Max Gogarty has started his gap year adventure with a bang, receiving comments and viral spread from the Guardian that the blogosphere’s wittiest comment kings would be proud of.
As Digital Lifestyles rightly said, “we’ve never seen a more vitriolic and frankly funny collection of comments”. Max’s Skins-writing, skinny-jean wearing gap year style was met with 475 lively responses such as “how marvellous, i think i’m going to barf with excitement” – before the mods closed the post.
The follow up from the Guardian’s travel editor today already has a few hundred replies already, and the spread of the story in the last 24 hours has been massive. Max has staked his claim to five minutes of blogosphere fame with two Facebook groups already. It’ll be interesting to see if The Guardian continue with the series, but it certainly seems to have entertained the blogosphere for a few hours, and the comments are worth reading for some Friday entertainment value alone.
Latest is Max’s blog is no more.
Travel editor is blaming all on spiteful ‘internetistas’ and relying on the hair splitting defence that Maxie’s old man is not editor – just a prolific contributor…
It’s not nepotism – it’s just a coincidence!
Spiteful internet peeps? I’ve never heard of such a thing!
It’s a shame, I think there would have been quite a following for Max’s next post…
The Guardian are behaving pathetically – they got caught behaving just as we imagined they do (neptoism, North London media love ins, yoof media chasing etc) and were made to look like idiots.
Incredibly they are now blaming all of this on their spiteful readers. It’s not Max Gogarty’s fault – he was just being a 19 year old kid. It was the travel editors fault and, more recently Emily Bell’s fault for her small mindedness in abusing her own internet readers.
I think this has significantly damaged the Guardian’s credability online. It’s about time they took their collective heads out of their collective arses.
There is a number of lessons to be learnt from all of this but their reactions to date suggest that they can’t be bothered to learn them.
I wrote on my blog – just hours before Max’s piece went on line – a piece about how everything is just so North London in the Guardian’s world:
“I also receive their Northerner mailer. It always feels a little sneery and aloof – like way too much of the Guardian’s content when it deals with the North East. You get the impression it’s written by Londoners who think that the best way to please is to write as many patronising “northernâ€? stories as possible. You find yourself looking for the whippet breeding pieces and the fashion spot on flat caps.
“As a blogger I can only applaud their website and commitment to all things web 2.0. But the attitude of their writers to the North East stinks. If the heartland of the Daily Mail is the Home Counties, the Guardian’s, whatever they might claim about Northern public servants, is London media land luvviedom and they don’t seem to like us much”
[...] However seriously you took it, the Max Gogarty fiasco last week was entertaining, and so we thought we’d just wrap up a few of the things that have made us laugh in the last week, as the LOLability of the web is not mentioned often enough! [...]