That was a fun story about Tina Brown.

There's a lot of grey areas with the commercial applications of blog. Say if you start a blog, and then some avid reader tunrs out to be an editor who ends up offering you a $75K job or whatever... well, my attitude is that blog made you $75K.

Ergo Gawker has provided us mere mortals with a great biz model (unlike the clown who invented Tip Jars)...

Rock on, Liz!

I'm just glad someone from Alabama was able to do something worthwhile.

Alabama's so five minutes ago.

oh, you sharp-witted one . . . nobody was skewering the media until gawker? isn't that a bit of an overstaement (ah, who care anyway. it's just some little cheeky interview in your hometown rag.)

what i recommend you do is step outside the box and look back in; gawker is a celebration of the very thing you seem to think it condemns. indigenous manhattanites (that is to say: immigrant [typically white and relatively privileged] children from the midwest who have watched too many episodes of friends) could use a bit more outside-the-box thinking before they further contribute to the ruination of the city with their ironic and superficial condemnations of irony and superficiality. don't fool yourself: gawker plays to that set. gawker is not read by true outsiders, it is read by the people who worship celebrity.

no. "true outsiders" are people who clicked on that www.jobsinalabama.com link at the end of the article.

"Ruination"? Is that like BURNINATION?

i guess what i'm trying to say is that i spent some years in new york city. i read gawker fairly regularly because it was a nice drudge-y, one-stop roundup of links to voyeristic manhattanisms. it was a fun diversion because i was in the area. then i moved away and all of that "content" became completely irrelevant. (on the other hand, i still enjoy lockhart's site because it's got a lot more original content and relevant insight). in fact, gawker only relevant to media- and fame-fixated people living below 23rd st in manhattan.

with that said, if gawker furthered spiers' career plans to become completely enmeshed in fame worship (fame worship through mean sarcasm is still fame worship), then more power to her. i just found her interview to be a little too self-gratifying.

yes, i just made up the phrase "voyeuristic manhattanisms," and i like it.

this will be my final comment, i promise:

i don't really buy the platitude: "this is my alter-ego, not really me." it's apparent to me that spiers IS the person who edited and wrote for gawker. she did take a job at NY Mag, right? she freelanced for Page Six? it's not like she's just doing this just for the money. granted, this is a step up from being a hedge fund analyst, but creepy wall street analysts and gossip columnists are more or less in the same universe.

I would tend to agree that it's not the real or the whole her, having seen the impressively dense and endless neo-realist discussion of the then-impending Iraq conflict on Capital Influx. Now, if you could work the Hilton sisters into that ...

maybe I'm naive, but it completely astounds me when people who don't know me personally and who *I've never even met* attempt to psychoanalyze me based on a specific type of writing that i was paid to do and presume to be able to determine whether gawker is "the real me." really, jim--your logic eludes me. how would you possibly *know* whether it's the real me, one way or the other? you've never even met me. actually, it's beyond presumptuous. it's creepy.

I've also written about terrorist use of weapons of mass destruction and liquidation preferences in venture capital transactions and those two topic areas are closer to my personal interests than paris hilton will ever be, but the fact is, most of the assignments I get are entertainment-related because my editors know me from Gawker. I'm not in financial position to turn those assignments down, and frankly, they're easier. I can do a 1000 word profile a celebrity in a quarter of the time it takes to write a decent 1000 word piece on managing interest rate exposure in emerging markets. ( Of course I did Page Six *just for the money.* Why else *would* I have done it? I'm not saying it wasn't fun--I love the Page Six people and it's a pretty low-stress job. But I wouldn't have come in for free, and part of what made it so attractive was that they let me do Gawker from the newsroom.)

if i were a prima donna and had the clout, i suppose i'd pound on my various editor's desks and demand that they let me write about exactly what I want and pay me loads to do it. But I don't have that inflated sense of entitlement, and at the end of the day, I'm pretty happy that I get paid to write at all. (I'm also a shitty negotiator, which works to my editor's advantage. "$0.02 a word? Okay!") There were even parts of gawker that were tedious and uninteresting and I hated doing--the gossip roundup, the to-do list, the gawker stalker feature, anything service-y--but they were necessary evils. if you're starting out, freelance writing isn't the sort of thing where you can always pick and choose. i'm just happy to have thus far avoided hamburger recommendation pieces.

