Update: Paste Magazine acquired Jez and it’s back! THANK GOODNESS.
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Wow, this one hits in the gut: G/O Media has effective immediately suspended publication of Jezebel, one of the oldest sites looking at “popular culture through a feminist lens,” to quote their masthead.
Per Ben Mullin on Twitter, G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller announced to the entire staff that they’re suspending publication in the fourth paragraph of a company-wide email.
While there are a lot of what I call “mouth noises” in this message about how great their coverage was (especially galling given that there was an election YESTERDAY that in part protected reproductive rights in Ohio, and yielded victories for many Democratic and left candidates who ran on platforms about worker rights, union strength, women’s reproductive rights, and trans rights, wow I’ve got some feelings about this decision apparently) and how truly excellent the staff has been, their “business model didn’t align with Jezebel’s.”
This announcement was accompanied by the layoff of 23 editorial staff, including the Jezebel team. According to Will Sommer, they lost email and were kicked off Slack immediately afterward.
Founded by Anna Holmes in 2007, Jezebel was a site that was formative for so many, SO MANY writers. By far my favorite of their former staff is Kelly Faircloth, who did so very much to change the narrative in how media sites and publications, and culture journalists themselves talked about romance. I did a podcast interview with her in Episode 346: Fuchsia has Followed Us Everywhere: Deep Diving Into Romance Cover Art with Kelly Faircloth, and earlier, in Episode 154. An Interview with Kelly Faircloth from Jezebel.
The decimation of media today isn’t limited to Jezebel: Tumblr is being de-staffed by owner Automattic. According to an internal memo shared by WaxPancake on Threads, Tumblr will be maintained by the Trust & Safety team (at least it has one?) and the other employees working on Tumblr will be moved to “other projects inside Automattic.”
And there were layoffs at PopSugar, which is part of Vice, prompting the VICE Union to release a statement of exhausted outrage: “We can lo longer express shock and surprise that VICE has determined its only way forward is to lay people off….”
Laura Hazard Owen at NiemanLab wrote about the ‘suspension’ of Jezebel and quoted the G/O Media head of corporate communications that “The hope is that G/O Media might still find a buyer, a partner, or enough advertiser support to bring it back fully.”
I’m not entirely hopeful about that, given the history of Jezebel, Gawker, and the fact that, as Laura Hazard Owen pointed out, prior employees including Laura Bassett, former editor in chief at Jezebel, left because of terrible working conditions for staff.
The loss of Jezebel is so complicated, too, in part because there are fewer and fewer media platforms that can continue function. It is, to be sure, desolate out here. The decorative icing on this massive bummer feeling is the number of sites that came up when I search for information on Jezebel that lead with some variation of “[site name] has ceased publication. This is an archive.”
Even going to find information was tricky because a lot of it is on Twitter, and for all I know that’s held together with dental floss and some egotistical bubble gum at this point, so who knows how long that’ll be a source of information.
This is terrible and crappy, and has coalesced into a mixture of feelings that I’m not fully able to describe aside from throwing my hands up in the air and thinking about noodles as a potential salve to the tired sadness that has taken up residence in my abdomen. Also I think I missed lunch.
The consensus on social medias (all the different ones my goodness) seems to be that this is a great shame but not a great surprise. To quote Maris Kreizman, “we have to figure out how media will survive after the private equity firms have obliterated all of the good sites.”
Do you have a favorite Jezebel story? Was Jezebel part of your literary snacking online? Are you bummed too? (Also: if it’s lunch time, don’t forget to have some food.)
One article I hold dear is Kara Brown’s ‘I Can’t Get Over How Bad It Was’: A Lisa Vanderpump Restaurant Crawl.
I haven’t read much Jezebel lately, but I loved it in its prime. So many great stories. I am sure I was older than a lot of their readers, but I loved feeling connected to so many energetic feminists. For a long time it was one of the few sites where reading the comments on articles could be just as good as reading the article itself. I am sad that it won’t be around anymore.
Aw, man. They missed as frequently as they hit, but their heyday was good. And speaking of their comments section, the origin story of Erin Ryan from prolific Jezebel commenter to now still delights me.
