"This is the end of Jezebel and that feels really, really bad."

November 9, 2023 2:24 PM

Jezebel, the pioneering feminist website (previously, plus another 300-plus posts), will be shut down (NYT gift).

G/O Media has previously shuttered political site Splinter (many of their writers went on to start Discourse Blog), shut down political content at sports site Deadspin (many of their writers went on to start Defector), and seen a mass exodus at Black culture site The Root (some of their writers moved to The Grio, while others wrote books, went to the Washington Post, or started podcasts).

posted by box (56 comments total)

Jim Spanfeller is a herb.
posted by kyleg at 2:30 PM on November 9, 2023 [9 favorites]

Jezebel, as a site, did more to open the eyes of people of my generation to structural misogyny and other forms of patriarchy than any other publication I can think of, so while it’s extremely galling that these fucklewits have done this, Jezebel’s historical legacy is secure. But damn, is it ever so goddamn galling.

I was gonna say that now I have a fresh set of names to add to the list of people whose asses will be first up against the wall come the revolution, but turns out their names were already on the list.
posted by Kattullus at 2:36 PM on November 9, 2023 [57 favorites]

It appears that the iO9 and Earther verticals in Gizmodo were also gutted in the layoffs
posted by N8yskates at 2:37 PM on November 9, 2023 [6 favorites]

I hope the staff all manages to land on their feet.

Might they pull off what the Defector (from Deadspin) people have done and the Aftermath (from Kotaku) people are trying to do? I like the idea of all of these sites breaking away from their clueless corporate overlords, but know that they face large technical, and gigantic publicity and economic challenges.
posted by JHarris at 2:38 PM on November 9, 2023 [6 favorites]

Jezebel’s historical legacy is secure. But damn, is it ever so goddamn galling.

As former Jezebel writer and independent journalist Lyz Lenz put it:

Jezebel was the site that helped launch my career. It was a place where women could unabashedly write about culture, politics, and everything with voice, humor, and the whole range of human emotions. The fact that it was killed by inept men is truly a metaphor.

posted by NoxAeternum at 2:41 PM on November 9, 2023 [92 favorites]

I still check it almost everyday. They’ve been relentlessly on the beat about abortion f*ckery since Roe was overturned and it’s important work. Where do I send my daughter to learn this kind of thing?
posted by amanda at 2:46 PM on November 9, 2023 [8 favorites]

Speaking of Defector, they have reported on the shuttering in a rather personal manner.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:47 PM on November 9, 2023 [9 favorites]

Oh, mixed feelings. I stopped reading years ago bc I got tired of hearing Kate Middleton called Princess ShinyLocks or whatever it just had such a mean spirited vibe but like that activist cousin who can be a bit extra I still liked it a lot and understood what it was getting at.

I also haven’t read dlisted for a while, then it shut down too, that hot slut.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 2:49 PM on November 9, 2023 [6 favorites]

The fallout from Theil’s fuckery continues.
posted by mhoye at 2:51 PM on November 9, 2023 [13 favorites]

The fallout from Theil’s fuckery continues.

We used to have laws against champerty. Maybe it's time they came back.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:53 PM on November 9, 2023 [10 favorites]

Have You Ever Beat Up A Boyfriend? Cause, Uh, We Have
posted by bouvin at 2:54 PM on November 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

Is Fleshbot still around?
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 2:55 PM on November 9, 2023 [6 favorites]

RIP Jezebel, a truly mixed bag of stellar feminist reporting and awful pop culture hit pieces.
posted by grumpybear69 at 3:00 PM on November 9, 2023 [25 favorites]

They had a handful of absurdly bad takes in the pursuit of page views over the years but on the other hand they also wrote some very nice things about my wife so I probably think of them a bit more fondly than they deserved.

If it wasn’t all over the news I wonder how long it would have taken me to notice; i stopped visiting frequently around the time Dodai left.
posted by Parasite Unseen at 3:52 PM on November 9, 2023 [4 favorites]

Ugh sad this is terrible news for the Queen of Petty over here. I will really miss all the ridiculously snarky headlines and the endless articles about people making questionable fashion choices and assorted fluffery.

As far as finding a new source for the serious news I got from them about stuff like bodily autonomy I plan on reading BUST and probably renewing my print subscription for thr first time in a couple of years.
posted by RobinofFrocksley at 3:53 PM on November 9, 2023 [4 favorites]

We used to have laws against champerty.

