I am the least literary of all Gawker writers, and therefore the least qualified to comment on the contents of Gessen's book (which I haven't read). So I just complained that he talks about Harvard way too much (which he does). But Gessen responded!

Hamilton: I do say Harvard a lot, don't I? It's impolite, right? You know who doesn't ever mention where they went to school? People whose parents went there before them, or paid for a lot of tutoring. In my book I was writing about a certain subset of guys and I didn't think it served any purpose to be coy about where they went to school. But how's this—if you send me your copy I'll cross out all the references to Harvard and replace them with the college of your choice.

So I did. Sheila donated her copy of his book, and I took it and gave it to him at his party. I considered having him replace all Harvard references with Oral Roberts University, but eventually settled on Florida State University, on the theory that middlebrow is even funnier than lowbrow.

Do you agree? Disagree? Either way, you fall on one side or the other in the culture war!

Gessen lost Sheila's book, but, to his credit, replaced it with a brand new copy, and kept his word by replacing every reference to Harvard, by hand. And there are a lot. In the front of the book, he wrote (as best as I can make out):

At the request of Hamilton Nolan, all references to Harvard in this copy of All the Sad Young Literary Men have been replaced with "Florida State" or "FSU." I've also replaced dorm names and bar names, where necessary.

The "Sam" character still moves to Boston after college—I don't see why he wouldn't be able to do that just as well from FSU. Of course he would find the weather more depressing. Otherwise the tone of the force(sp?) of the book and its complaint(sp?) remain intact.

Keith Gessen
New York
6/30/08

Please: take a moment to reflect on all of the various threads of the literary, social, cultural, urban, educational, academic, media, and Gawkerist zeitgeist that are summed up in this single item. It is truly staggering. Do you want to keep it under glass? Burn it? Either way, it has a power over you that you cannot deny.

We are auctioning off this totemic volume for charity. All proceeds will be donated to the New York Coalition For the Homeless—the organization that will be responsible for sheltering all of us once this writing hustle plays itself out.

The link to the eBay auction is here. We listed the book last night at $10; bidding currently stands at $105. But it should rightly go much higher. It's for a good cause.

What price is too great to pay in order to own this, the new version of the "Morris" character's speech on p. 72?:

"There's this thing about guys from FSU. They think everything's fine, just because they went to FSU. And for them, you know, it is. Even the most mediocre mediocrity can make a nice life for himself in New York if only he went to Florida State fucking University."

[Bid for it here.]

From Emily Magazine, excerpted here and there for length:

"Before I get into this, I’ll save you the trouble of pointing out that I used to work at Gawker. I quit that job, and one of the reasons I quit was that I wasn’t comfortable with being shady, insulting, and two-faced. It’s not that I’m saying I’m some kind of moral beacon, I just am terrible at dissembling, acting one way to someone’s face and another way behind their back. And I’m not a hardnosed investigative journalist who will do anything for the story, no matter who gets hurts. I don’t like the idea of hurting people. It took me quite a while to realize this, and if you want to criticize me for having taken quite a while to realize this, go ahead. That’s valid. But just because I used to hurt people doesn’t mean I now have to approve of it when other people do.

"A woman named Susannah Breslin called me around the time that my Times magazine story came out, saying that she wanted to interview me for a piece she was writing about the Sex and the City movie... None of my quotes ended up in her article, which I was grateful for. However, I wasn’t particularly grateful when she wrote a post on her personal blog about how snotty I’d seemed on the phone. More recently, about the paragraph-long excerpt from an essay included in my book proposal that was posted on New York magazine’s Daily Intelligencer blog, Breslin wrote a post on her blog entitled “Vomit,” which reads in part:

“This writing is so god awful I thought it was worth pointing out. I love the blogosphere, and the blogs, and the blogginess of the world, but one thing blogs have done is given people who write the perception they are writers.”

