Emily Gould's "Exposed" exposes media rifts, too

If you were hanging around the blogosphere Thursday when the New York Times posted its Sunday magazine's cover story a few days early, you probably witnessed the riot. "Exposed," was the nearly 8,000-word confessional essay by former Gawker.com gossip blogger Emily Gould, in which she describes her compulsion to blog everything, whether it's personal, professional or -- for the really serious Web traffic -- the slippery place where the two intersect.

Hundreds of mostly negative reader comments flooded in immediately, so many that the NYT's comment moderators were overwhelmed and temporarily locked the discussion while they caught up.

"How can it be that such vapid foolishness be accorded the importance of a cover piece in the Times Magazine," wrote a commenter who identified himself as Leo Dymkoski from Toronto. "Extraordinary."

"Please stop embarrassing our generation with mindless prattle," wrote L.M. from New York. "The world already thinks we are a bunch of spoiled brats, and we need intelligent and talented people (which you obviously are) to put their abilities to good use."

The ire of average readers unaccustomed to seeing such personal musings in the paper of record's magazine was one thing. But even more explosive was the eruption of shrieking blog reactions from commentators around the Web. What she'd exposed in her essay, it appeared, was more than just the vagaries of Internet microcelebrity. Gould had tapped into a vein of media-world animus that no one quite realized was there.

The media's disapprobation was evident on the usually even-keeled NPR. During an interview on "Day to Day," host Madeleine Brand focused on what the piece revealed about Gould as a person, pointedly asking Gould if she worried that she came across as "very narcissistic." Brand added that the magazine's photos of Gould splayed across her bed, laptop at her side, "make the point that it is all about you."

And then there was Rachel Sklar, the Huffington Post's media critic who is rarely in attack mode but who led the blogospheric harrumph with her scathing, comprehensively linked tear-down of Gould's piece, and of Gould. Sklar questioned the essay's basic journalistic value ("Good God, NYT. The cover? Really? For this?"), suggested its author's intentions were suspect (saying it was a "chance for Gould to settle the score" with her ex-boyfriend), pointed to multiple bungled facts, and in the process betrayed that she, Sklar, was in fact one of the world's leading experts on "the saga of Emily Gould," a phrase that she used three times.

It seems worth noting that at one point, Sklar links to a set of party photos to make a point about Gould's social opportunism but neglects to mention that she, Sklar, was at the same party and in the same photos. That Sklar and Gould are also Facebook friends seems to confirm that even if they're not real-life BFFs, they're not people who have the journalistic luxury of vast interpersonal remove.

Gould, of course, did not fail to notice the scrutiny her piece received from professional bloggers. "They want me to be punished for having left that world, and for having criticized it," Gould wrote to me in an e-mail. "It's important to them that it be understood that my article, which on the surface might seem like an accomplishment, is actually a fluke, a mistake on the Times' part, attributable to pretty much anything besides relevance or skill."

That may sound a little defensive (and even a touch paranoid?), but it's not far off to say that the demographic that cared about this story most was the New York new media crowd. That group's open access to megaphones and soapboxes belies its exceedingly small and unrepresentative nature -- so much so that with a collective eye blink it can light up the blogosphere with vituperative chatter about what's, after all, just a story about the by now unsurprising pitfalls of playing with the Web's peephole-filled boundaries between public and private.

New York Times Magazine editor Gerry Marzorati told Media Bistro (where Gould is now a contributor) that "putting Emily's story on the cover was not a tough call.

"One of the things we are most interested in at the magazine are those lifestyle issues -- what we call the Way We Live Now issues -- that blend personal narratives with larger political or ethical or philosophical concerns."

Reading through the blogosphere's fast-cash critiques of Gould's piece, you come across dismissive yet vague adjectives ("boring," "long," "self-absorbed"), and things like a tally of the number of times Gould used the word "I" (363, but please, try writing a first-person essay without referring to yourself). I've read the piece several times now, and it doesn't rock my world, but there wasn't much about it that seemed to merit such a knife storm. To someone not steeped in the blogosphere, my guess is it would be a lucid introduction to its temptations and rewards.

