What we need are legends: this week on Fresh Powder

“Celebrity blogs aren’t as directly unkind as they used to be. It is far less acceptable, for example, for a blogger to post an upskirt photo of a teenager today than it was back when Hilton and other bloggers of his ilk would post those photos of Miley Cyrus as she gets out of her car. The public discourse around mental health and drug addiction continues to become more nuanced. This isn’t to say that slut-shaming, racism, and misogyny don’t exist on gossip sites — just that such comments are more likely to come from the followers of gossip accounts (now usually on Instagram) rather than the gossip sites themselves. It’s a change that mid-aughts gossip bloggers like Hilton and Lui have to navigate. But what kind of career revamp can you really have when, once upon a time, cruelty was your raison d’etre? Lui, for one, is thinking a lot about how to make that shift. ‘If there’s one time to be a little self-involved,’ Lui told me over the phone in late March, ‘it’s to be self-involved in your shame.’” Perez Hilton and Lainey Gossip changed gossip blogging in the early 2000s, and now they’re sorry. (BuzzFeed News)

In other journalism

–  A skim of Apple Podcasts finds more than two million titles. A lot. But is it really that many? Consider that 26 percent of those two million have only ever produced one episode and 44 percent never published more than three. The truer number: About 720,000.

–  Maggie Haberman, and when Trump access no longer matters (Press Run)

–  A career path parallel to journalism: A good friend of mine works as a book production designer for a publisher called Sourcebooks. She was interviewed recently about what it’s like to do her job and other book things.

–  Who is “Kacey Montagu” and how did he or she get here? Politico: How an online ‘Lego’ gamer infiltrated the White House press corps