@Amanda – -remember the Lisa Frank one?
https://jezebel.com/inside-the-rainbow-gulag-the-technicolor-rise-and-fall-1179495705
I haven’t read Jezebel in ages but have fond memories of Erin Ryan, Lindy West, Jia Tolentino, Moe Tkacik, and a bunch of others from the golden age of blogs and comments sections. I always enjoyed Photoshop of Horrors—the Faith Hill Redbook cover was a classic and I thank them for introducing me to Tinkle eyebrow razors. RIP, Jezebel.
Through the comment section I made online friends, that now that Twitter has been destroyed for use has a discord channel, and are struggling with Bluesky. This is a sad day. Anna Merlan is probably my favorite journalist from there who is now at Vice.
I adored Jezebel at the height of its powers- and had so much fun reading the commentary, too. After the sale and subsequent de-fanging of Television Without Pity (“Spare the snark, spoil the networks”), Jez was a place I went to for snark and sarcasm. I found my tribe through these sites, and it isn’t the same online without them. I discovered Lindy West, Roxane Gay, Jia Tolentino, and Bobby Finger through Jez and I will FOREVER be grateful for that.
And, my god, the article on Superstar Machine (https://jezebel.com/inside-superstar-machine-which-ex-members-say-is-a-cul-1775494367). I can’t remember if that was before or after NXIVM (goog says sameish) but it definitely was a stunning, well-researched, gloriously-crafted piece of journalism.
These are still some of the most hilarious pop culture articles of all time, imho:
https://jezebel.com/the-united-states-of-basic-bitches-1575949216
https://jezebel.com/the-united-states-of-bros-a-map-and-field-guide-1550563737
I haven’t been this sad since The Toast said their farewells.
R.I.P. Jezebel
May something rise like the Phoenix it its place.
Jezebel was a daily must-read for so many years. The comment section felt like a family. Kelly Faircloth was probably my favorite writer there (now at Scary Mommy) and I loved the Best Restaurant in NY series. I have a tiny spark of hope that they can pull off something like the former Deadspin team accomplished with Defector, or like refugees from Kotaku are attempting at Aftermath, though both those teams left with their loyal readership intact whereas Jezebel has been bleeding regular readers for a long time. The site just became nearly unreadable with all the ads.
I embarrassed to say I am unfamiliar with Jezebel, and it sounds like I missed an important and formative site. I am crushed by the news about Tumblr. As a Mama Dragon, I participate in that community to reach a large audience of transgender, nonbinary and LGBTQIA+ youth who are despairing and in need of positive news and support right now. Besides Discord, it is one of the few safe communities for these kids and YAs right now. I really wish these sites would stop selling out for cash. I know it must be hard not to, but, honestly, this is all so depressing. So grateful for this community.
The comment about private equity forms reminds me of a pod I just listened to from On Point talking about how private equity is mucking up healthcare as well.
One of the comments they made was the margin on private equity used to be a lot higher than other investment avenues and now it’s roughly equal. When your business model is acquire a company, make it look good by either signing up for more business than is sustainable or by laying off everyone who knows how the how it operates and then re-selling it, eventually all the churn will break the company.
On Point: How private equity is changing American healthcare
https://open.spotify.com/episode/7m9x7ZzXg2a6mXYE8b7sX0?si=d7635daec6e844eb
Yeah, private equity has been wreaking havoc on journalism outlets for longer than a decade now. And this isn’t even Jim Spanfeller’s first rodeo. Didn’t he also dismantle Deadspin as well as several other websites? Definitely just the grim reaper meme. It’s also not just journalism. Pretty sure private equity firms have taken down grocery chains, Toys R’ US, and other retailers/businesses. One has also just recently acquired Simon & Schuster, one of the Big 4? or 5? publishing companies, so its days are numbered …. I’m kind of worried about what might happen to some of my favorite authors.
My favorite part of Jezebel was Saturday Night Social, which disappeared long ago. I wonder how some of the regular commentators are doing, and in my head, I wish them well. I have the tiny hope that someone or someones will get together and begin another website along the line of The Toast and [earlier] Jezebel. Because new businesses often succeed by filling gaps. Unfortunately, my impression is that people with ideas to share are creating podcasts, not written journalism. I also suspect that advert-based websites are not sustainable.
Hey, here’s a Jez piece that references something I wrote about the first conference on Romance Literature in American Culture – in Princeton, way back in 2009! This site and Sarah are mentioned in my piece! https://jezebel.com/romance-novels-for-a-free-society-5251071
Jez will be missed!
Occasional Jezebel reader here. Don’t have a link, but I confess to loving an article on bathroon etiquette in the workplace.