So I would gladly sacrifice a bit of drama for the sake of accuracy, but apparently not all copy editors make that choice. I didn't get past the self-indulgent first page of this New York magazine article on Gawker, in part because the writing was so slippery.

Example:

She was mortified, and I=pissed: High-minded citizen journalism, it seems, can also involve insulting people's ethnic backgrounds.

Does the equals sign work in the past tense? Whatever. Vanessa Grigoriadis is referring to this entry, which makes no reference whatsoever to her ethnic background. Citizen journalism, it seems, can also involve jokes readers make in the comment section.

Grigoriadis isn't the first person to have done this, but I find criticizing a blog for its comments extremely dubious. As expected, the Gawker legal page includes the caveat "Gawker is not responsible for the content of user comments."

Worse still is the phony timeline Grigoriadis uses to drum up sympathy: this could have been fact-checked in about thirty seconds.

She starts by writing that

I woke up the day after my wedding to find that Gawker had written about me.

Timestamp on the New York Times wedding announcement: September 24. The announcement itself says that she was married "yesterday," which would put the actual wedding on September 23rd, a Saturday. The Gawker article was posted the following Monday, the 25th, so I'm sure the day after Grigoriadis's wedding was just wonderful.

Need more pathos? How about this:

Plus, only pansies get upset about Gawker, and no real journalist considers himself a pansy. But there is a cost to this way of thinking, a cost that can be as high as getting mocked on your wedding day.

Yeah, that must've sucked. Except: no! Because it never happened!

Names and dates, people: if Grigoriadis says Gawker hates her, check it out.

(Incidentally, what's with writing "New York Magazine"? Either magazine is part of the name or it's not.)

Labels: editing, semantics