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Amanda Hesser Blows Her Own Internet Bubble

Amanda Hesser is putting the best face on her buyout from the New York Times, spinning the event, 1998-style, as a bold new leap into the electronic frontier, in the form of a digital-life aggregator. (A digital-life aggregator is an application that gathers all the content you produce — photos, blog posts, YouTube videos, etc. — and puts it all on one Web page.) The only problems are that (a) her background and reputation is based entirely on food and cookery, and this project is, by her own admission, unrelated to either; and that (b) there are already a number of digital-life aggregators out there, and they’re not exactly taking America by storm. We would still feel bad for Amanda Hesser even if she were going to move to a beach house on Martinique — no one likes to lose a job at the Times — but this new-media venture has a grimness to it we wouldn’t wish on Judith Miller.

Update: Amanda Hesser responds, and we acknowledge an error.

Hesser on Leaving NYT: ‘The Economy Is Tanking — It’s the Perfect Time to Start a Company’ [Mediabistro]

Related: Amanda Hesser Out at the ‘Times’

Amanda Hesser Blows Her Own Internet Bubble