Media Mob just received the Summer 2008 issue of Russia!, the premier glossy for hip, young people of Russian descent. The cover features a striking drawing of newly installed Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, whose eyes seem to follow you across the room. Russia! editor Michael Idov penned the accompanying story, Meet the New Boss.

For the subset of people still fascinated by the personal life of former Gawker editor Emily Gould, her story on young Russian novelists—including, as her former website gleefully pointed out her ex-boyfriend, novelist Keith Gessen—is given a seven-page spread and the great headline, The Beet Generation.  read more »

This past winter, Paul Tough, a story editor at The New York Times Magazine, brought Emily Gould, a recently retired editor of Gawker.com, to the sixth floor of the paper’s skyscraper on Eighth Avenue. Sometimes, writers meet with the magazine’s editor in chief, Gerry Marzorati, and this was one of those times.

Mr. Marzorati had never before heard of Ms. Gould, he told Off the Record.  read more »

"I am starting to wish the magazine had chosen to illustrate the piece some other way, though." She calls the pics "vaguely cheesecakey."

This is a Q&A on nytimes.com just published where Gould responds to her critics.

Emily Gould's New York Times Magazine cover story hasn't even landed with a thud on front porches and newsstands yet, but it's already garnering a ton of criticism online.

Some of the critical outlets weren't surprising.

Like Gawker, for example, since Ms. Gould's article is in many ways a rebuke of the site.

Gawker's first post officially linked to Ms. Gould's Times Magazine story received 9,133 views and 170 comments.

A follow-up post clocked in at 8,814 views with 149 comments, while a post announcing comments had closed on NYTimes.com received only 4,150 views and 83 comments.

Sadly, another, about the article's photos, topped out at only 2,556 views and 55 comments.

Finally, it seemed, for Gawker, the horse had been kicked to death.

New York magazine's Daily Intel had a wonkishly incisive post in which its editors calculated how many dollars Ms. Gould was presumed to have been paid for the words "I" and "me" in the 7,937-word article. (Eight hundred and sixty dollars, by Daily Intel's math. One wonders how many I's and me's were in New York's equally controversial first person cover story this week.)  read more »

A "Make Ready" of this week's New York Times Magazine just arrived, featuring the much buzzed about cover story by former Gawker editor Emily Gould. The story is headlined Exposed and features three photos of Ms. Gould excluding the cover. (One photo shows just her hands at a laptop, an Instant Message window and a web page on the screen.)

The article is heavily diaristic; for a magazine that exists to explain "The Way We Live Now" every week, it's light in sociology or cultural grasping, focusing instead on the writer's relationships and her job.

Samples after the jump:  read more »

"Every generation thinks it's special—my grandparents because they remember horses and buggies, my parents because of the Depression. The over-30's are special because they knew the Red Scare of Korea, Chuck Berry and beatniks. My older sister is special because she belonged to the first generation of teen-agers (before that, people in their teens were "adolescents"), when being a teen-ager was still fun.... My generation is special because of what we missed rather than what we got, because in a certain sense we are the first and the last. The first to take technology for granted."–Joyce Maynard, An 18-Year-Old Looks Back On Life, The New York Times Magazine, April 23, 1972.

And in more web log news! The former Gawker editor Emily Gould is becoming a blogger at Galleycat, mediabistro's publishing-news arm, it was just announced.

For those who may have missed yesterday’s Page Six Magazine, here follows a quick rundown of some of the issue’s highlights:

Just when it started to seem like fresh book ideas from eager-beaver magazine assistants had all been exhausted, Anna Godberson burst upon the literary scene. The 27-year-old writer from Berkeley, Calif., who was an assistant to a literary editor at Esquire for four years after graduating from Barnard, has landed her new teen novel, The Luxe, on the Times best-seller list. Ms. Godberson’s novel, about a teen socialite at the turn of the 20th Century, has allegedly attracted interest “from TV producers, leading to whispers that it could be the next Gossip Girl.”  read more »

On Friday, Nov. 30, readers of an item on Gawker.com which was nominally about author and editor Keith Gessen were told that the Web site's managing editor, Choire Sicha, and editor Emily Gould were quitting.

On Monday, Dec. 3, nightlife editor Josh Stein told The Media Mob, he'll do the same.

"The reasons I'm quitting are kind of personal," he told Media Mob on Sunday night. "It has nothing to do with the job. I'm actually really happy with the job."  read more »

So, buried at the end of this long post that's nominally about Keith Gessen's forthcoming book comes the news that Choire Sicha and Emily Gould are leaving Gawker.

Choire just confirmed the news to Media Mob.