In all seriousness, Vanessa Grigoriadis is right. Most of us are just running routes out of the Elizabeth Spiers playbook: "Gawker made its debut under the leadership of Nick Denton, the complicated owner of the blog network Gawker Media, and Elizabeth Spiers, a 25-year-old banker turned blogger who...displayed a streak of dark cunning on the page. They didn’t exactly invent the blog, but the tone they used for Gawker became the most important stylistic influence on the emerging field of blogging and has turned into the de facto voice of blogs today."
But Spiers is brainy and funny instead of simply cruel. In honor of Leopard's impending release, let's look at her latest Fast Company column: "And yet I keep buying Apple products....But I don't blame myself, because that would be unpleasant. So I blame Steve Jobs, who has seduced me into buying his sleek machines, even if their delicate organs seem to fail with alarming regularity, like the beautiful consumptive heroines in Victorian novels. Steve--we'll call him Steve because he seems like a first-name-basis kind of guy--is the human incarnation of the average Apple product: He's good-looking, he overpromises, and he's notoriously temperamental. He evokes the feel-good indie populism synonymous with the company's brand and manages to retain a solid reputation as a creative person while managing a $118 billion business."
Then it gets better.
2 comments:
This may be blasphemous, but I think that Spiers is overrated. While she did on occasion display good wit at Gawker, in her own attempt to create a blog empire (from which she ultimately departed) I think she fell flat. I thought she was mostly lazy, grabbing and rewarming the lion's share of her material from other blogs as opposed creating or finding her own. I guess I'm just tired of not terribly original blogs that 'borrow'way too liberally from the work of others.
That's interesting. Do you mean she was mostly unoriginal while at Gawker? Or at her own Dead Horse blogs?
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