We'll break in here to judge—not professional, Suze. But, Em! We wouldn't have even known about this had you not called it to our attention. Anyway:

Yesterday afternoon I was waiting around for various deliveries and installations of things and I wasn’t screening my calls. So I picked up the phone. It was Jessica Coen, who used to work at Gawker and who now works at New York magazine’s Daily Intelligencer blog, I guess overseeing it somehow, though during our conversation she was quick to point out that it’s not like at Gawker — “I’m not in in there in Moveable Type or anything” — so I guess this means she doesn’t have direct control over anything anyone writes there.

Daily Intelligencer posts don’t have bylines, but because one of their editors has always been friendly to me in person and wrote me a supportive, fuck-the-haters type email when that Times piece came out, I’ve been assuming that the really ad hominem posts about me on there — which are the fourth and fifth Google results for my name, respectively — have been written by the other editor, Chris Rovzar, who I don’t remember ever having met. Rovzar is one of the best Gossip Girl recappers of our time, and that’s saying something. But his posts about me are not only gross, they’re full of basic factual errors. He accuses me of documenting my “burps and blow jobs” and says, innacurately, that I “while at Gawker [I] made the site all self-referential, to the detriment of pageviews.” Well, okay, except that my Gawker posts still get more pageviews than the posts of some writers who actually currently work there. He has also taken me to task for misrepresenting bloggers to America, and for using the personal pronoun too many times in a personal essay.

Anyway, back to my conversation with Jessica Coen. “We have a very good source who says that you got a million dollars from Regan Arthur at Little, Brown,” she told me. I told her that rumor was wrong in all its particulars. I didn’t know then that Publisher’s Weekly and Publisher’s Marketplace had already run items about the book’s sale, which were correct in all their particulars (except that PW daily called it a “memoir,” a word that makes my skin crawl and which apparently makes everyone else’s skin crawl, too. What is a 26 year old who hasn’t overcome an addiction or been a child soldier doing writing a MEMOIR? But it’s hard to figure out what else to call a book of autobiographical stories, I guess. That is a few too many words to fit onto a computer screen, apparently.)

Anyway, I told Jessica, off the record, to look for a press release, and then — stupidly! — I took the opportunity of having her on the phone to ask her why her site’s coverage of me was so personal and so negative. I don’t know what I wanted her to say, really. “I don’t like you and I never did”? That would have been kind of gratifying, I guess. Instead, though, she talked about how she was sure, having been there, I understood what it was like. And she “apologized.” She said,

“I’m sorry you’ve found it hurtful.”

Look, it’s not like Jessica Coen and I were ever friends, but there was a time — I guess when I worked at Gawker — that we were friendly.

Oh, and then there’s Rachel Sklar, who was so nice to me when I worked at Gawker, always sending me such long, chatty emails, especially when she wanted something she’d written to be linked to. Sometimes I’d write something about Julia Allison that would make her angry and she’d send me long, crackpotty, strange emails. She’s also a friend of a friend. She has never been anything but incredibly nice to me in person. And lately she has been one of my harshest critics, writing cattily and condescendingly about me on the Huffington Post’s Eat the Press blog.

“For anyone who has followed the saga of Emily Gould, this week’s New York Times magazine cover story comes as a shock only to the extent that they would publish it,” one of her posts began. Of course Rachel Sklar thinks my “saga” is old news. She used to live in Josh Stein’s apartment building. This is a person who has been inside this machine so long she no longer realizes that a world exists outside of it.

Yesterday, her post about my book deal included four references to my appearance and the speculation that I might be tempted to pose for Playboy...

It’s true, the kind of coverage my book deal has gotten has been a far cry from the kind of support that Sklar’s friend Skurnick got when her deal for a collection of nostalgic pieces about classic young adult novels was announced. I guess there probably aren’t a lot of bloggers, blog-editors and freelance writers sitting around thinking “I am the perfect person to write a collection of nostalgic pieces about classic young adult novels, but she gets to do it and I don’t! Bitch!”

