If you're tied of this gossip girl, perhaps another real life NYC blog chronicling of inside baseball anecdotes and trite tidbits will pique your interest. It's called Miss ITK (for Miss In The Know), and it's a gossip blog that titillated, and caused heartbreak in, the inner sanctuary of Manhattan's elite offspring: high school. An unidentified teen traversed the hallways of private schools like Dalton, writing in Gossip Girl speak, until he or she was, somehow, brought down. And now the kids who were its most avid readers are saying terrible things about it, like labeling it "immature." Yeah? You're immature! CONTINUED »
The excellent fashion mag blog Glossed Over has returned.
"When the Backstreet Boys came to visit my junior high, I didn’t even flinch! Granted, that was over 10 years ago, so they weren’t at the peak of their game, but even so I was cool and collected. I also type fast like lightening and I’m extremely perceptive. As for Harry Potter vs Spiderman, I doubt they would fight to begin with - maybe Harry loaned his vibrating broomstick to Harry’s main squeeze Lily, causing fireworks at Hogwart’s? - but if so, I imagine Harry would win. Spidey could easily fling himself out of the way, and scoop up Hermione as he hit the road. But then Harry could retaliate by turning Spiderman into an actual squishable spider, so there goes that plan. But I digress! I also have a winning smile, an ability to speak to/about Mike Meyers without imitating any of the characters from Austin Powers (thought I would be happy to give it a try, even at the risk of humiliating myself), and the ability to be sarcastic without being offensive. My written and verbal communication skills are phenomenal, and my commentary would crack everyone up. Finally, I’m also a whore for pop culture, so I’m up to date on who’s with who, what movies will be the next mega-hits (can we say Twilight?), and what everyone should and shouldn’t be wearing"
That is one girl's application essay to be MTV's 2008 Movie Awards blogger. [MTV]
"I do sincerely regret the way in which Leitch was treated because it did undermine the valid points that I was trying to make." So you're sorry you were an ass because it kept the focus away from your very valid points? [VF]
ZINCZENKO LOSING HIS LIBIDO? Tomorrow will be the 50th day since Men's Health washboard Dave Zinczenko posted to his Yahoo blog about relationships and sex. And his last post was only rated "helpful" by 30 percent of its readers. [Yahoo]
Blog hater and Friday Night Lights author Buzz Bissinger is kinda sorry for being a douche on HBO: "I believe in what I said (although the emails I received have also directed me to some excellent information-based sports blogs I was not aware of). But I made a terrible mistake in the manner in which I said it. I am a man of passion and my passion truly got the better of me. I should have considerably toned it down, in particular in terms of my treatment of Will Leitch. Without going into details, I have taken steps to remedy that. I have also publicly apologized on several radio shows that have been widely disseminated. Those apologies are sincere, just as my passion was sincere if terribly misplaced. I treated Mister Leitch like the worst kind of blogger." [TBL]
The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg does not understand blogging and should therefore have his writing privileges taken away. But it's hard to take things from people on the Internet, unless it's music, movies, or porn, so we're helpless. But our argument for it goes like this: He complains about getting bashed on the Internet. After the Observer's Matt Haber blogged about Goldberg's online debut, delivering a very hard slap on the back as a welcome, Goldberg whiningly blogged a reply after talking with colleague Andrew Sullivan about blogging politics, and how Haber uses blogging as a "loose" form of journalism. This, sadly, comes as news to Goldberg, who, while having dipped his feet in online chattering with Slate, does not understand that blog publishing is just an excuse for slander.
CondeNet has picked up two travel blogs, HotelChatter.com and Jaunted.com, and will fold them into its Concierge.com brand. [PR]
Stereohyped launched exactly one year ago, and what I remember most about that day is that I was completely terrified. I was terrified that I would suck, that I would mess up, and that you wouldn’t like me. Well, over the course of the year, I have sometimes sucked, I have messed up on occasion, and some of you have not liked me at all.
Nevertheless, the good has far outweighed the bad, and the site has grown and evolved so much — with no small thanks to the readers, especially the ones who actively comment — since this cheesy, dated introduction was posted. Among other things, we’ve won awards and expanded our staff, and we hope for even more good things to come in our second year.
In honor of the Stereohyped’s birthday, I went through the archives and picked out some notable moments in the site’s short existence. If you’ve been reading for as long as I’ve been writing, you’ll probably remember many of these, too.
Ryan Phillippe became a paparazzi go-to when rumors of his marital woes with Reese Witherspoon bubbled up. Now, he's a mainstay, but at least he's learning some lessons: If he's going to be photographed and put in the tabloids, then the least he can do is wear T-shirts with the web addresses of charities to generate some free advertising.
But what effect does the paparazzi's hounding have on his kids, daughter Ava and son Deacon?
"She’s aware and it creates in her a lot of anxiety, which is partly my fault. When Ava was very young, I was young too. And brash. I’d get… I wouldn’t like to say violent, but visibly angry at the paparazzi back then. She was my first child, and my instinct was to protect her. I remember one time that I’m not at all proud of, I was holding my daughter and handed her to Reese and ran off to chase this one guy down and hit him. I would never do that now. I think the attitude I had at the time did create in her a lot of the fearfulness she has today. [...] It breaks my heart to think about it, hearing her say, ‘My friends at school saw a picture of me in a magazine and they made fun ’cos I was carrying a blanket.’ A little girl having to consider how she looks before leaving the house? I have a privileged life and hate to complain but there’s something vile about that." [London Times]
Aww, the poor thing! No, really, we feel bad for the little tyke. But when Ryan speaks about his relationship with celebrity so openly, what's the natural course of action? For the gossip blogs to pounce. CONTINUED »
New research shows bloggers are more likely to be men, unmarried, Democratic, white, 37.6 years old. They also hate it when you complain about typos and grammar.
