Serially updated. See unfolding story below.

Web 2.0 - can give it to you with both barallels. This is as funny as it is painful. Something tells me the travel editor has a lot of explaining to do.

Discovered via Bloggerheads - thank you thank you thank you. Suddenly I feel less angry towards the Guardian.  I am now content just to join in with the laughing - no more slagging, only guffaws.

Max Gogarty Update 1: A Travel Editor Says Sorry (Almost) and gets yet more comment box abuse.

Max Gogarty Update 2: This fabulous comment to the above is spot on and ties in exactly with what I was saying in my last post, - see it wasn’t just me.

What’s simultaneously so marvellous and so awful about this story is what a paradigm it is for so much.

For how the interweb can explode a little story so quickly. For how much hatred there towards a perceived middle class London coterie who run the media. For how un-selfaware that coterie is about their own status. For how much funnier cruel stuff is than all that serious nonsense. For how easy it is to be vitriolic when blogging. And so on and so on.

It’s not Maxieboy’s fault that he represents such a terrible stereotype, but you’d think he might have had an inkling of awareness. Actually, not necessarily, I meet his type on a weekly basis and they are a staggeringly ill-informed bunch. And of course he must feel crushed that this little story has gone a bit nuts and he’s being laughed at for little more than writing a truly ballsucking piece. But you know what, I think he’ll probably survive.

The real issue here, as others have pointed out, is with the travel eds. I don’t think it honestly occurs to you - and when I say ‘you’, I mean London based journos on the nationals - just how often, how incessantly and how forcefully we are fed the stories of the lives of a small subsection of London society, how we can’t open a paper or magazine without hearing their bleating, self-important voices complaining about their nannies, discussing whether it’s OK to wear a mini skirt round the Portobello Road if you’re over 40, and yes, just what their kids did on their gap years.

It’s so dispiriting and depressing to find that there is LESS of a cross section of a society represented in the acres of newsprint that there were 30 years ago.

Like university education, the clock is turning back from the brave years of working class kids taking a step up. Unis are more middle class than ever and so are newspapers.
Now, Maximillian didn’t know he represented such a cliche (yes, they are there for a reason, boyo), and he might thus be astonished by the levels of anger on these blogs, but the sad fact is that the Max’s of this world don’t even realise they’re treated like the centre of the known universe - because they’ve already taken that fact for granted.

Every word of his glittering prose is littered with that fact, along with a smattering of youthful bravado. Sure, it’s not his fault he’s a painful archetype, but by god, Guardian, didn’t any of you recognise this as an article that was going to get SLAUGHTERED by us mere provincial mortals?

No, you didn’t, because you too, stuffed to the gills with your Marinas and Cartner-Morleys, you just took it as read that he’d be accepted as the voice of youth. That’s how out of touch you are.

Yes, this whole thing has gone OTT, but don’t blame your readership for biting back for being so consistently and systematically excluded from your version of who the world consists of - and giving an article like that space instead. You got found out. Good.

Fantastic. Give that man a Guardian blog.
Max Gogarty Update 3: The Guardian/Observer is getting arsey and while the large proportion of the bile has been aimed at the paper and it’s incredibly short sighted Travel Editor - all commentators are now being labelled as cruel, heartless etc.

Well, it wasn’t us that put him in the firing line.
They could have featured him anywhere in the paper - that didn’t have the comment function if they really thought he was genuinely talented. But the Guardian isn’t humble and doesn’t learn - only blaming its big, bad readers.

The piece, which is incredibly harsh on its own commenters, includes this whinging - and redirecting of blame:

The director of digital content, Emily Bell, said the mood had changed after the intervention of Max’s father and the comments had become more critical of the website and its editors’ decision to commission and publish the blog: ‘They were much happier to give us a kicking instead of him.’

In her own online blog, Bell wrote: ‘We’re used to it, but it is still an absurdly awful experience for the individual on the end of the monstering, particularly if you are a relative novice.’ She added: ‘Perhaps an open blog post was not the best place to publish it.’contributors were uneasy over the tone of many comments. One wrote: ‘The amount of hate, envy and hypocrisy that’s been on display here is shocking.’

But others compared Max to Nathan Barley, a loathsome fictional twentysomething London media type in the Channel 4 sitcom of the same name. One asked, ‘Whose son is Max then?’, while another predicted, ‘Oh, Christ. This guy’s going to get an absolute hammering.’ Yet another added: ‘Don’t show Derek Conway this - he’ll be most upset.’

Still others urged him to continue the blog and answer the critics, but his father said: ‘We just want him to be left alone. It’s scary and the exposure is so horrible. He’s a strong kid and I think he is moving on. Max himself made the decision to pull it and I think it is a mature decision.

‘People have said “stay and fight”. But there is no way - whatever he writes next week, it would be pilloried. It’s a no-win situation. He has seen some of the blog. He has said to me that he doesn’t like the media world now. He doesn’t want to go into it any more.’

Oh pleeease. The Guardian, Emily Bell, Travel Editor, Andy Pietrask, travel writing Dad, Paul Gogarty and to a much lesser degree young Max Gogarty all come out of this looking bad.

Admitting publicly to lessons learnt might have been a big start - in reality you can’t help but think that it’s just way to easy to blame people from outside their cosy little media world. We still await from The Guardian: “We f*cked up. We have learnt”

Similar comments here, superbly put by Dan Wilson.  More from Bloggerheads too. 

Time for the Guardian to stop digging on this one.