Nothing personal, just business as usual! Um, enjoy the Fourth of July weekend, eating non-gossip sausages, everyone!

From How your Emily Gould gossip sausage gets made [Emily Magazine]

But it has nothing to do with the internet. It has nothing to do with “everybody.” Remember the old slogan, Choire—my sister had it on the back of her leather jacket when we drove cross-country in 1991—“Queers take back the night”? Well, we’re taking the internet back from you people. You’ve mucked it up something good.

TAKE BACK THE INTERNET!! From "you people," which means, specifically, Choire and Nick Denton. (Or maybe it is not "specific" at all!) Keith Gessen is going to reclaim the internet FROM THE GAYS.

QUEERS GIVE BACK THE INTERNET.

Choire and Emily [Keith Gessen Blog via YM]

[Key: Keith Gessen is the editor of n+1, an important literary journal, and the author of some novel about dudes trying to get laid. He used to date Emily Gould, a former Gawker editor. Former Gawker editor Choire Sicha wrote a story about how men are terrible novelists these days. Nick Denton is the publisher and acting managing editor of Gawker, a media gossip site that has devoted a bit of ink to the relationship of Gessen and Gould, which has upset both of them. Your day editor sincerely likes everyone involved, except Gessen, who seems like a tool.]

Nick Douglas
Jason Calacanis
Jackson West
Anil Dash
Allison Mooney
Lockhart Steele
Scott Kidder
Caroline McCarthy
Kelly Reeves
Jason Kottke
Peter Rojas
Lindsay Robertson
Julia Allison
Anthony Volodkin
Choire Sicha
Nicholas Carlson
Alisa Leonard
Jaclyn Johnson
Ana Marie Cox
Heather Snodgrass
Jessica Coen
Alex Blagg
Rex Sorgatz

Don't Shoot the Canary [YM]

I'm amazed we've managed to keep a lid on this news; that, given your naturally gossipy natures, must be a first! We're spinning off three sites: Idolator, Gridskipper and—this one may be a surprise—Wonkette. There were indeed some rumors about Maura Johnston's music blog late last year; they were true of course. For reasons that I'll explain below, both it and our travel and politics sites have better commercial futures outside Gawker than within. (Excuse the corporate lingo: some of it is unavoidable.) But, first, the facts, which will be hitting the wires later this morning, or as soon as you leak this email. Go ahead!

* IDOLATOR is going to Buzznet, a music-focused web and social network. Buzznet recently acquired Idolator's chief rival, Stereogum, and received a big investment from Universal Music Group.
* GRIDSKIPPER isn't going far: it's being taken over by Curbed, the network founded by Lockhart Steele, in which Gawker Media is a shareholder.
* WONKETTE is being spun off to the managing editor, Ken Layne, former founder of one of the web's very first news sites, Tabloid.net. The title will become part of the Blogads network of political sites, which includes Daily Kos, among others.

Why these three sites? To be blunt: they each had their editorial successes; but someone else will have better luck selling the advertising than we did.

Music audiences are fragmented across genres; Maura's Idolator gave Stereogum a good run, but a group with a whole array of music sites will command more attention from record labels than we could. In the case of Gridskipper, our urban travel guide, we could never match Curbed in attention to city-specific content and advertising. As for Wonkette: political advertisers are a strange breed; they don't come through the same agencies our sales people deal with.

I'm relieved we've found pretty decent homes for the three sites, and most of their writers, but we're gutted to lose them. Idolator's Pop Critic's Poll was a tremendous coup—and Patric's bleeding-heart logo for the site was one of my favorites. Gridskipper is so far the most sophisticated travel blog: it entirely deserved its inclusion in Time's list of the 50 coolest websites.

And Wonkette is one of the brands with which the company is most associated; people will be shocked that we would ever part with it. The political site has won an array of Bloggies and other awards; it introduced the word ass-fucking into the dictionary of political abuse; the founding editor's slippers are even on display in the new media museum in Washington, DC. And Ken and his team have brought a new liveliness to the site this election season—validated by the record traffic of the last three months.

