There's a segment of the journalism and media-product-making world that believes that paying sources for their exclusive version of events is a great business technique. It's competitive, it's efficient and it's not usually terribly expensive. (Unless you are talking about pictures of Angelina Jolie's babies, in which case it's very pricey—in 2008, People and Hello! together paid $14 million, to charity, for pictures of the Jolie-Pitt twins.) Over the weekend, Gawker paid an acquaintance of the insane balloon boy's family—I'm not even going to use their names, if that's okay?—to tell his story. It was pretty interesting, and damning, if not entirely conclusive. READ MORE 26