How to Shut Down an Internet Argument [The Internets]

Just post this video, each and every time, when things appear to be getting out of hand in a comments thread or whatever. Makes everyone involved feel stupid. [via Cajun Boy]

Pretend You're Talking To Someone Now [Advertising]

Make a YouTube video—any video—and show your stupid Sprint phone in it, and Sprint will pay you $20. The promotion is appropriately called "Sell Out." Or, don't do this, and enjoy a satisfaction that $20 could never buy. Unless you bought crack. [via PostAdvertisingAge]

Who Says Newspapers Are Dead? [Journalismism]

The L.A. Times is cutting 250 jobs, the Tampa-Tribune is cutting 21, the New York Times is now available only on Kindle during a lunar eclipse, but all is well in dead-tree medialand — in Korea. An anti-Communist group in Seoul plans to distribute 100,000 free copies of its newspaper to North Korean readers via balloons. The so-called Free North Korea Shinmun "will expose and condemn human rights violations in the communist country with articles written by North Korean defectors living in the South." The good news? The paper's made of plastic, so less atmospheric wear and tear. The bad? There's no food supplement made of real food to actually be use to North Koreans.

"Most residents in the North live without hearing news from outside their country," said an official of the group. "We hope the newspapers will spread the desire for freedom by reporting the firsthand experiences of defectors who came to South Korea in search of freedom and human rights," he said.

It was either that or Marty Peretz paratrooping in with remaindered copies of TNR.

[World Tribune]

Lorenzo's Royal [Hottie Boombalotties]

Seeing as it's apparently Cute Boy Day on Gawker, we'll throw another fella into the mix. Our friends at Guanabee think that Lorenzo Betancourt, son of the recently-released hostage and one-time Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid, is a hottie. And we don't disagree. Though, erm, he's nineteen.

Emily Gould Handles Her Own PR, Calls Out Everyone [Microfeuds]

We will begin by thanking Emily Gould—former Gawker editor, recent NYT Magazine cover story, and recently-sold book-write—for providing us with content on a slow news day before a holiday weekend. She's chosen the perfect time to publish a long screed on her blog, titled "How Your Emily Gould Gossip Sausage Gets Made." Whoa! Everyone gets called out. We're all crazy from the heat this week!

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]

Hipsters In Space [Hipsters]

A cartoon starring an East Village DJ in shutter shades, on a space ship. About time. [Current]

Entire New York Gossip Agenda Shaped By One Dude in Jersey [Chaunce Hayden]

Recently, Steppin' Up editor Chaunce Hayden got himself banned from tipping Page Six because of an inaccurate item he sorta sent them about a sex tape involving the wife of radio morning show host Opie. Does that sentence confuse and upset you? It should, because there's no fucking reason you should've ever heard of Chaunce Hayden, Steppin' Out, or "Opie," as Chaunce Hayden more or less admits in a Radar profile today. The unread free New Jersey magazine is actually just a vehicle for Mr. Hayden to meet famous (or "famous") women and land his name in the columns.

Today, Steppin' Out has a circulation of around 85,000 and is distributed throughout New Jersey and New York City by a team of 30 drivers. Hayden is the editor, but, more important, also serves as the magazine's de facto publicist: Since no one actually reads it, it's up to him to feed the best material to the various gossip outlets around town, most of which are desperate to fill column space each day.

This is how "gossip" works! Armies of professional tipsters (literally professional, in many cases—some Ron Burkle-owned magazines are known to have piles of cash on hand for these tipsters) who sometimes feed you great stuff and sometimes utter bullshit.

So Chaunce seeks status and publicity for himself, netting himself closer access to the famous and semi-famous who he then sells out to Page Six until one of them then turns on him and Page Six is forced to burn him, the end.

"It's actually not that difficult to get people to appear in the magazine," he says. "I just promise them the cover. Of course, no one has ever seen the damn thing, but publicists have usually heard of it, which is good enough. Everyone's a fame whore in this town."

True! When we first began receiving emails from "Chaunce Hayden" on behalf of Steppin' Out they confused and upset us, but now, sadly, we understand the whole game. And we've still never seen a physical copy of this magazine.

