Emily Gould’s New York Times Magazine cover story hasn’t even landed with a thud on front porches and newsstands yet, but it’s already garnering a ton of criticism online.
Some of the critical outlets weren’t surprising.
Like Gawker, for example, since Ms. Gould’s article is in many ways a rebuke of the site.
Gawker’s first post officially linked to Ms. Gould’s Times Magazine story received 9,133 views and 170 comments.
A follow-up post clocked in at 8,814 views with 149 comments, while a post announcing comments had closed on NYTimes.com received only 4,150 views and 83 comments.
Sadly, another, about the article’s photos, topped out at only 2,556 views and 55 comments.
Finally, it seemed, for Gawker, the horse had been kicked to death.
New York magazine’s Daily Intel had a wonkishly incisive post in which its editors calculated how many dollars Ms. Gould was presumed to have been paid for the words "I" and "me" in the 7,937-word article. (Eight hundred and sixty dollars, by Daily Intel’s math. One wonders how many I’s and me’s were in New York‘s equally controversial first person cover story this week.)
Perhaps the most surprising critic of Ms. Gould’s work was The Huffington Post’s Rachel Sklar, in her Eat the Press posting Emily Gould: New Gloss On An Old Story. Ms. Sklar, whom Media Mob once described as having "an unusually sunny voice in the media-blog world," did not mince her words:
Ms. Sklar (who, in the interest of full of disclosure, mentions this writer by name in her post) concludes, "Gould is a talented writer and blogger, as evidenced by her continued presence in this sphere, but the NYT did her, itself, or really the blogosphere no favors in accepting this essay as a cover story." Ms. Sklar even points out a factual error in the piece and chides, "Way to fact check, NYT," reminding us of a certain kind of critical but helpful video like the one above.
But seriously. If Eat the Press is getting on your case (more or less), you must’ve done something bad. It’s almost like Ms. Gould and The New York Times Magazine don’t have a single friend in this town!
Then again, there’s always Mediabistro’s FishbowlNY, which gave Times Magazine editor Gerald Marzorati a chance to justify Ms. Gould’s piece’s existence.
Of course given that Mediabistro employs Ms. Gould as its publishing columnist, that’s hardly too surprising. But it goes to show that when you work together, you can overcome pretty much anything. And that’s one to grow on.