So let's go back to first principles. This is the story of a young woman who has gotten where she is (read: the cover of the NYT magazine) by unapologetically pursuing a kind of reportage that features her as the main character in every story and the people around her as supporting actors. (And not just lately -- this goes back to the comics she wrote about that she drew in high school, where SuperEmily beats up all the mean girls.)

And yes, thanks to the Internet, this kind of performance journalism, where the writer is her own subject, is gaining ground. When digital video and photos became ubiquitous, it opened a door for certain writers to cultivate online images and personalities -- an approach that Gould discovered had a strong appeal to her readers. And this is happening across the Web: in the tech blogosphere, Veronica Belmont, Robert Scoble and Michael Arrington have become journalistic brands; in politics, it's been Markos "Daily Kos" Moulitsas; in celebrity gossip, Perez Hilton; in dating, Julia Allison (a Gould role-model) -- in every case, online writers and commentators who skipped slow-lane paths through traditional journalism and who liberally project their image and personality onto their subjects.

For these brand-name bloggers, it's no longer about whom they write for, or in some cases even the importance of what they're saying, but about a kind of fame-building, where the more reader-fans they've got coming to them every day, the stronger they become.

And by being featured on the cover of a major magazine, SuperEmily just got a lot stronger.

It remains to be seen if she will use her powers for quote-unquote good. In her piece, Gould stops short of swearing off tell-all blogging, leaving the door open to more of the stuff she freely admits has hurt her.

I asked Marzorati about how Gould's piece seemed to be missing a conclusion -- some kind of reckoning with the basic ethics of her anything-goes approach.

That complaint, Marzorati thought, was "from people who wanted her to renounce herself -- to abandon her blog-post ways and beg the culture's forgiveness. What I found most interesting was her ambivalence and complication, but that seems to have driven people crazy."

Comments

[Rachel Sklar]

Hi David, good point all - you are correct in noting that I did not disclaim anywhere that I knew most of the people in this story by virtue of being part of the New York blogosphere - though I did mention Gould's Facebook page, which presumably I'd only have access to as a Facebook friend. I linked to my story re: the New York mag Gawker story, wherein I note that I know many of the players in the drama, and had been written about on the site before, but you're quite right that I ought to have noted that explicitly, particularly when the piece started getting so much pickup. That said, I did mention my familiarity with the "saga" (overusing a word - ten demerits!) which I thought implied a sense of familiarity with the actors - but if you missed it, then I clearly was in err. So thanks for pointing that out, I'll remedy it on my post. Cheers, RS.

[jSon]

"For these brand-name bloggers, it's no longer about whom they write for, or in some cases even the importance of what they're saying, but about a kind of fame-building, where the more reader-fans they've got coming to them every day, the stronger they become."

So naive. I mean, there was a little thing called New Journalism.

[David Sarno]

@jSon: Perhaps you can illuminate us as to the similarities between the work of Robert Scoble and Gay Talese, or between Emily Gould and Hunter S. Thompson. They are not readily apparent to me, but I could very well be missing something.

[Sissy Willis]

How to write a first-person essay without referring to me, myself and If? The editorial we comes to mind

[Sheldon]

Of course, in a blog, the editorial "we" comes off as rather pompous and condescending, but what the hey!

[Linda Scott]

Oh what fun, instead of the usual propaganda spun out of control...the L.A. Times
and the New York Times and all the other soon to be foreclosed dreamweavers
have decided to attack the web's success at actually getting out the truth,
by using this crap as an example of the blog...
You have sold our country out with all your lies, the only way I can get any
truth anymore is by searching the web 24/7, but I never find anything as
mindless as what the mainstream press has become...

