PBS Hacks: Out of the Frying Pan, Into The Fire

For those of you keeping score at home, websites for PBS, and its NewsHour and Frontline programs, were hacked over the weekend when the crew of “The Lulz Boat” (@Lulzsec) took umbrage with a Frontline documentary about Wikileaks.

Undaunted by the hack, PBS web staffers made sail for a safer habor and began to publish their videos and transcripts on Tumblr.

“We already had a Tumblr page that we played around with and had a small presence on,” NewsHour’s social media production assistant Teresea Gorman tells Turnstyle via email,  ”so when thinking how we could get our show published it was a natural leap. Kate Gardiner , the first NewsHour social media assistant, actually set it up way back in August .  It’s a good place to experiment, especially since it is so simple to post and there’s an interesting community there.”

But Tumblr is famous for how often its servers are down, which is occasionally due to massive flame wars between cliques of Tumblr users and their arch-nemesis 4Chan, the Tortuga of the Internet. While turning to Tumblr to keep the news flowing is clever, it feels like leaping out of the frying pan and into the fire.

With a wave of major tech press conferences coming next week, and Sony still weathering the effects of the attacks on their Playstation Network, my spider-sense tells me that the newly emboldened hacker class is going to make more headline grabbing moves in the weeks to come.