19 ms·
Jezebel to shut down after 16 years as parent company lays off staff
- mjhay 3y agoCountdown till they axe The Onion. G/O is trash even by private equity standards.
- saalweachter 3y agoIs there any inside take out there on whether the problem was "you can't run a news/political commentary rag profitably" or "you can't run it profitably enough"?
- shadowgovt 3y agoI don't know anything about their CEO, except that Wikipedia notes that in 2020, "GMG Union, which represents the staff of six G/O Media sites, announced a vote of no confidence in CEO Jim Spanfeller, citing, among other issues, a lack of willingness to negotiate for 'functional editorial independence protections.'"
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- superfrank 3y agoI doubt they'd shut The Onion down. The brand is pretty well known at this point and that has value. If they don't want it, selling it to someone who does is likely the play.
- foobiekr 3y agoIf you go back a day or two I'd have said the thing for The Escapist not being willing to put themselves in jeopardy but here we are. Companies are stupid sometimes.
- superfrank 3y agoThe Escapist is a much, much smaller brand than The Onion. Looking at google trends, the search traffic for The Onion is about 35x that of The Escapist over the past 12 months. It's also in a much more crowded space than The Onion and a much younger brand. The Onion is a big fish in a small pond whereas the The Escapist is a minnow in a vast sea. I don't think they're comparable.
- josteink 3y agoIt was a sexist website offering bad advice for impressionable, young women. Nothing of value was lost.
- Bluescreenbuddy 3y agoSo where can women go for good advice?
- whatshisface 3y agoGood advice doesn't really exist in the same way bad advice does, because the same things can ruin anyone's lives but everyone needs something different to fix theirs.
- FredPret 3y agoI think it's the other way around. Anna Karenina principle: all happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in it's own way. Or: there are many ways to be miserable, but only a few ways to be happy. Or: entropy increases. A couple of pointers would lead the vast majority to better lives, but there are so few of these that you can't build a publication around it.
- whatshisface 3y agoIf every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, they each need a different change to become happy.
- graphe 3y agoWhat kind of advice? Relationship advice probably might not be the best to take clickbait seriously.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- fullshark 3y ago
- AlexandrB 3y agoI think the writing has been on the wall since the Deadspin debacle[1]. G/O media seems to have little appetite for political commentary, so I'm surprised Jezebel lasted this long. I didn't realize they owned The Onion though. Probably doesn't bode well for that publication either. [1] https://deadspin.com/the-adults-in-the-room-1837487584 https://deadspin.com/the-adults-in-the-room-1837487584
- pbj1968 3y agoAnd the Deadspin offshoot Defector is bleeding money, too.
- JStanton617 3y agoI don't think that's correct. Their 2022 annual report shows them as profitable. https://defector.com/defector-annual-report-year-two https://defector.com/defector-annual-report-year-two Maybe took a major downturn in the past year, but I haven't seen any evidence of that
- x0x0 3y agoSince they didn't take external investment, that's impossible.
- damagednoob 3y agoWhat I can't understand is that The Onion's YouTube channel[1] has 2.5 million subscribers and a billion views. You'd think they be able to do something with that amount of eyeballs. [1]: https://youtube.com/@TheOnion?si=WyE-hvhrR6cRpFFT https://youtube.com/@TheOnion?si=WyE-hvhrR6cRpFFT
- shortrounddev2 3y agoThe onion's most viewed videos are from over a decade ago when they put actual effort into their content. Now their most recent videos get a few thousand views whereas their older content used to get a few million. The quality of their content has really fallen off a cliff and their sarcastic political takes are usually pretty dumb now.
- Always_Anon 3y agoGood riddance. Identity politics rags like Jezebel have made the world a worse place.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- n3df 3y ago[flagged]
- Always_Anon 3y agohttps://www.devever.net/~hl/newchurch https://www.devever.net/~hl/newchurch
- nativespecies 3y ago[flagged]
- Always_Anon 3y ago[flagged]
- neilv 3y agoSade's song as eulogy? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yK3IlV3l9xY&t=45s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yK3IlV3l9xY&t=45s
- Eumenes 3y ago> The closure and layoffs come at a difficult time for US journalism. I think we can do with less click bait "journalism" - good riddance.
- Arnt 3y agoYes… but the publications you're losing is not just the clickbaiters, it's a superset of that.
- senderista 3y agoJust leaving this here: https://jezebel.com/have-you-ever-beat-up-a-boyfriend-cause-uh-we-have-294383 https://jezebel.com/have-you-ever-beat-up-a-boyfriend-cause-...
- pengaru 3y ago+831 comments
- kylebenzle 3y agoThere are a lot of scum bags in the word so it's easy for them to find companionship and bond over this kind of stuff. For me it was a huge unexpected outcome of the internet.
- Manuel_D 3y agoAnother classic: https://jezebel.com/is-the-uva-rape-story-a-gigantic-hoax-asks-idiot-1665233387 https://jezebel.com/is-the-uva-rape-story-a-gigantic-hoax-as...
