than I yet understand,” Edelman, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, told the Herald yesterday in a series of emails from Singapore.

And maybe most shocking part of this entire fiasco is the actual tshirt that the Globe was trying to sell on Zazzle.  LOOK AT IT!  This sums up everything you ever need to know about the Globe and then some.  I mean I’ve seen alot of bad tshirts in my day but this takes the cake.  Zero ingenuity. Zero pizzazz.    This is what happens when a boring vanilla company suddenly tries to act hip.   They come across looking like morons.  Again leave the viral stories and tshirts to the King of Smut.   You guys don’t belong in this ring.   That’s how people get suspended and you become a laughing stock.