So anyway, yes, I think I’d be grossed out if I had to watch two characters with rolls and rolls of fat kissing each other … because I’d be grossed out if I had to watch them doing anything. To be brutally honest, even in real life, I find it aesthetically displeasing to watch a very, very fat person simply walk across a room — just like I’d find it distressing if I saw a very drunk person stumbling across a bar or a heroine addict slumping in a chair.

Now, don’t go getting the wrong impression: I have a few friends who could be called plump. I’m not some size-ist jerk.

-Maura Kelly, “Should ‘Fatties’ Get a Room?”, Marie Claire

Yesterday Marie Claire blogger Maura Kelly wrote about her first reactions to the show Mike & Molly, about a couple who meets through Overeaters Anonymous. Now just a little over 24 hours later, Kelly’s post has received over 500 angry comments, incited a lukewarm apology from the author, and pretty much blown up Marie Claire’s Facebook Page with Like and Comment ditchers. Just a couple of hours ago, the trolls and 4CHAN admirers started causing a riot on the Page. Unfortunately, this one made me chuckle, but for Grammar Police reasons, I swear:

Rather than get into why Kelly’s remarks are so alarming (Jezebel and Feminista Files have got that bit covered and covered well.), I’m choosing to focus my armchair punditry on Marie Claire’s obvious desperation. Maura Kelly appears to be the latest case in what I’ve started to loosely dub Print Media’s Cheap Trick. Media has vaults and vaults of cheap tricks, to be sure. The tactic in question, though, is specific to print in a Web publishing world.

I don’t believe print is dying, but I do believe that it is scared. Print looks at the Web, at citizen journalism that’s easy to access between work emails, snarky blogs that are fun to read over lunch breaks, tabloids that fill magazine racks at the gym, and headline-sized tweets, and it pees its pants. Print media needs to adapt and embrace multimedia outlets of production, but instead it chooses to compete with its Web entities as if print-reading and Web-reading audiences are completely mutually exclusive.

I have no insider knowledge on Kelly’s superior chain of command, but I do see a pattern of purposefully misguided direction. None of this is a really new discovery, really. Just things I’ve noticed over the past year’s mini-media scandals. First, Ramin Setoodeh, a gay writer, wrote a piece for Newsweek.com suggesting gay actors could never adequately play straight roles. Second, Times columnist Joel Stein wrote a piece for the online version discussing his discomfort with South Asian immigration and influence in his American hometown. Now Maura Kelly for Marie Claire. Each of the earlier pieces incensed the minority populations they spoke about. They each got their angry reader time, troll time, and apology-from-on-high time.

Every step was predictable, no one should have been surprised that each piece would traipse through outrage and eventually lead to apology (instead of redaction) – which is why I think it’s all a ploy. I think Newsweek’s, Time’s, and Marie Claire’s editors are under pressure to gain and commit the attention of audiences who have been flocking to the Net. They know they need to get Net readers, so they specifically release these pieces on the Web. The hits come rolling in as angry reader passes it on to angry reader and groups of angry readers, et voila, there’s their hits and new readership.

It’s a PR nightmare as writers, then editors, scramble to lightly cover up their tracks. There’s damage to their image, for sure, but over time, it’s just a gimmick that got them a lot of attention. Their credibility is hurt for an immediate period, but they still succeed in making themselves a big, notable name. And hey, their boards will love hearing about their record-breaking hit counts during those weeks.

It comes at the cost of angering underrepresented groups of people, but the payoff is that these big titles continue on. Every time an angry commenter starts off with “How dare a publication as big/reputable/established as Newsweek/Time/Marie Claire release such a thing?,” they reinforce that Newsweek/Time/Marie Claire were and are big/reputable/established to some degree. It’s not reverse psychology. It’s just a cheap trick for us to pay attention to print titles who want to play the sensationalist game.

(Personally, I’ve never even flipped through MC at the supermarket, but hey, I recognize that it’s a big title to some women.)

I’ve pasted the full text of each article below the jump, figuring I don’t want to play into the shock-and-hit count approach of scaredy cat editors. All fully credited, in reverse chronological. Continue reading “Marie Claire and Print Media’s Cheap Trick.”