Is It Too Soon For The Wackness? [Movies]

I guess it was inevitable after Interpol's second album tanked that late-80's postpunk recurrence was fated to be as short-lived as Ian Curtis. But how the hell did we reach 1994 in our retro cycle so quickly? The Wackness (trailer after the jump), the indie feature directed by Jonathan Levine, opens this weekend, revisiting the broiling New York City summer that you might not have before realized was so zeitgeisty. The film's being cited as much for its splenetic anti-Giuliani politics as for its remember-when hip hop soundtrack. Our hero Luke Shapiro (think a smarter version of Telly from the Larry Clark film Kids) is a virginal high school drug dealer who runs a mini-cartel of Jamaican weed out of an Italian shaved ice cart. Cosmopolitan! But his skanking around town with Ben Kingsley, a fiending Jewish psychotherapist dressed like Kramer, is about to be interrupted by broken windows law enforcement. Where were you standing when Newt Gingrich took over Congress?

Andrew O'Hehir at Salon gives the film a middling review, but then sits down for an interesting Q&A with Levine:

For me, a lot of it was informed by the music. We had the opportunity to listen to "Ready to Die" [by Notorious B.I.G.] or "Nevermind" [by Nirvana] or "Illmatic" [by Nas] or the first Weezer album. All this great music was coming out then. Especially the hip-hop — that was what I connected to on a visceral, personal level. The music you're listening to really determines a lot about your memories.

Where are they now, musically speaking? Dead, dead, destroyed by Jay-Z, and just as sex-deprived as poor Luke. Yeah, okay, maybe it was time to go there.

[Salon]

Yet Another Show About The Increasingly Uninteresting World of the Filthy Rich [Money]

Oh look. A new show about rich people. It's certainly not a new TV meme, but there's just so much of it these days. What with the Real Housewives and the Gossip Girls and the Super Sweet sixteen-year-olds. One might begin to think there was some sort of canyon-sized poverty gap growing in this country of ours. This newest entry in the genre is about a young writer who takes a job tutoring two spoiled rich heiresses and blah blah blah, people swim in money. The show is slated to be on the CW, where Gossip Girl is housed, this fall. So tune in on your non-flat television set, pour a glass of Fish Eye from a box, and feel terribly, terribly impoverished. It's a good thing poor people just aren't that interesting. A promo clip for the show awaits you after the jump.

"The empire struck back and laid me off" [Photography]

A couple months ago we brought you the elegiac newsroom photography of Martin Gee, a designer at the San Jose Mercury News who picked up a camera one day and documented the ghostly quality atmosphere inside a newspaper dessicated by layoffs. Well, guess what: Gee has now been laid off! With no warning. While he was on vacation. Sucks. He's pissed, but he never put down his camera. After the jump, three photos that express his feelings towards his old employer:

"the empire struck back and laid me off. fuck the merc. fuck medianews. newspapers deserve to die. i left today with my at-at under my arm."

Oversharing Is Sometimes Okay, Says Oversharer [Rex Sorgatz]

Goaded by a commenter, writer Rex Sorgatz wrote a passionate defense of those who share intimate details of their lives online. The media blogger (and recent author of a piece on microfame for New York) had linked to his anonymous Tumblr blog, which documented conversations Rex had about New York and the hookup scene. (The blog was outed even more quickly than Rex expected.) Rex says his pillow-talk conversations weren't oversharing, and fuck you for accusing him of that. So what's his defense, and is there anything still too intimate to blog?

Rex says:

If that fucking Tumblr is oversharing, then so is writing a goddamn novel. It's just some random fucking quotes that I sorta thought summarized a certain kind of feeling, aesthetic, angst at this particular historical moment.

And:

I don't like this reactionary voice on the internet that wishes to turn everything into bland, impersonal, "boredwithit" blog junk. The internet was once a big experiment of people trying out new personal forms, but we've reached this new place in which the only allowed first person accounts are those that involve peoples' motherfucking babies, trips to cupcake shops, and OMG I HATE MY BOSS LET ME TELL YOU WHY.

Furthermore:

Seriously, why the fuck does David Sedaris, or Augusten Burroughs, or Klosterman, or any number of lesser memoirists who make less hyperbolic examples of confession culture — why exactly do they get to "overshare"? Where did they get their license?

But:

There really is a line that people have crossed that IS over-sharing, in the bad sense.

Where that line is drawn is left as an exercise to the reader.

"Overshare" is one of Gawker's favorite insults, applied to Emily Gould's NYT Mag piece, a memoir about J. D. Salinger, a photo of a cumshot on a sex blog, and a pickup line from Michael Musto.

Do all these stories deserve the same label? Are none of them merited? Are we just using "overshare" as a coy little criticism instead of thinking out a proper response? I posit no, some, and yes respectively!

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