Emily Gould is not our poster child

"Exposed," the front page story of this weekend's Times magazine (already posted online) feels like one long LiveJournal entry by former Gawker editor Emily Gould, and the internets are already abuzz about it. The ten-page story details everything from Gould's experiences at Gawker, to her high-drama relationships, and it's peppered with photos of Gould lazing about, with slightly greasy hair and flower tattoos on display, trying a bit too earnestly to look seductive and nonchalant with her laptop. She writes:

"Some of my blog’s readers were my friends in real life, and even the ones who weren’t acted like friends when they posted comments or sent me e-mail. They criticized me sometimes, but kindly, the way you chide someone you know well. Some of them had blogs, too, and I read those and left my own comments. As nerdy and one-dimensional as my relationships with these people were, they were important to me. They made me feel like a part of some kind of community, and that made the giant city I lived in seem smaller and more manageable." 

All of this seems like a preamble to a tabloid-y, Fox News-type sensatinal piece: "Blog addicts! For some 20-somethings, WordPress is replacing reality." And in a way that Gould does not state directly in the story, it sort of is. Or, much to the chagrin of Phoenix bloggers, perhaps the Times hoped it'd be a generational commentary. New York Magazine worried yesterday: "What troubles us about Gould's oncoming article is not that it will be a rehash of everything we've seen before. It's that people will mistake her perspective on the Internet, writing, and fame as the perspective of an entire generation of bloggers." Exactly! That's what troubles us too! Gawker's already calling her our poster child! And the NYT just payed her gads of money to write the words "I" and "me" a gagillion times (actual number: 430, according to the math whizzes at NYMag). 

Unsurprisingly, the comments look fairly positive on Gould's personal blog so far, but on the NYT site things are not looking so good: "I expect more from the New York Times. This article was nothing more than the ramblings of a moronic juvenile who calls herself a writer. I hope that the New York Times is not paying her for this piece. I long for the days when writers were people who had something to say," writes Joseph from Manhattan. "Dreadful, narcissistic, uninteresting stuff," writes "hazbin" from New Jersey. "An overlong article about the author talking about how much she enjoys talking about herself. Attention whore, indeed," writes Dave from New Jersey. And that's just the first two pages.

Here's the irony: Here we are, blogging about Emily Gould and Gawker and, well, blogging, and wishing that the media would stop covering everything Gawker media does. We'll step away if you will?

-Caitlin E. Curran