So why not wait, at least till the election? Well, since the end of last year, we've been expecting a downturn. Scratch that: since the middle of 2006, when we sold off Screenhead, shuttered Sploid and declared we were "hunkering down", we've been waiting for the internet bubble to burst. No, really, this time. And, even if not, better safe than sorry; and better too early than too late.

Everybody says that the internet is special; that advertising is still moving away from print and TV; and Gawker sites are still growing in traffic by about 90% a year, way faster than the web as a whole. But it would be naive to think that we can merely power through an advertising recession. We need to concentrate our energies, and the time of Chris Batty's sales group, on the sites with the greatest potential for audience and advertising.The dozen sites that remain represent some 97% or our 228m pageviews per month, and an even higher proportion of our growth and advertising revenue. (Key facts are below, in case anyone asks.) We'll be able to devote more attention to breakouts such as Jezebel and io9, as well as established titles such as Gizmodo and Kotaku, which are becoming utterly dominant in their domains. And, then, once this recession is done with, and we come up from the bunker to survey the internet wasteland around us, we can decide on what new territories we want to colonize.

Both Noah and I are around to answer any questions. On email, IM, or phone.

Regards

Nick

[Photos: from Ext212's Flickr]

The short of it is that we're entering an advertising recession, and the internet will, whatever the wishful thinkers believe, not be immune. Rupert Murdoch's closure of Page Six website is harbinger of the tough times to come. All web publishers will have to make hard choices about the properties they've launched during the good years.

At Gawker Media, we're determined to make those choices sooner rather than later, putting sentiment to one side. Already in 2006, we sold or shuttered three sites—Oddjack, Screenhead and Sploid—that either weren't performing or didn't fit the rest of our portfolio. The internet boom, even then, seemed unsustainable. We told the New York Times then we were "hunkering down." That wasn't the last of it; nor can I say that the disposal of Jezebel will be the end of this rationalization.

Jezebel obviously wasn't sold because it was flailing. The site drew more than 14m pageviews last month, an extraordinary achievement for a title which is less than a year old. But the bulk of Gawker Media's traffic and advertising, despite the attention paid to our more gossipy blogs, goes to the group's geekier titles such as Gizmodo, Kotaku and Lifehacker. We have to decide where we're going to hold the line.

Gawker is a technology media company, in a fierce battle with companies such as CNET and AOL's Weblogs Inc unit; Jezebel will be more easily monetized by Conde Nast, which has a portfolio of similar properties, and a sales team which can deliver package deals to cosmetics companies and other marketers. It's hard to admit, but Jezebel will be in better hands.

One plea. Jezebel's popularity derives from its willingness—eagerness—to break with the generic blandness of women's magazines and websites. Jezebel is anything but bland. In the effort to sell more advertising on the site, I hope that Conde Nast doesn't chill the vitality of Moe and Tracie and Jezebel's other writer-provocateurs.

• We watched every single minute of The Wire.
  
• We rounded up every single blogging cliche.
  
• We saw shouty PR man Ron Torossian sue a lady for the audacity of helping someone escape his firm.
  
• We spent the night in jail.
  
• We pointed and laughed at silly journalists and their overzealous ways of capturing all the news.
  
• We covered the latest fakey-fake memoir debacle: Valley Girl turned "gang member"!
  
• We got all up in a tizzy over puppies. Verdict? We like them!
  
• We learned how to land a job... at the New York Times!
  
• We wondered: are bloggers bipolar?
  
• We threw a grenade at Keith Gessen, certain other writers.
  
• If we have to teach you how to be a blogger, we'll do that later.
  
• We told Oscar-winning French actress Marion Cotillard where she could shove it.
  
• But still, thank God for French women: sexing it up for the rest of us.
  
• We analyzed why moneymaking blogs should never be sold.
  
• There was terror! But we solved it.
  
• Does John Mayer annoy us? We can't decide.
  
