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He was anything but “invisible.”

Jill

steve-gilliard-photo-courtesy-of-the-gilliard-family.jpg

The New York Times Magazine pays tribute to one of my all-time favorite bloggers, Steve Gilliard. When I was a little baby blogger at a little baby blog, Steve was one of the first big bloggers who ever linked to me. He was one of the first big bloggers to offer me words of encouragement. His blog was one of the first blogs I read. And he is sorely missed.

Check out the article, and Jesse’s additions to it.

Thanks to Morgan for the link.

4 thoughts on He was anything but “invisible.”

  1. Oh, don’t even get me started on what a dipshit Matt Bai is, with his “bloggers are lonely losers” and “white bloggers on exploring the stark urban landscape of Harlem” angles.

    Trust me, it could have been a lot worse, but the Times does actually employ fact-checkers.

  2. Yes, the Times employs fact checkers.

    Jen (Gilly’s co-publisher) and I were talking earlier today about how badly they failed to get anything other than basic facts correct.

    Trust me — Gilly was anything but the celibate impotent black geek boy the Times paints him as. Too bad Matt Bai is so threated by a strong black sexy man that he must emasculate him in order to feel safe.

    He lamented that he didn’t know what it was to “wake up naked in a strange bed,”

    Total crap.

    Jen was neither Gilly’s lover or girlfriend, but as Jen and I talked about today, Gilly had girlfriends, lovers, and opportunities to just get laid. There’s something about a strong articulate man that simply turns smart women on — and Gilly had enough smarts and genuine strength for ten men.

    If Matt Bai and the fact checkers from the Times had bothered to actually listen when they called Jen, or had bothered to check with the rest of us who worked with Gilly and have been privileged to serve his community after his passing, perhaps they might have got their facts straight, or even half-way bent.

    That said, I will always be thankful that The New York Times saw fit to honor our friend in such a fitting way with the other notable passages of 2007. This article will mean a great deal to the Gilliard family, and that means a great deal to all of us at GNB.

    In the end, what matters most is not the errors in the article, but what a great man Steve Gilliard was, and how he effortlessly touched everyone around him.

  3. Bai botched this, and justice demands that he be publicly roasted not for writing garbage – that’s fine – but for writing garbage labeled as journalism, now or the next 50 times he does it. It’s the most honorable tribute that bloggers could probably do for Steve Gilliard – call lazy journalistic hackery by its proper name, every time that Bai does it in the future.

    If Bai were reasonably prudent, he would have said to himself, “Gee, I am writing an article that a whole lot of family and friends of the deceased – a black-belt blogger and journalist himself – might read. Maybe I should double check the facts myself, rather than rely on an 19 year-old intern, since my by-line and rep are on the line…” But Bai is not reasonably prudent, only reasonably paid.

  4. Matt Bei… real life’s answer to Rita Skeeter?

    Sadly, I had only heard of Steve and read his writings after his death- but man, what a VOICE.

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