tMF CONTROVERSIAL: The current state of blogging-
Celebrity rags sites & Elitist bloggers!

post from The Movie Fanatic Feeds on 09 November 2008 02:11:55 PM. © The Movie Fanatic Feeds

Founded the previous year, the Web site Gawker, that celebrity garbage-disposal unit, hadn’t yet left its snot mark on the culture; its best worst years lay ahead. YouTube hadn’t yet sprung into existence to provide a pandemic platform for every unguarded mishap and surveillance-cam video. Nor had TMZ and its splattergun TV spin-off, where a bull pen of avid rookies lob chum at host Harvey Levin during the show (actual teaser: “Jamie Lynn Spears and Casey went to the Wal-Mart superstore yesterday … ”—pushing a shopping cart, no less!) as they all sip from their stupid cups of whatever. - - -- - -That's from blogger/writer James Wolcott (http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/08/nextwave200808) of the 'prestigious' Vanity Fair blogs. I'm supposed to be reading something about Hollywood's Next Wave, but it seems he likes to do an introduction of sorts - a distinction between his blog and Vanity Fair and the Celebrity garbage disposals, as he calls them, sites such as Gawker (http://gawker.com/), TMZ (http://www.tmz.com/), and yeah, YouTube (http://youtube.com)!The Current or near-current state of Celebrity Blogging: I don't usually visit Gawker or TMZ for that matter, but it seems even such high-profile online sites which are extensions of traditional publications have been looking at them very closely.Going back to the Vanity Fair blog, at first I'm totally clueless as to why such an introduction, but reading further, I got it! He's trying to make a point about the current state of spotlight by which young celebrities has to go through each day. I thought that's the only critical article from maintream media, but then I was a bit surprised that even the more prestigious New York Times had a series of articles (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/fashion/13gawker.html) about one of these sites- Gawker....think of gawker as NYT Sunday Styles, but with much lower threshold for a storyThat's a quote and from another article (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/12/fashion/13gweb.html?ref=fashion) at the NY Times. I have a feeling that perhaps the owner of Gawker, Nick Denton, has somehow became a competitior of sorts for Vanity Fair and even the NY Times, and from the very tone of these articles, there is no love or even a sense of 'belongingness', and I think I'm quite right. Has it something to do with traffic and Ad revenue?

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