• Jim Behrle's cartoon, attached, sums it all up kreepily. That is all. Let the FNFF'ing commence!

Gawker Media
Our publisher Nick Denton loves to point out that no major media company could buy Gawker and keep up the site's outsider angle. Of course he wants you to believe Gawker does something special and to think of it as a competitor to decades-old media empires. But he's not lying.

When this network tried licensing stories to Yahoo News two years ago, the editors bitched about it (this was before he replaced them with inexperienced, unsure toadies like me), and the stories never did well. Gawker and Yahoo let the contract expire, and while Denton pretended it was because I kept maligning Yahoo execs on our Silicon Valley site Valleywag, it was really because no one was reading Gawker on Yahoo. Their audience just wasn't interested.

Imagine you were running this show. Why sell it and either work under some executive who probably hates you for some five-year-old blog post, or struggle to start another business that becomes this influential? It's easy to say Denton is in this for the money, but only if you've never seen the man revel in his own role. He doesn't want to be rich, he wants to be Rupert Murdoch.

TechCrunch
Before he started Silicon Valley's most influential blog, Michael Arrington (pictured demonstrating caution and humility in Business 2.0) was a successful lawyer, but this didn't make him much of an analyst. Despite frequently getting his story utterly wrong, he built influence by covering every startup that would talk to him. Tech writer Paul Boutin figured it out: TechCrunch wasn't a news source, it was a phone directory, and that's what the Valley wanted. Arrington used his local influence to earn a few scoops, and now he's an unignorable player in tech reporting.

But it's all him. Most press about TechCrunch is actually about Arrington. None of his writers are breakaway talents. And while the blog probably makes over a million a year in ad revenue, TechCrunch also makes plenty from its conferences (and "parties" where startups pay to demo products for liquored up biz-dev guys). As with Gawker, the publisher makes the brand. If Arrington sold but stayed in charge, he might have to stop writing dramatic posts like "When will we have our first Valleywag suicide?" If he left the blog, what's left? A staff of amateurish writers who can't get the scoops Arrington gets?

Boing Boing
Boing Boing is owned by its four idiosyncratic writers, who act like the blog is still the small-time zine it started out as in the 90s. For example, Cory Doctorow always pushes his anti-copyright agenda, and Mark Frauenfelder owns the ukulele news beat. That's why the blog remains popular even when sites like Digg theoretically replaced the its role as a clearinghouse for Internet memes. The blog was getting nearly a million views per day before the team stopped publicly reporting traffic, but at its heart it's a personal blog, and selling it would be like selling a favorite pet: theoretically possible but against the whole point. Besides, they all have other work that they can promote to their Boing Boing fans, and that's more valuable than ad revenue.

Weblogs, Inc.
The network of over thirty blogs made sense for AOL because it was already a non-personality-based news farm that paid under $10 per post (even lower than Gawker Media at that point), churning out consumer-friendly content. Since then, most of its blogs fell behind competitors, except for the still wildly successful Engadget tech blog. Founder Jason Calacanis was indeed in it for the money, and he left the network soon after the sale to try relaunching Netscape as a social news site (the project failed and is now just a section on the Netscape web site). Calacanis's new project, a web directory, is even less personality-based. Maybe a blog network could replicate Weblogs's success, but it would have to focus on a niche, as no one will manage to dominate as many topics as Weblogs did.

Everyone Else
Well all the others are too small, aren't they? If you want to hire a writer, you could buy his blog and immediately dissolve it, but there's no point adding an existing blog to an existing media outlet.

Most magazines, TV networks and newspapers have already launched blogs with current and new staff. It's cheaper and avoids creative conflicts. Plus blogs always have a lower revenue-per-pageview rate than the media sites that could buy them, so any acquired blog would have to be integrated into the buyer's ad inventory.

For the record, Gawker Media doesn't buy blogs, but Denton's hired at least three people who started blogs about Gawker.

