Emily Brill's Wild Journalistic Adventure
Journo-heiress and ultimate narrator Emily Brill is bursting back upon the media scene in a major way! She's under assault by Harvard University! She has a new blockbuster work of journalism on the way! Come, marvel!
Mediaweek today detailed the saga of Emily's latest story for The Daily Beast about a Harvard professor, which earned four separate "editor's notes" post-publication after strenuous objections from Harvard. Harvard's PR department even released emails that Emily had sent them, i.e.:
One particularly colorful memo was a 550-word e-mail in which Brill acknowledged earlier typos she had made that read: "I take responsibility for my typos. I am the writer and publisher of my e-mails. The Internet, by the way, is not the writer, or the publisher. I am the decider." The e-mail digressed into a lengthy declaration on online ethics in cyberspace: "To be clear, I think Facebook should be required to make a good faith effort to inform me if/before it intends to use my picture(s) on a billboard in Dubai, and especially if it plans to caption my picture(s), ‘Will Turn Tricks for Blow.' I think that's reasonable, but who knows? I use Facebook for free. I'm an adult. A freeloader. My IQ is above room temperature. What are my rights?"
Emily Brill fans are already familiar with her writing style! Despite all this, Emily has another story coming up in CJR. On a related topic! CJR editor Mike Hoyt told us today: "We're about to send the piece to the printer. Harvard Law School did lobby against it. Their dean of communications Fedexed a thick packet in a shiny red folder with material marked Exhibit A, Exhibit B. etc., but their complaints are about a piece she did for another magazine, not ours. I like what she did for us. So does the editor and fact-checker who worked with her. We're delighted to run it."
Likewise, we spoke to Emily today, who told us that during her back-and-forth with her editors at The Daily Beast, "there were heated conversations," but that she's happy with the results of the tortuous process. We await Emily's renewed journalism career with interest.