![]() ![]() Gould sometimes appears conflicted about whether this is a good or a bad thing, but knows, unquestionably, that it is her thing. “Even having to take into account someone else’s feelings about being written about felt like being stifled in some essential way.”Īlthough she was loudly pilloried for it at the time, Gould’s essay now reads as a trenchant insight into the way digital media was rapidly erasing the distinction between public and private, particularly for the generation – Gould is now 33 – who had never known a time before the internet. “At some point I’d grown accustomed to the idea that there was a public place where I would always be allowed to write, without supervision, about how I felt,” she wrote. Gould’s first priority after quitting Gawker was to write about her experience in a long, self-involved, but fascinating cover story for the New York Times magazine in which she presented her career and relationships as a modern morality tale on the dangers of oversharing online. “I don’t think I understood that when I was at Gawker, and now it’s been made abundantly clear to me, by a God who has a sense of humour, if you want to believe in stuff like that.” “I don’t think people understand that writers, with very few exceptions, aren’t rich and don’t have power,” she says. But whatever remorse she feels, it is not for stalking celebrities it is for making fun of other writers - once a meat-and-potatoes target for Gawker’s editors. “If I wanted to get really melodramatic about it, I could say that I feel like I was punished,” Gould says today. Humiliated by the experience, and the corresponding deluge of hate mail, she found herself paralysed by panic attacks, often too scared to leave her apartment. Nevertheless, Gould was unprepared for Kimmel’s tub-thumping offensive, and it showed. Blowback was inevitable.Ī little over 18 months later, exhausted by the emotional comeuppance of “being shady, insulting and two-faced” as she later described the Gawker work ethic, Gould announced her resignation online, in a Gawker post that captured the disenchantment of a one-time naïf waking up to realise she no longer believes in what she is doing.Įmily Gould grilled by Jimmy Kimmel over Gawker Stalker Gould showed up at the exact moment the site was mushrooming into a water-cooler phenomenon, in which Denton’s gotcha stunts frequently made the headlines. The rise of Gawker – founded in 2003 by English expat Nick Denton – as new media’s rabid attack dog, with its Private Eye-esque takedown of celebrities and politicians, had been swift and merciless. Not looking at online comments is a writer’s armature against rage and despair, but Gould, fresh from the less brutal world of book publishing, didn’t heed the advice. “You really shouldn’t read the comments,” Emily Gould was told after arriving at the notorious gossip blog Gawker, in 2006. ![]()
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