Gwyneth Paltrow Says She and Chris Martin Broke the Internet First
Gwyneth Paltrow (Getty Images)
Move over, Kim Kardashian, because Gwyneth Paltrow has declared that she’s queen of the Internet… or the queen of breaking it, anyway.
During a chat with Katie Couric at the Fast Company Innovation Festival in New York City on Tuesday, the Goop Founder didn’t hold back on her plans for the brand. Paltrow and Goop CEO Lisa Gersh (formerly of Martha Stewart, Inc.) spoke candidly about their vision for the future and all of those haters.
“We are a media company, as well as a commerce company,” Gersh explained, “and you want people to pay attention to what you are saying. For most media companies, that’s a really good thing, and that happens to us all the time. People pay attention to what we say. Sometimes they say not nice things, but, for the most part, people say nice things,” she added.
“To Lisa’s point, I think, in a media company, it’s good when people are talking about your content,” Gwyneth chimed in. “Especially if you stand by your content: It’s not like we’re a gossip site, we’re not saying mean things — we have no negativity in the website at all. If we try a restaurant and we don’t like it, we just don’t add it. That’s part of our values. We believe in positivity and promoting; we don’t say anything bad.” She quickly added, “To get attention for our content is never a bad thing.”
Which brings us back to her now infamous announcement about “conscious uncoupling” from ex-husband Chris Martin. Basically, it “broke the f***ing Internet” the mother of two readily admitted.
Gwyneth Paltrow and Katie Couric (Getty Images)
“At the time, I was like ‘Oh, my gosh.’ It was such a hard time personally, and then you have this added layer of all this criticism,” she revealed. But with time comes a new perspective. “You look back, you think, well, this is actually kind of a good thing to talk about, introducing [the idea that] you could break up in a way where you remain a family, even if you’re not in a couple,” she mused. “What would be that knock-on effect, on your children, on your community?”
Paltrow insisted she’s “glad” the Internet bonanza about her split happened “because it opened a discussion in terms of how maybe there’s a gentler way to do something like that.” Maybe conscious uncoupling isn’t as crazy as people had first thought.
But Paltrow’s hardly satisfied with creating an entirely better way to break up and promoting must-have items like solid gold dumb bells (an item featured in Goop’s upcoming holiday gift guide). She’s getting into publishing too. That’s right, the actress turned entrepreneur is expanding into books with the creation of Goop Press, which will be an imprint at Grand Central Publishing (the company that published her cookbooks).
According to a press release, the venture is modest as far as publishing is concerned, aiming to publish one Goop-branded book per year along with three other (non-Goop) releases sourced from a team of Goop editors and expert contributors. “With so much incredible content now being produced at goop.com on a daily basis, we’re excited to memorialize it for audiences across the world,” Paltrow wrote in the statement.
Before you get too excited, though, the first book, which hits shelves April 2016, will not be about how to master the art of conscious uncoupling. It will be Paltrow’s latest cookbook, It’s All Easy: Delicious Weekday Recipes for the Super-Busy Home Cook. But hey, there’s always next year.
