Hey, bloggers! The countdown to the three-day weekend clusterfuck of examining and reexamining former Gawker editor Emily Gould's forthcoming New York Times Magazine piece may be cut short! Because The Observer has a copy, and it'll probably be online tomorrow. You are forewarned: there is a photo of a blogger at a laptop, blogging. It's just Emily's hands, though. According to Matt Haber, the piece is "heavily diaristic." Do you want to read about Julia Allison? Sure you do.
Another person I ended up I.M-ing daily was one of Gawker's most frequent targets, a blogger named Julia Allison, who, within a year, parlayed a magazine dating column into a six-figure TV talking-head job and into into a reality show, all while updating her blog several times a day. She wore skimpy, Halloween-style costumes to parties and dated high-profile men in a high-profile ways—her tech-millionaire boyfriend collaborated with her on a blog where they took turns chronicling their relationship's ups and downs. I was initially put off by Julia's naked attention-whoring—"Attention is my drug," she often confessed. In thousands of photos on her Flickr feed she posed, caked in makeup, like a celebrity on the red carpet, always thrusting out her breasts and favoring her good side. But in the midst of this artifice she was disarmingly straightforward about how much she craved the attention that Internet exposure gave her—even though it came at the expense of constant, intensely vitriolic mockery.
If this and the second excerpt are any indication, it's an odd piece for the cover of the magazine. On account of how it looks like one woman's personal journey through notoriety, and not the Grand Socio-Cultural Statement On The Way We Blog Now that some of us were wary of. But also it's not an odd piece for the cover of the magazine, because look at alll the attention it's getting! The Times is just like Jullia Allison! As are we all!
New York Times Magazine Exposes Readers to Blogger [NYO]
Photo: Julia Allison, natch.