Wouldn’t apply in the Hogan/Thiel case. Thiel merely bankrolled Hogan’s case without (as far as I know) any agreement for or expectation of an interest in the judgment award; Thiel just wanted to destroy Gawker.
posted by star gentle uterus at 3:55 PM on November 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

*sigh* Another one bites the dust and reminds me of why I'll never write for money again.
posted by jenfullmoon at 4:15 PM on November 9, 2023 [4 favorites]

Complicated feelings, so: .
posted by gentlyepigrams at 4:46 PM on November 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

as someone who had to look up champtery, is there any statute of limitations of how long between
step 2: lawsuit
step 3 ???
step 4: Profit happens
within which champtery could be claimed for which Thiel would be found liable?
or is that not even a real school of lawthink anymore?
Cuz the knock on effects, seemingly, of his involvement in the gawker takedown are immense and that guy is a fucking goon.
posted by Cold Lurkey at 4:47 PM on November 9, 2023

Nothing can replace the yearly Spooky Stories contest :(
posted by jordantwodelta at 5:44 PM on November 9, 2023 [11 favorites]

Mr. Spanfeller said that G/O Media had tried to sell Jezebel and had talked with “over two dozen potential buyers,” but that it did not find a new home for the site.

So how does that work in general? Was it just not a viable concern at this point, or is there some way in which is was worth more for G/O to shut it down rather than sell it for a dollar?
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 6:06 PM on November 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

Was it just not a viable concern at this point, or is there some way in which is was worth more for G/O to shut it down rather than sell it for a dollar?

As per Josh Marshall of TPM:

I have very little doubt it could be run at least in the black. Operating at at least a modest profit. Not blowing smoke. I've run the same operation for days shy of 23 yrs and with a succession of different business models. That site cld succeed. So why is it shuttering? Look at the public notice about how they looked for a buyer but couldn't find one. I bet that's true as far as it goes. But they were certainly looking for a cash out price. If you pay $5 million for a house you want your money...

posted by NoxAeternum at 6:31 PM on November 9, 2023 [8 favorites]

Jezebel launched when I was a college student. Through that site I have found so many writers and thinkers who I continue to follow today. This seems to be the last of the feminist websites I followed through my 20s and 30s closing. It wasn't a perfect site, but it was fun.
posted by arachnidette at 6:33 PM on November 9, 2023 [7 favorites]

I have no words to describe the loss of the place where I became the person I am today.

.
posted by dazedandconfused at 6:44 PM on November 9, 2023 [5 favorites]

But they were certainly looking for a cash out price. If you pay $5 million for a house you want your money...

I guess, but shutting down a company and letting a bunch of people go costs money too.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 6:47 PM on November 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

I still check it almost everyday. They’ve been relentlessly on the beat about abortion f*ckery since Roe was overturned and it’s important work. Where do I send my daughter to learn this kind of thing?

Teen Vogue online. Not kidding.
posted by limeonaire at 7:16 PM on November 9, 2023 [35 favorites]

,
posted by pelvicsorcery at 9:15 PM on November 9, 2023

Jezebel's founder, Anna Holmes, has an essay in the New Yorker reflecting on the site and "the question of women's anger."
posted by whir at 9:48 PM on November 9, 2023 [10 favorites]

Writing isn't a valuable or valued profession any more. I'm not surprised there was no buyer (or "no buyer"). Also, there's Mr. Herb to deal with who wants to just have AI write articles.
posted by jenfullmoon at 11:18 PM on November 9, 2023 [4 favorites]

amanda, I began subscribing to Ms. when I was 15.
posted by brujita at 12:53 AM on November 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

Ugh.. I won't link to it but this headline from a post in the /r/MensRights subreddit is certainly what I would expect from those assholes: "Jezebel, the notoriously misandrist and gynomyopic online magazine launched by Gawker Media, is finally being shut down." I really hope the Jezebel writers consider that a badge of honor of sorts.
posted by Nerd of the North at 2:28 AM on November 10, 2023 [6 favorites]

.
posted by hydrobatidae at 3:11 AM on November 10, 2023

Autostraddle is explicitly queer focused feminism, but it's still going.
posted by rikschell at 4:47 AM on November 10, 2023 [5 favorites]

Wow I read Jezebel constantly for years, it was a huge influence on me. There was a shift at one point where it felt like "snarky" meant "straight up mean" and I fell off as a reader. But it can't be overstated how influential that site was to me as a young feminist.

