Cold comfort: Desperate UK media throws its writers under the bus, too (Zoe Margolis)

Image by Exey Panteleev.

When Paul Carr writes the post, I don’t really need to frame it for you. Here, one of my favorite writers (Carr) tells us about one of my other fave writers (Zoe Margolis) being treated as a second class writer by a mainstream publication in either a desperate attempt to claw for pageviews, or because they foolishly think sex writers (or female writers for that matter) are not legitimate and deserving of respectful treatment. You decide, and do send Zoe some thoughts of support. No one deserves this. Snip:

(…) This time last week, my friend Zoe Margolis – who writes as the Girl With A One Track Mind – was asked by the UK’s Independent on Sunday (IoS) newspaper to write a column about how she went from being an anonymous sex blogger to a widely-recognised advice columnist and memoirist. Zoe, I should emphasise, does not have sex for money. I know this for a fact: we shared a house at SXSW a couple of years ago and she stubbornly refused to sleep with me, despite the fact that I paid for all of our groceries at Whole Foods.

And yet, thanks to an astonishing but – I hope – innocent piece of lazy subediting, when the IoS published her column they did so under the unambiguously libellous headline “I was a hooker who became an agony aunt“.

Hoo boy.

The IoS reaslised its mistake (for want of a better word for “misquoting one of our writers as calling herself a whore”) within an hour of the paper going to press and quickly changed the headline in print and online. But of course the damage was already done. Although, according to the paper, only a couple of thousand hard copies had been dispatched to news stands, the web version had already been syndicated to dozens of other sites – including Yahoo! – and such far-flung newspaper websites as the Times of India. Worse still, it took several more hours – and increasingly vocal complaints by Zoe – before the IoS changed the story’s URL which still contained the full wording of the original headline. (…read more, techcrunch.com)