Instead of spending all your professional expertise on bullshit, why don't you
try to win back your subscribers by doing something of value???

[KateAurthur]

Disclosure: I am the TV editor in Calendar at the LA Times, and Sarno and his editor, Maria Russo, are my friends. With that out there, I have a comment about this whole Emily Gould/NYT Magazine kerfuffle that leads to a question I hope some people within this message board can address.

In reading the essay "Exposed," I felt the biggest problem with it was not the fact that it was too long (it was), nor the accompanying photos (slightly creeped out, don’t really care), nor the score-settling (so much!), nor that someone like my mother, an NYT reader of 5000 years, wouldn’t understand a word of it because there was so little context provided about this bloggy world – the biggest problem, to me, is that the formula for provocative magazine stories is so rote, and we all (or I) fall for it every single time.

That is: Developed over the years, the formula at its core paints a picture of a joyless, pathological universe that is so uncomplicated by nuance or ambivalence, that rather than being The Way We Live (as coined by Adam Moss long ago, and evoked by Gerry Marzorati here), it would more accurately be The Way We Die -- it's always that awful.

The subject can be technology (as it is here) or Britney or date rape on college campuses. It seems to always be written by and about young women (and perhaps edited by older men?).

So my question can be boiled down to: where is the love? Are our lives so gloomy and sad that the fun of Gawker (which serves as the main foil both here and in Vanessa Grigoriadis’ much more interesting New York Magazine article last October) is not worthy of examining or, if you see no fun at all in Gawker, debating? Why does a story need to construct a fake world of blackness and illness and panic in order to get people riled up?

Or am I wrong? Please say I’m wrong!

[Janet]

The amazing thing was that the articles by Daniel Bergner about the brain-injured Iraq vet and the one by Michael Norman on the last page about Vietnam didn't make a ripple of comment. New Yorkers are SO self-involved. All of this blogging is going nowhere, will not have any future relevance, and shows the superfluous nature of a lot of narcisstic talk. Is this how to use a college education? What Gould doesn't realize is that as she grows older, no one will be reading her blog. Time to get a career - fast! (I just got back from the trendy isle of Park Slope, Brooklyn).

[Maria Russo]

Kate, I completely agree about the problems with that formula for a magazine story -- that one way to make The Way We Live Now seem interesting, or to make the stakes of stories about ordinary, affluent American life seem high enough, is to paint it in bleak tones, with dire pitfalls everywhere. This story certainly fits into that mold. But I think it made it into print because it is a perfect overlap between two genres beloved of "older male" editors: Young woman writer poses provocatively and reveals details of her sex life (The New York Observer has a good piece on this pattern today). And, this Internet thing is SCARY. Watch out, or it will rob you of your soul!

[Kate Aurthur]

Maria, hi. First of all, we're proving Sarno's point by talking to, you know, ourselves here. Love it!

Yes, agreed about the double-whammy of appeal to the "older males" (let's just keep going with that stalking horse): girl-in-distress + Internet = disaster you want to read about.

But I do think that magazine standards demand that the stakes always have to be raised to a comical level. We must be convinced that the bird flu is going to kill us all, or genetically engineered food will, etc. The common element being less the Internet than technology and modern living are somehow literally deadly. With the Emily Gould piece that would be soul death. Soul death by blogging.

Um. See you in the cafeteria.

[Choire Sicha]

Kate--the June issue of the Atlantic arrived around the same time as the NYT mag story. THE SKY IS FALLING, is the Atlantic's coverline. "It's inevitable"! An asteroid is going to hit the earth! WHY ISN'T NASA TRYING TO SAVE US ALL? I think they were serious, too! So yes: The Way We Live (and The Way We Package Magazines) is definitely a problem. (Magazine covers now are sort of like late-night car commercials--how will I know I want to buy their car unless they're screaming at full volume?)

