Julia Ioffe, a reporter for the New Republic, has been awarded an iPad mini after winning a subscription sales contest, according to Forbes.
New Republic staff competed to sell both print and digital subscriptions of the magazine to friends and family at a "special friends-and-family rate" of $20 for 20 issues.
One of the subscriptions Ioffe sold was to Forbes staff writer Jeff Bercovici, who says he bought the subscription to the magazine in order to learn more about the contest.
"I subscribed to support her, and because she wouldn’t tell me more about the contest unless I did," wrote Bercovici, explaining why he gave in to the ransom demand.
The iPad mini features a 7.9-inch LED-backlit Multi-Touch display screen and runs on Apple’s iOS 6 operating system. It boasts a battery life of up to 10 hours of surfing the web on Wi-Fi, watching video, or listening to music. Its screen also features special fingerprint-resistant oleophobing coating.
Winning the contest is the latest in a string of victories for Ioffe. She recently also won praise for comparing the Tea Party to Russian Bolsheviks. And she recently predicted that, of all the obstacles on Obama’s path to intervention in Syria's civil war, Russian autocrat Vladimir "Putin is not one of them." She later said, "Obama got played by Putin."
Franklin Foer, the editor of the New Republic, took to Facebook to plead with his friends to become new subscribers.
"I need to have a strong showing," wrote Foer, who lost.