I never had an actual sister, but I had Jezebel, so I had many sisters, and a few brothers, with whom I learned that while nature is supposed to be cyclical, history is not, and that there is a lot of work to be done to create a world where everyone can experience safety and joy.
Except, well, oops, properties where women can gather to wonder why they remain second-class citzens don’t always dovetail with “efficiency and being budget conscious.” That is what the CEO of the media company that owns Jezebel said today as he pulled the plug. Supposedly, the company would like to find a buyer for Jezebel, but what this new owner would be purchasing is a bunch of archived articles, as 23 staff members will be losing their jobs.
Before everyone was on social media, everyone read blogs. I checked Jezebel several times each day to read about things I was familiar with as well as things I knew nothing about. The site helped me loosen up my thinking about how women should express themselves in society. I was tired of being neutral and businesslike, and very tired of watching men (and a few women) clearly not policing their voice the way I was. The writers on Jezebel were women who were well into their work lives and spoke with authority, humor, and sometimes anger. And the fact that there were many, many regular commenters who were as smart and as tough as the writers of the site proved to me that it was OK to not always be sweet.
Site founder Anna Holmes addressed one of the criticisms lobbed (unfairly, I still believe) at Jezebel recently in the New Yorker: the site’s main goal was to get people mad at each other. Mad=clicks=revenue, I guess, although I never understood why that equation made it through the first day of Bizness Master School.
I’m no newspaper expert — wait: I AM a newspaper expert. I worked at small, community newspapers for ten years, and for online news sites for five or so years. All you need to do is make a small group of regular advertisers happy and hope their industries stay strong. Of course, that is not easy (especially that last part…) but most people don’t even know where their information is coming from, so saying “fuck” or “tampon” in an article isn’t going to take anyone down. And getting your readers mad is what we now call “engagement.”
Still, engagement shouldn’t hurt. Managing the madness, which Holmes describes in her article, should not harm either an online site’s staff or readers. Holmes was on the leading edge of the art and science of whomping down the banhammer. Today, editors have given up, leaving trigger warnings and other types of mediation to the creators and consumers.
I hope that the work of moderating and boundry-setting that Holmes and other Jezebel staff put into the site helped a strata of media consumers learn to behave for the better. Jezebel, Gawker, Wonkette, and other sites that started as blogs all tilled and seeded the soil of social media. To extend the metaphor, we may all not agree what is a weed and what is a gourmet green, but there is so much growing now, thanks to the women of Jezebel.
Carol Morency 