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I'm sorry, but lumping Gawker in with Perez Hilton and TMZ is just laziness. I usually enjoy Heather Havrilesky, no stranger to snark herself- but reciting hit jobs from Vanessa Grigoridias and N +1- surprise surprise, both with grudges- makes me feel she just doesn't get Gawker.
Gawker is a NYC-centric site, without apology. The "jealous creative underclass" that Vanessa spitefully described in that NY Mag article, from her privileged perch, is fully entitled to vent about the indescribably comic rat-race that is NYC media and culture. Are they not allowed to do this? When it's well-known that editor X's new job comes from being married to financier Y, can we not have a snicker at watching "who you know/who you blow" in action?
Unless you've lived as a young creative struggling in NYC, every day observing what David Sedaris described as people "who not only have more, but much MUCH more, than you", you don't know what you're talking about, comparing Gawker to Perez.
There's something quite reassuring, reading about that hot new punky downtown artist that the media is fawning over is hiding the fact he comes from a billionaire art-world dynasty (hi, Dash!). Or that first-time novelist living in the townhouse of one's dreams in the NYT Styles didn't actually write "Travelling Pants" herself, and the house is paid for by her husband's vast inheritance.
This is rubbed in one's face every single day in NYC- it takes a ton of balls and spunk and brains to survive. So the coddled Yale N+1 trust-fund boys, with their undergrad pretensions, are fully fair game to have a laugh at.
Do you know who Barbara Corcoran is? Steven Schwartzman? Amy Sacco? Arden Wohl? Teddy Forstmann? I don't see Perez Hilton writing about these people. Maybe Gawker just doesn't translate west of the Hudson, but for a lot of us it's a pleasure in the spirit of the old SPY.
As for the Stalker feature, it's not meant literally, it's not really in real-time, and it's not GPS enabled. One of the few compensations us creative undervermin get is to occasionally see Sarah Jessica Parker blow her nose, just like you and me! A lot of the mentions seem publicist planted btw . And spare me, Ryan Gosling is not John Lennon.