Just because the Writers Guild of America isn't striking anymore doesn't mean their scribbling members are actually back to unleashing scripts on Hollywood. Might Tinsletown be running dry on fresh script ideas? If you answered yes, then it'll lend credence to one theory that studio development units are turning to books, magazines, and "graphic novels" for ideas.
There's the $3 million book deal for trilogy The Flag of Orpheus, from Heroes writer Tim Kring, that's said to have studio execs salivating. And DreamWorks snapped up the Wired article "Deep Sea Cowboy," from Joshua Davis, about a company that races around the world to salvage sinking ships. Miramax grabbed the Wall Street Journal article "The Heart Has Its Reasons," by Kevin Helliker, about "an unlikely romance between 27-year old convicted murderer John Manard and Toby Young, a 48-year-old social worker who was a married mother of two when she smuggled Manard out of prison. They ran away together with $42,000 of her retirement money before they were caught in a cabin in Tennessee."
And Warner Bros. paid up for The Lost Girls, a HarperCollins "87-page proposal by Amanda Pressner, Jennifer Baggett and Holly Corbett, who gave up their media jobs and boyfriends to travel the world for a year, blogging every step of the way."
Which is basically Into The Wild, but with a broadband Internet card.
BLOGGER BURNOUT Is writing words everyday becoming too much for you? The Boston Herald, the rag that's "indispensable" but "isn't a great paper," surveys a few bloggers who could be the next always-on scribes to throw in the towel. [Boston Herald]
Balthazar snob and blog publisher Nick Denton is unloading a trio of his websites. Music blog Idolator, which never gained much traction, is being unloaded to Buzznet, the music-focused social network that insisted it wasn't raising capital to buy blogs. City guide Gridskipper goes to old pal Lockhart Steele's Curbed network of hyper-local sites. And political muckraker Wonkette is going its lonely way, with managing editor Ken Layne taking the reigns solo. Not that it'll impact the business much: As Denton himself writes, those blogs represent just 3 percent of his pageview dump. Full memo from HQ below. CONTINUED »
Desperate for any angle to publish another article about blogs, the Wall Street Journal digs up this news peg: bloggers get hate mail! Take Dooce.com's 32-year-old mommy blogger Heather Armstrong: "She prints out nasty emails, puts them in her driveway and drives over them with her car." That's because blogging about your day, and about how much your daughter poos, is exhausting. Pair this evidence with the New York Times' research, and we're looking at the most dangerous, unhealthy profession around.
CALLING THE KETTLE HOT PINK Perez Hilton, who has undoubtedly hurt, damaged, and rendered beyond repair the reputations of many a Hollywood figure, is now suing blogger and amateur sex tape star Jonathan Jaxson for allegedly slandering him all in an effort to promote his own website, which Hilton claims caused him "loss of his reputation, shame and mortification" and "mental anguish." [TSG]
What's 1,300 words on how hard it is to be a blogger?
For the New York Times, it's an embarrassing Sunday front page story about how some of our kin work day and night to spit out the drivel heretofore referred to as "copy" just to satisfy our employers' post quota demands or our own innate need to fill the HTTP://WWW with endless commentary. Some of us blogger types have even suffered major health complications as a result of these sweatshop-esque demands, including heart attacks and death, which can also be triggered by scary monsters lurking in the night.
That's the Times' newspeg – the deaths of tech bloggers Russell Shaw (heart attack) and Marc Orchant (massive coronary), and the heart attack of Om Malik (survived) – neglecting the notion that some folks maintain perfectly healthy lives, albeit with recreational coke habits, to maintain this lifestyle. Nevermind that a story on, say, the fact that CEOs are still commanding exorbitant salaries while Americans investing in their companies suffer shareholders suffer affects a much larger group of people than the vain bloggerati, and might've served audiences better than hiding in the business section. But why leave yet another dramatic blog beat stone unturned?
Are newspapers wasting precious cash employing bloggers? Of some 360 newspapers studied by Ball State University, 42 of which produced blogs, a singular conclusions was drawn: "While much has been written about blogs' potential to save democracy and revive journalism, this picture of newspapers' blog posts does little to support that notion."
That is: Blogs have failed us! CONTINUED »
It was when NYT fashion critic Cathy Horyn noticed the gals of the original Charlie's Angels reunite at the Emmys that became her "aha!" moment: She wanted a blog to chronicle all the minutiae without writing a full newspaper article. She decided starting On the Runway, which hasn't been updated since March 21, was the right move when she wrote about the Marc Jacobs show two years ago that ran two hours late; she blogged about it from a Park Avenue restaurant, which is probably when she also realized she didn't even want to sit front row, or be there at all. Web-streamed fashion is the future!
As is wont to happen when foolish corporate players get around to deciding something is hip, again, the publishing industry has begun doling out redonkulous sums to bloggers in exchange for their piecing together sentences that do not include "ZOMG!" or "NSFW." Stuff White People Like's creator scored $300k, but by one estimate, publisher Random House will have to move 75,000 copies of the book in order to break even. (Simon & Schuster learned that math the hard way with Gawker.com's The Gawker Guide to Conquering All Media, which moved an embarrassing 2,000 copies.) So why do publishing houses insist on scooping up authors that almost certainly will lose them money? Because it was in the cards!
In a 2004 New Yorker profile about blogger book deals, the magazine predicted that in two years, "Books by bloggers will be a trend, a cultural phenomenon." Or a giant stain on one industry's track record.