Also - I understand that you probably don't live in New York and might not necessarily know this, but New York Magazine is not a gossip column. Nor am I the gossip columnist for the magazine.

Snarkwatch on carnation_jim.

There are worse things to do than hamburger recommendation pieces. Hot dog recommendation pieces, for one.

Or "Friendster--the latest wacky internet craze" pieces...

(oh, and in the unlikely event that you do get assigned a hamburger piece, I'm volunteering to do the field research. Though I'd rather do the research on a cocktail recommendation piece....)

I didn't realize you're only 26. This is good news. I have been picturing a late 30's, early 40's bitter old career freelance-writer.
So, are you hot? Any pics out there of ya??

Oh, God.

You're right Spiers, I can only derive from you what you willingly put out there. But you should know by now that in this business *you are what you write*. The self-gratifying attitude in that hick newspaper interview ("look at me, I'm so witty") isn't what bothers me as much as your consistent defensiveness about what you do. You sound like an aspiring model who really just wants to help starving children in Africa. Why not embrace what has been successful for you instead of claiming that you just doing it for the money, it's not really who you are, etc? I find it annoyingly disingenuous.

Besides that, there are certin things you've said that, if they're true, do reflect the kind of person you are. For example, you chose to work as a Wall Street analyst after being rejected for work in the CIA? I'm a raving lefty, and, in my book, those are clear indications of the type of person you are: befitting your new role as a gossip whore.

P.S.

I spent five years below 23rd Street, so this "you just don't understand becuase you obviously don't live in NYC" thing doesn't work on me. I chose to leave NYC because the freelance work I was getting was unsatisfying and, more important, the people I was forced to work with were creepy, petty, superficial, social climbers: the Gawker demographic.

jim - You just called the Montgomery Advertiser a "hick newspaper" and you're calling *me* shallow and superficial? well, that says enough for me. i've just made an executive decision not to give a shit about your opinion. carry on.

It shouldn't be like that, World! You shouldn't be like that, Liz!

I tell ya, that Liberal Arts degree from Columbia comes in real handy sometimes. It allows me to go onto people's website and give 'em hell.

actually, liz -- and this will be my last comment -- i am a southern advocate who understands more than most that people there are more open minded and artistic than they are in the LES. with that said, i can still call the advertiser a hick paper because it is. it is not a condemnation of the south, nor of alabama (where the civil rights movement began, by the way).

i would love to sit down with you and discuss exactly why I should have any respect for somebody who aspired to work for the CIA and fell back on being a NYC fund analyst, then gave that up to become rupert murdoch's whore.

basically, i'm just asking you to stop being defensive about what you do and stop pretending like you're really somebody who wants to do soemthing more fulfilling. i'm sorry your dream to work for the pentagon overthrowing little defensless countries didn't pan out. at least your gossip whoring seems to be apying off for ya. embellish it, baby, and stop pretending like you have the moral fiber to do something more important and relevant. you'd be a hell of a lot more appealing if you would stop claiming you really aren't the person you have created in your self-promotion.

Yeah, but Liz isn't the one who had to leave NY because her writing career was tanking.

Fifteen, Love...

i also love how speaking to reporters when they call somehow constitutes "shameless self promotion." as if i called the newspaper and asked them to write about gawker.

Yeah. And it's not as if he'd say it to your face if you a guy or something....

*AHEM!* ...you WERE a guy or something....

I'm surprised you even responsed to that never-has-been, never-will-be, non-factor who is clearly just jealous. Don't you hate it when people try to shit on your party?

Jimbo will never admit it, but he came to NY to be somebody, and failed. So he left. It happens to many. They just never face the truth.

You came, you succeeded, and now you're a boldface name. You are living the NY dream. Sort of like Lauren Devil Wears Prada. People slam her, but she's laughing all the way to the bank.

I would agree with Jason, were it not for the fact that I hold this quasi-Marxist idea to be self evident- Namely, that people who have never done shit are generally smarter than people who have.

You buncha God-haters.

$45 in NYC as a freelancer, or $65K outside of NYC with a steady I'm-learning-as-I-go gig. You're right: I'm a complete failure because I moved away. Why else would I want to leave NYC?? Could it be due to the plague of neurosis, and the midwest imports that have ruined the city I grew up in? Obviously, that's why I think "Liz" is so defensive about what she does. . .

A~