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| Written By Rick
Ellis, Saturday, July 26th, 2008 UPDATED: added winnr's name on Sunday, July 27th, 2008 now that the finale episode has aired. A mistake by someone posting content on the Food Network web site accidentally revealed the winner of Sunday's finale of "The Next Food Network Star." Several alert visitors who were on the web site late Thursday evening noticed that the winner's picture had been posted. The page revealed that Aaron McCargo Jr. had won the show, and it included video from his upcoming show "Big Daddy's Kitchen." The site also included exit interviews from the two runners-up. The winner's show was also among the pull-down list of network shows available on each page of the site. The pages were removed after several hours, but not before screenshots of the info began popping up online.
The Food Network issued a brief statement on Friday, acknowledging the mistaken posting: "FoodNetwork.com experienced technical difficulties last night. As our viewers have seen on The Next Food Network Star this season, many twists and turns have taken place during the show. We encourage all to tune in on Sunday at 10pm to see who will be the Next Food Network Star." While there has been a lot of chatter on various online food blogs as to why this happened, several webmasters at major media outlets I spoke with said that it can be a very easy mistake to make. "Typically, a site as robust as foodnetwork.com would have a staging area. That's a section where you can assemble changes to the site in advance, without them being visible to the public," said one web site managing editor. "The advantage is that you can thing make a number of pre-arranged changes to the site with a click or two. But as you can see, the disadvantage is that someone can make a mistake, and post sensitive info in advance of when it should be public." For the most part, news of the web site snafu seems to have been overlooked by major entertainment news outlets. Other than some mentions on popular food blogs (as well as the D Magazine food blog, which helped break the story), there wasn't much about the problem in Google News and other news aggregators. |
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