Our hard-partying reporter has no trouble finding bedmates among his media colleagues, but he plays fratboy when trawling for one-night stands on the notorious Manhunt. "I'm a writer, runner, ex-football player and Zeta Psi brother, bar-hopper, people-watcher—and I'm a blast," he writes. There's nothing that shocking in the profile: he lists the usual menu of kinky gay sex; and he's not the only person to have been caught out with an online ad. Here's the mystery: this journalist is on the biggest and most sensitive story of his career, and he's been rooting around in other people's personal lives. How on earth does he have time to trawl gay hookup sites? And why would he leave so many clues as to his real identity when he's so much in the public eye?
Who Is 219west?
10:08 AM on Fri May 9 2008
By Nick Denton
7,212 views
63 comments








Comments
Steve Doosey?
Your willingness to poke fun at yourself is impressive.
Nick - is that his thumbnail at the bottom of the screen?
Sam Donaldson.
I'd hit that.
He's in Chelsea - so it's a building number and beginning of a street address. 219 West 22nd Street, etc.
This almost makes up for your theft of my painfully obvious joke in your Hachette post yesterday, Nick. [gawker.com]
My first thought is Patrick Healy.
@wrongneighborhood: Mine is Lou Dobbs.
MoDo in he-drag.
Kind of looks like Obama's chief speech writer
He's not just "trawling for one-night stands" - it says right there that he's up for an LTR, dating, or just friends.
And nipple play.
@kokotaylor:
Ooh, interesting - I think he is around 26...
"Status: Negative"
That is just chilling.
@fileunder: Well, this is Manhunt, so 26 is really 33-35.
@wrongneighborhood: I think Patrick Healy is black. He does look kinda Dentonish if you shave a decade off his age.
Nick, I had an idea. Can we integrate the same "menu" of kink into our commenter profile pages?
@PrincessKashmir: I mean the thumbnail, not the reporter.
@PrincessKashmir: Shaving Denton is a task that could take years and cost thousands of lives.
@In Other News...:
"He's in Chelsea - so it's a building number and beginning of a street address. 219 West 22nd Street, etc."
I know a photographer who lives near there and does these utterly sublime pictures of endangered seafaring birds.
They're quite astounding, really.
Sort of like the chilling, emblematic work of Dorothea Lange, except her subjects never choked to death on tiny bits of plastic. Well, you know what I mean.
@kokotaylor:
Hah! You just warned me away from the site without intending to - thanks!
@PrincessKashmir: [www.mediabistro.com]
That's the Times' Healy.
@TheHonJudgeSmails: Ha. For some reason, I was thinking that too.
Also, it could turn out that "the biggest and most sensitive story of his career" was his nipples.
[my.manhunt.net]
ta-dah
@TheHonJudgeSmails: If I don't first, I'm sure you will!
Manhunt: it's Journalism 2.0's Deep Throat.
Looks like Healy...
I guess traipsing along after the hellbent Hillary's 300 can leave a guy in need of a little "Nipple Play."
Morley Safer
Bill O'Reilly
Casting stones are we?
Definitely Patrick Healy. It's all in the facial hair.
[www.mediabistro.com]
@kokotaylor: That would be awesome. But he's definitely not 6'3". Or gay, for that matter.
@wrongneighborhood: He's cute. I'll take his nipples on a play date.
@Yessizzle: That's a loaded statement.
@wrongneighborhood: I have no idea why I thought he was black, not that it's relevant. All in all, he's pretty cute.
Tufts has a zeta psi chapter.
What story is he working on that's so ridiculously evil that he deserves this? And since when did Gawker start attacking reporters for doing invasive tabloid-y gossip pieces?
I think that is the most G-rated Manhunt profile on the entire interwebs.
@In Other News...: Also, there appears to be a Zeta Psi frat headquarters at 219 East Pierce Street, Easton, PA.
Denton: this is really really low. He's still smarting after Chris Rovzar dumped him and broke his heart. Take it down.
@Bell County: 219 West Pierce, dillweed.
In his primary photo, he kind of looks like the love child of Choire Sicha and Matt Taibbi.
(I Don't Want To Go To) Chelsea
@asketchymess: If there had been more than one exclamation point in the profile I would've thought it was actually Choire.
This is pretty lame, Denton. Anyone who still has a Friendster account can see exactly who this is. Maybe there isn't anything to be ashamed of about gay hookup sites? And by maybe, I mean definitely.
Perez Hilton had one eons ago as well, right? Wasn't he into water sports or am I just imagining that?
Psst - the dude at 9West has a fucked up shoe fetish.
@rod: Don't enable it!
Low blow, Denton. You're the one fag left without a Manhunt profile?
What did he do? Turn you down?
I realize that blogs have different reporting standards than newspapers, but I wonder if you confirmed with this guy that he did indeed post the profile himself, and if so, what, if anything, did he say about it?
and even if he did post it himself, it's not like there is anything bad about it. So why try to embarrass him over his personal life, which truly can be the only motive for this posting. And no, I don't know the guy.
This is so wrong. A public outing? C'mon, have some class. Isn't manhunt a members-only site? If so, it's very inappropriate to sign into an account, grab someone's profile, then post for all to see who aren't even members.
If the guy is into looking for sex online, it's really none of anyone's business except his own.
Gesh.. I was just about to email the editor at was a classless story this is, then I realized it was posted by the editor.
I wonder what the sudden interest in Pat Healy is about. It's either personal or political. Did he spurn your advances? Probably not. Is it his coverage of HRC in the Times? Are you a Hillary fan? That must be it, she reminds you of Maggie Thatcher.
@NoDowdAboutIt: Maybe he's working on a story about Hillary, or perhaps Condi being in the closet. That would make this a lot more forgivable.
Maybe Mr Denton feels Mr Healy's story probes a little too obnoxiously into the sex lives of the Clintons (in addition to showing a similar past inclination toward other Democratic candidates) and so thus Mr Healy opens himself up to a similar examination.
[mediamatters.org]