ShortFormBlog has followed up their story on the not-journalist blogger Crystal Cox, who lost a defamation lawsuit and was ordered to pay $2.5 million in damages. From the follow up story at SFB:
Forbes reporter Kashmir Hill disputes the way the story was first presented by Seattle Weekly, which broke the story: “The facts in the case are far more complicated, and after hearing them, most journalists will not want to include Cox in their camp.” Hill points out that it appeared Cox was attempting to engage in reputation damage, not journalism, including sending out the e-mail shown above, in which Cox reportedly offered reputation-protection services.
Click over to ShortFormBlog to see the email in question. It’s only slightly more veiled than “say, that’s a nice reputation you got here. It’d be a shame if someone were to start a series of websites defaming you.”
Of course, this news doesn’t really change what I wrote about defamation and such yesterday, but it does shed a little more light on the beef between these two.