The cover story of this month's Atlantic, on the new paparazzi, is probably the worst piece by David Samuels I have ever read. If you purport to seriously contemplate the celebrity-media complex, and splash Britney Spears on your cover, you have to go all in. Otherwise, the whole thing is just a tease, and you're left -- as The Atlantic was -- with a rather dull story about a writer sitting next to photographers whose job it is to stalk celebrities. Shockingly, these people wait around for celebrities to do stuff. I did not need The Atlantic to tell me this.On some level, though, I'm sympathetic to their obvious hope to move newsstand copies by putting Spears on the cover. But regardless, if you're going to dabble in this sort of thing -- the Britney Think Piece -- it's much better to go the route that Rolling Stone did, when it had the talented Vanessa Grigoriadis dive head first into Spears' life and paint a picture of a celebrity culture that has destroyed a young woman's life.
Why pretend to be above giving your readers what they want -- and what you, however coyly, have promised?
Update: It occurs to me that this post came out as the product of unfairness and imprecision. One of the cardinal rules of good media criticism is that you must critique the piece that was written, on its own terms, not the piece that you thought should have been written. In that way, the comparison to Grigoriadis' piece is unfair to Samuels, who set out to follow a certain group of paparazzi around and write about their lives and that experience, a project that differs from Rolling Stone's. I still think that it's not the most compelling thing that I've read, and that it pales in comparison to the work that was done here or here, or even here, but then, I think there's only so much you can do with a group of subjects whose job is simply to stalk people, whatever the background of those subjects may be.
Regarding my imprecision, it's important to note that the headline, layout, and pullquotes that attend a piece are typically not done with the writer's input. In this case, I think, frankly, that the editors at The Atlantic wanted to have it both ways -- they had an intellectually defensible piece on paparazzi, but dressed it up with excited, Britney-centric pullquotes; photos of Britney Spears; a headline and cover promo all about Spears; and a cover shot focused on her (and, yes, the paparazzi, in the background). It's hard to believe there weren't some economic factors involved here, but in any event, to the extent there's a mismatch between all that stuff and the piece itself, and to the extent it leads you to expect something that the piece isn't intended to deliver, the blame should be apportioned properly.
Update 2: Hey, apparently I'm "one blogger" -- nameless but existent! Question: Can't something be both "a nice bit of gonzo journalism" and the worst piece by this writer I've read? Confusing!