At one of my old jobs, we used to always joke about how New York magazine's ideal cover story would be just a woman, from the waist up, in a blouse, clutching a big clunky bag, with the coverline: "I'M RICH--BUT SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH MY BABY!"

[Rachel Sklar]

I read that last comment and laughed out loud at that New York cover - and then of course I saw the comment was by Choire Sicha (who, I might add, I specifically shouted-out in my piece as being terrific). I see Kate's point - and Choire's (who is sometimes pensive to the point of lugubrious in these pieces - cf. that NY mag piece), but I'm not quite sure that's it - I just think that there is an enduring appeal in the coming-of-age story and the learning-through-a-difficult-process story, especially where sex, romance, friends and self-actualization are involved. I think Emily's experience definitely has some lessons built into it - and it definitely tapped into something, that's for sure - but my problem was more about execution, as I detailed in my own piece.

I'm not 100% sure of the young female writer - older male editor connection, only because then wouldn't we see way more of these stories, given that so many editors are older males, and there is still a fairly pronounced byline disparity in magazines? (see WomenTK.com) What I was struck by, in reading John Koblin's behind-the-scenes, is that Marzorati didn't know who she was, and then reading how he seemed surprised by the copy he received, i.e. that she could write (see Koblin here: http://www.observer.com/2008/times-magazine-dapples-sunlight-it-s-memoirist). That, to me, explained a lot about how the story found its way to the magazine, and to the cover. I guess the whole point is for the editor to hire the expert, but for something like Gawker the due diligence is so easy. I don't know who edited - Paul Tough brought her in, and since he's Canadian I am inclined to give every benefit of the doubt - but I think that she might have benefited enormously from an editor who knew her subject matter and could challenge her to dig a little deeper.

I feel compelled to add, by the way, that I absolutely LOVED "Felicity" - a coming-of-age story about a girl dealing with life, sex, romance, friends and self-actualization. I'm just sayin'.

[Guesst]

According to the Observer: Mr. Marzorati had never before heard of Ms. Gould, he told Off the Record. They talked for around an hour about her “wanting to write some memoirish piece about having lived a fair amount of her life on the Internet in her first years in New York; I was interested.”

and: “It was a lot better written and more ‘thinky’ than I could have imagined,” he said. “I think she’s really a good writer, it turns out.”

According to the piece above: New York Times Magazine editor Gerry Marzorati told Media Bistro (where Gould is now a contributor) that "putting Emily's story on the cover was not a tough call.

Emily's "story", on the cover? I'm only seeing a photograph of a braless young woman in a rumpled bed with a wired device.

Oh. That story.

[CM]

Good job on this piece. Emily's essay (I don't know why people call it an "article") was interesting and well-written, and it spurred debate, which is what it was intended to do. But it's fun to watch the knives come out. So come out they will. Schadenfraude is as old in literature as putting photos of female writers with their essays in NY-based magazines.

[resigned reader]

Marzorati had never heard of Gould? He didn't read the New York Mag article on Gawker? And he greenlighted a piece that he assumed would be of low quality? Do we really buy this line? I assumed that the essay was originally assigned in an attempt to play catch-up with Adam Moss.

[Maria Russo]

The vastly larger number of male bylines in major magazines is partly my point, Rachel. If you are a young woman writer, one reliable way to get your work considered in such a place is to pitch it as about you, your personal life, your "coming of age" -- i.e., to hold out the hope that you will be revealling details of your sex life. Have you ever seen the male counterpart of the Emily Gould piece in a respectable publication? Page Six Magazine doesn't count. And the corollary: Do you think that if Emily Gould pitched a reported piece about the pitfalls/joys of blogging people's personal lives, it would have been published?

[Kate Aurthur]

And then there's the followup cover about Tyra Banks as America's Next Top Mogul:
Banksable
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/magazine/01tyra-t.html

This idea was pitched to me by Her People two falls ago (I said no). It was written by Vanity Fair last summer. And now this!

Pulling back the curtain is ugly, y'all.