And so The Girl With A One Track Mind is outed. For the uninitated The Girl is a blogger who writes about her sex life but unlike most blogs of that ilk she’s taken the radical approach of being all human about it, which is what makes her blog interesting. Because she’s writing about sex, and this being the internet, her blog is pretty popular and, since blogs are, y’know, hot right now, she got one of them book deals that all the popular blogs are getting. The book was released and, since the real world is a lot like the internet, it got a fair bit of coverage. The Girl, or as she’s known in her book Abby Lee, wrote under a pseudonym because, let’s face it, she’d be stupid not to since she was dealing with personal stuff that often involved other people. Today the Sunday Times “unmasked” her. Here’s the article, linked with nofollow so they won’t get my Google-juice.
The “journalist” responsible for that piece of tosh is Anna Mikhailova who, according to a quick Google search, was recently a contributor to The Oxford Student. Presumably she recently graduated and got a job at the Times where she’s desperate to make her mark. How better to do this than by revealing the identity of someone who has the audacity to write about her sex life under a pseudonym?
This sort of thing annoys me, and not just because The Girl is a fellow blogger. The question I find myself asking about this whole thing is “Why?” What was the point of this exercise? It’s not like we’re talking about some major literary scandal. The book is published by Ebury for crying out loud! As anyone in the book trade will tell you Ebury are the division of Random House who publish the novelty books, some of which are quite good but most of which will be out of print in a year. They seek out the hot trends and get them into print with as much hype as possible and they do a mean trade in Xmas stocking fillers. If an Ebury book gets a long shelf life it’s by accident rather than design. Most of the books by bloggers are published by imprints like Ebury which says lots about how the publishing industry feels about them. Blogs are cool. We’ll milk this for a few months and then move on to something else. That’s not to diminish the bloggers themselves, or to begrudge them their advances. I encourage them to milk this while it lasts. But unfortunately the rest of the world sees a book as something important and journalists doubly so.
What’s most irritating about this is the outing adds nothing whatsoever to the picture of The Girl. All the important details (such as her work in the film industry) were already alluded to in the blog and the name means absolutely nothing. Mikhailova’s research has brought nothing new to the table. All she’s done is complicate the life of someone who really didn’t deserve it and if The Girl stops writing in the way she has I wouldn’t be at all surprised.
Which is really my point. We have, over the last few years, seen an explosion of non-professional people taking to the writing game, not to mention photographers, musicians and all manner of creative endeavors. Some of them are getting attention from the professional world and that attention isn’t always welcome. There’s a reason why people reject the “mainstream media” and it’s not that it’s blinkered or biased. It’s that it’s fundamentally fucked on so many levels. You could say when The Girl signed her book deal she should have expected this to happen but why is that an excuse?
So congratulations, Anna Mikhailova. You’ve got your first scalp. I hope your employers are happy with your work and that you get to ruin the lives of many more. Or perhaps you might do some investigative research into what journalism is supposed to be about and do something useful with your skills.
And if you find someone hiding in your garden waiting to take candid photos of you and repeatedly phoning you to find out personal details which they’ll then make public…
I agree with you Pete, that there’s absolutely no news value in this story at all - it’s just served to screw somebody over and added absolutely nothing to the world.
However I don’t agree that the Girl, or anybody else, should get anonymity just by asking for it. That way lies just as much disaster.
I’ve expanded the arguments further on my blog.
There is not much news value is most of the news that gets published.
I do find it interesting that anyone actually still has notions of anonymity in todays big wired world. If one really wants anonymity then a good place to start is by pulling out the modem cable and opt out of the brave new world of the internet.
I agree with you too Pete, and you bobbie, hell even you Dave C! ;-)
And, yes you guessed, I’ve expanded my thoughts on my blog.
I agree with you Pete, and am astonished by the reservations of the comments. Do so few know we are supposed to have a right to privacy?
The Girl was actually writing about what are actually rarely explored, serious issues for women, and for men too. The way she had found depended on walking a careful line between reality and anonymity, for herself and for others. Her identity being known would mean that others would be identifiable. She did it very carefully, very ethically. Openly discussing the ethics.
The book deal was anonymous. No doubt there would have been a larger payment otherwise, with the additional publicity opportunities. Then another part of the same media empire “unmasks” her. So they get the publicity regardless, and destroy her life, her career.
Looking at the work the reporter had published in the few previous weeks since she started at The Sunday Times, they were all conspiracy type stories. GM drugs. satellite surveillance of sex offenders, ID cards. I can only imagine, as the extraordinarily dated, disapproving language she used in the “unmasking”, and the extreme measures she used in pressuring The Girl would seem to indicate, that she felt The Girl to be a sexual deviant who had to be unmasked, terrified and stopped from writing, all for the public good. Then she, and those above her at The Sunday Times acted as detectives, prosecutors, judge and court officers to execute it.
That is a gross misuse of press freedom, perhaps not unconnected with people at another Murdoch paper, edited only yards away, and no doubt using the same support services, now being in the hands of the police for tapping phones. Again for no good reason. This is the media one again deliberately confusing what they see as the public being interested enough to buy a few more copies of their rag with investigations being in the “public interest”, and to hell with our freedoms or our values.
“However I don’t agree that the Girl, or anybody else, should get anonymity just by asking for it. ”
So, if someone would plaster your kids pictures, your address, the school you take your kids, your mother’s address, and all the details they can find about you, on the net, spinning some basically true, but twisted text around it, you would take it without a word.
I dunno. I think Ms Mihailkova would be really upset if some trashletter would appear in her box, people would stalk around her place, taking photos of her, printing her picture with her address, and so on.
Maybe i’m being a bit cynical but this could all be a scam to boost sales of the book. Anonymous blogger gets ‘outed’ just as her book hits the shelves. Coincidence?
Pete
You should see the journos own blog:
annamikhailova.blogspot.com
Hypocrite me thinks! Maybe a post to the register?
If only it were so, but nah. That’s a fake blog if ever I saw one.