Also, I agree the scary story contest will be irreplaceable.
posted by wellifyouinsist at 4:51 AM on November 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

like that activist cousin who can be a bit extra

Oh no it's me, I'm the cousin
posted by an octopus IRL at 5:56 AM on November 10, 2023 [7 favorites]

Jezebel is one of the few websites I have bookmarked and read nearly every day. Snarky but entertaining and enlightening.
posted by bluesky43 at 6:37 AM on November 10, 2023

Mixed feelings, which I'll bracket with the caveat that It Probably Wasn't Intended For Me. Lots of good posts on there, but I was a bit taken aback when they did a post on someone who had Charlie Sheen's contact info flirting with him in the midst of all his tiger blood bullshit. Plus, a lot of celebrity gossip-mongering, and, sometime after wozzisface bought the Gawker Media blogs, I noticed that a lot of posts were being made by someone with a traditionally masculine name. (In general, I still have a lot of misgivings about Gawker itself and the fates of some formerly great blogs that were acquired by it.) But, as I said, I wasn't really their audience anyway, and maybe that's the price that they thought they had to pay to exist as long as they did.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:11 AM on November 10, 2023

Advertisers Don’t Want Sites Like Jezebel to Exist
posted by Artw at 9:27 AM on November 10, 2023 [7 favorites]

I wonder how much of the aversion to ad buys is also based on the likelihood of a readership to accept and positively interact with advertising.
posted by Selena777 at 10:30 AM on November 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

Autostraddle is explicitly queer focused feminism, but it's still going.

Autostraddle was recently sold by its founders to For Them, a "queer wellness and tech company" (their words) who seem to mostly otherwise sell binders and have no experience in online publications and communities at all. I hope that they manage to keep Autostraddle going because a part of the reason they sold is that it was hard to keep the site going financially.

This story keeps repeating itself over and over again and clearly this is something the collectivist internet denizens need to get figured out and soon. Some alternative to the relentless pursuit of growth leading to the atrophy and shedding of anything unprofitable no matter how important it is to the communities who rely on it. Hopefully Metafilter's Own (lol) eventual alternative site governance model will serve as a example others can learn from and build off of.
posted by urbanlenny at 11:53 AM on November 10, 2023 [5 favorites]

It appears that the iO9 and Earther verticals in Gizmodo were also gutted in the layoffs

i09 has steadily declined since Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders left it, but this still makes me sad.
posted by Ber at 1:25 PM on November 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

Have You Ever Beat Up A Boyfriend? Cause, Uh, We Have

I recognize the folly of getting upset over a clickbait troll article from 2007, but holy shit is that thing evil. "One of my co-workers abused her boyfriend because he was worried he might have breast cancer, and we all had a good laugh about it!" I mean, joking about/normalizing domestic abuse is hideous enough, but male breast cancer is a very real thing, you 2007 Jezebel shitbags. Were you people actually trying to make incels happen?
posted by Ursula Hitler at 2:56 PM on November 10, 2023 [5 favorites]

For me Jezebel was kind of an Early Warning of the "enshittification" of the web that we've all come to know and hate. Early on it had built a community of smart, articulate commenters - sometimes (often?) the discussion under the articles was better than the articles themselves. You had recognizable regular users that could be counted on to add something interesting or witty to the discussion, comment histories you could browse through, some kind of like/dislike ranking system, active moderation, and once you'd signed up for an account your first few comments were held in limbo until a staff member got a chance to look at and approve them, reducing the low-effort trolling and JAQing off.

Then one day they announced they were going to revamp and redesign the site & especially the commenting system - it might have been a move to the Disqus comment hosting format, I don't remember - and they swore it was all going to be even better. Why the site and commenting system needed to be revamped was left unexplained. "Just because" seemed to be the reason - gotta keep up with the new hot trends in web blogs, maybe.

Of course it was a disaster. People's logins stopped working, huge chunks if not all of some users' comment histories disappeared, the new commenting system was slow to load, difficult to sort, and glitchy as fuck. And of course they'd no process in place for people to download and save their commenting histories, so once the new commenting system showed up it was all just gone. A ton of the best commenters just got disgusted and left.

So they took one of the strengths of the site, the organic community of regular readers and commenters, and just blew it up chasing the new shiny thing that they half-assed the implementation of. Maybe the community recovered over time, I don't know, that experience plus an increasing number of click-bait articles meant that I mostly lost interest in the site & spent more time elsewhere.
posted by soundguy99 at 3:35 PM on November 10, 2023 [13 favorites]

.
posted by limeonaire at 8:26 PM on November 10, 2023

Pluralistic: "Brand safety" killed Jezebel

This theory seems strong, but on the other hand G/O seems like they’ll use any excuse to gut anything good.