Like the rest of America, we missed the mention. But a loyal viewer said it went something like this:

"So far I've seen it on MediaBistro, Romenes... it got over 6,000 hits on Gawker."
[Screengrabs of Romenesko and Gawker on screen]

Over 6,000 hits! There is not a single item in history that was picked up from Romenesko and then went on to get 6,000+ views.

Screengrab? Or clip? Anyone?

Update: We have the Cashmere Mafia clip! It's amazing how "with it" this show is! Also it's totally up-to-date because Choire would never have let us use "Bitch" in a headline.

So actually this is also on her blog with pictures but it is somehow more satisfying, at least to me, to read it without the pictures and to create them in your mind.

Before I get started, just know that the cleaning service I called gave me an estimate of $450. Since most of the damage happened after I passed out, I'm not footing this entire bill. In all the years that I've had parties, I've never so much as even asked for someone to stay and help me clean up, let alone chip in for any of the booze or anything. But today, I'm livid. The people who fucked up my shit know who you are. You have to give me something. I don't care if you're poor. If you can't afford to be an asshole, than you shouldn't act like one.

You can make a deposit into the "I Can Be Tracie's Friend Again" fund via my PayPal account by clicking the following link. You do not need to have a Paypal account in order to do this.

[She includes a PayPal link here]

I've hosted lots of parties in my day, but nothing—nothing—has ever even neared the level of destruction (and blatant disrespect) that happened at my place after I puked and passed out last night. Seriously, this beats out the time that I had a party when my parents went away when I was 17 and Amanda Spence fell down the steps and broke the spokes of the wooden banister, as well as her cheek bone. I understand you guys are party animals, but frankly, I think that some of you are just plain animals. Like wine spilled all over the walls? Are you kidding me?

And it got on my signed Dolly Parton poster, which as some of you know, is one of my most prized possessions in the world.

I heard that Callie fell down the stairs, so I'm assuming that she did this. I also heard that someone poured champagne from the second floor into the Callie's mouth on the first floor. You know, that really fucking pisses me off. There's a fucking television and speakers right there that it could've gotten on, you shit slices. And I know that if that stuff got destroyed, your asses would not compensate me in any way beyond a "Sorry dude." I would never do that in someone's house, whether it's a dump, squat, dorm room or mansion. I wanted people to have a good time. I went out of my way for people to have a good time, and it pisses me off that it was my friends, not strangers, who were doing this shit. I expected a huge mess when I woke up this morning, and expected to do heavy duty cleaning, but this is unreal. I'm fucking pissed.

And who's the asshole who poured beer all over himself? Was that you, Brian? It smells like mildew in here now.

I don't know what the hell was going on in the bathroom downstairs (I do however know about a blow job that went on in the bathroom upstairs...not performed by me), but the shower curtain rod was pulled out of the wall and the rings are broken.

The kitchen suffered damages as well.

There's a hole in the wall, too. It's blurry, but it's there.

I take responsibility for the floors, since the glitter was my idea. It was really pretty when those things popped off.

Oh, and you can't really tell from this picture, but that's an o.b. tampon on my couch. For you boys that don't know, those are the kind you have to finger yourself to use. I don't use them because I don't wash my hands after I use the bathroom.

Anyway, Happy New Year to you all! Even to the assholes who wrecked my place and to the assholes who were the last to leave and left the fucking front door wide open for the entire place to be burgled. I woke up at like 5 am because someone kept calling my phone repeatedly because he thought he left his gloves here. Apparently it was urgent for him to get them, but I'm glad he called, because otherwise, I would've slept through the night with the roof door and the apartment door open.

Also, my ass has the biggest bruise on it and I can't really walk. And this happened to my arm:

I am unable to move. Seriously, my ass is really fucked up. I can't bend over, which is why I called a cleaning service to come here, because it is not humanly possible for me to do this alone. I didn't even include the roof pictures, because there was a pile of chunky puke up there, and as a hangover present, I decided to not include that.