Fundamentally they don’t want the media part of being a media company, they just want ad money from whatever AI bots churn out.
posted by Artw at 10:24 AM on November 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

Lauren Tousignant, Jezebel’s interim editor in chief, told 404 Media that Jezebel was told “brand safety,” the fact that advertisers don’t want to be next to the type of content Jezebel was publishing, was “one of the biggest factors” that led G/O to stop publishing the site and lay off its staff.

Same thing did in feminist teen mag Sassy almost three decades ago*. I'm sure it's just a coincidence.

*Yes, technically it survived until 1996, but I was a subscriber both pre- and post-Petersen Publishing and they took all the bite out of it.
posted by jocelmeow at 3:44 PM on November 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

Artw: Pluralistic: "Brand safety" killed Jezebel

I just noticed that Doctorow's piece directly sites this very thread. He linked here and continued:

Jezebel's demise is the direct result of monopoly power. Jezebel writes about current affairs – sex, politics, abortion, and other important issues of great moment and significance. When we talk about journalism as a public good, necessary for a healthy civic life, this is what we mean. But unfortunately for Jezebel – and any other news outlet covering current events – there are vast, invisible forces that exist solely to starve this kind of coverage of advertising revenue.

posted by Surely This at 1:04 PM on November 12, 2023 [3 favorites]

um or "cites" even. Maybe I should just have said links to.
posted by Surely This at 2:23 PM on November 12, 2023

With Jezebel shutting its doors, abortion coverage in the US will be worse off, Media Matters.

"With Jezebel being the former hub of some of the most active journalists on the reproductive justice beat — namely Susan Rinkunas, Kylie Cheung, and Caitlin Cruz — reporting on abortion and other feminist news will be worse off. Just last year, the revered feminist outlet Bitch Media succumbed to financial hardship and closed its doors after 26 years. In 2019, independent blogs Feministing.com and The Establishment shut down. Even mainstream outlets with dedicated websites on gender and identity were adversely impacted, as evidenced by the Washington Post’s The Lily and VICE’s Broadly sites being folded into their respective parent organizations.

Ironically, readers now have a greater appetite for women’s perspectives on news and culture. Roe’s overturning brought even more readers to feminist publications like Jezebel. Polling has repeatedly shown that the majority of Americans believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, and recent news trends have shown that outlets like Jezebel experienced a surge in readership in the months after the Supreme Court revoked the federal right to an abortion. The New York Times reported that Jezebel “saw an 18 percent increase in traffic after a leaked draft of the decision was published by Politico in May,” while other outlets with a gendered perspective on current events like 19th News and The Cut experienced similar bumps in engagement."
posted by amanda at 12:11 PM on November 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

Jezebel's founder, Anna Holmes, has an essay in the New Yorker reflecting on the site and "the question of women's anger."

She was also interviewed by Brooke Gladstone yesterday on the On the Media radio show/podcast. Audio file downloadable here:

Anna Holmes on the End of Jezebel

It's about 20 minutes long.
posted by fuse theorem at 5:07 AM on November 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

Maureen Tkacik, The American Prospect: When a Feminist Content Sweatshop Was the Coolest Thing On the Internet
posted by tonycpsu at 10:29 AM on November 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

Meanwhile, the front page is so far frozen in time with GD Nikki Haley's photo top left. No statement.
posted by amanda at 3:03 PM on November 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

And in surprising good news, Jezebel has been sold to Paste Magazine in a cash deal.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:16 AM on November 29, 2023 [4 favorites]

Who owns Paste?
posted by Artw at 9:14 AM on November 29, 2023

As per the article:

Mr. Jackson and two friends started Paste in Atlanta in 1998. It operated as a print music magazine from 2002 to 2010, when it became digital only. Paste was acquired in 2011 by the music retailer Wolfgang’s Vault, now known as Wolfgang’s. The magazine is 100 percent advertising-supported.

posted by NoxAeternum at 10:24 AM on November 29, 2023

Hmm. That’s still giving me an uneasy feeling about getting Private Equity shuttered in future, but I guess it puts things off.
posted by Artw at 11:15 AM on November 29, 2023 [1 favorite]