- kergonath 3y agoTitle: “'Is the UVA Rape Story a Gigantic Hoax?' Asks Idiot”, published December 1. First link below: “Rolling Stone Partially Retracts UVA Story Over 'Discrepancies'”, published December 5. That’s quite a feat.
- weeblewobble 3y agoFor whatever it’s worth, the “first link below” story contains this quote from the author of the first story “ This is really, really bad. It means, of course, that when I dismissed Richard Bradley and Robby Soave's doubts about the story and called them "idiots" for picking apart Jackie's account, I was dead fucking wrong, and for that I sincerely apologize.”
- 3y ago
- hn30000 3y agoSadly, has been a shell of itself for many many years.
- danjac 3y agoRegardless of whether people liked the content or not: it only employed 23 people (not sure how many were freelance or part time), and I assume it had good traffic throughout its life. Yet it wasn't able turn a profit?
- FredPret 3y agoThat's a ton of money out the door every month. 23*100k = 191k/month. That excludes overhead. Writers probably make less, but even a third of that is a lot of cash just flowing out. Someone who runs an ad-enabled site could weigh in with how much traffic you'd need to get 50-200k cashflow every month. I'm guessing it's a hell of a lot.
- cantSpellSober 3y agoThey were pulling in about 4 million pageviews a month, I'd expect $50-100k, but it's not that simple. If you're advertising on a site rich people visit (let's say Robb Report) you'd expect a higher CVR because your users probably have more money to spend. If it's just a blog like this, that was already seeing declining traffic, the numbers aren't sustainable. (It looks like AV Club is pulling in about 10 million views a month, fingers crossed they survive) https://www.similarweb.com/website/jezebel.com/#traffic https://www.similarweb.com/website/jezebel.com/#traffic
- in_cahoots 3y agoIf you don’t see the writing on the wall with AV Club, you’re in denial. They’ve lost all of their best writers via attrition and forcing staff to move to LA. Half their content is mindless videos, and the main long-form content they have now is AI-generated listicles. No more features or music reviews, very few TV reviews. What value is that website providing these days?
- cantSpellSober 3y ago> you’re in denial No I'm not! sobs in corner. Sigh, good points.
- TuringNYC 3y agoPutting aside differences with their politics and angle, what happens to all this content when they are gone? I feel a piece of culture gets lost in the process. Is there a stash of articles being released somehow? Do we rely only on the Internet Archive to get to it?
- alephnerd 3y ago> what happens to all this content when they are gone If the sites are shut down, that's it. Writers of articles often archive it on Web Archive, but this isn't compulsory. Knowledge decays sadly. Such is life.
- FredPret 3y agoJezebel disappearing is a great leap forward for human knowledge.
- red-iron-pine 3y agoit's a stretch to call Jezebel's content "knowledge"
- Bluescreenbuddy 3y agoOh yeah, journalism so fearless like when they were paying for un-retouched photos of Lena Dunham for some reason. https://jezebel.com/were-offering-10-000-for-unretouched-images-of-lena-d-1502000514 https://jezebel.com/were-offering-10-000-for-unretouched-ima...
- chefandy 3y agoClosures like this are a Rorschach test-- many people are going to think it supports their view because the lack of opposing evidence is more visible than the lack of objective supporting evidence. As far as I can tell, Gawker media's strategic shortcomings damaged all of their subsidiaries, and Jezebel's style, content strategy, and cachet was more of a fad than a broad cultural shift. I'm open to actual supported evidence that this is anything more significant than that, but so far I've seen a bunch of people assuming that it's evidence of something larger and more significant than the evidence supports.
- yterdy 3y agoIt's part of a broader cultural purge across media outlets that has seen the cancellation or destruction of works that appealed to marginalized people, including minorities, women, and queer folk. Belligerents include large companies like Warner Bros/Discovery (we are currently witness the destruction of American traditional TV animation), astroturfed parent groups (going after the teaching of both newly-discovered and long-known histories of American civil and human rights abuses), wealthy entrepreneurs (Musk's direction has has devastated Twitter on both a technical and community level), and the government itself (from That One SCOTUS decision to state bans on city decision-making). And I'm sorry for you if you're going to be onstinate enough to deny this. It means you won't have a plan for when someone goes after something you care about.
- jstarfish 3y ago> It's part of a broader cultural purge across media outlets that has seen the cancellation or destruction of works that appealed to marginalized people, including minorities, women, and queer folk. You're not wrong, but all of those groups were--up until recently--causes championed by those same belligerents. This is what happens when you bite the hand that feeds. It doesn't tend to work out for any marginalized group when their narrative shifts from "we're tired of being bullied" to "we want to be the bullies." That's Hamas logic, and the establishment will bite back. Take a page out of MLK's book and settle for mere equality.
- 3y ago
- gjsman-1000 3y agoIt was always strange to name a magazine for women after a biblical wicked queen who was ultimately thrown off a rooftop, run over by chariots, and eaten by dogs. “At Jehu coming in at the gate, and said: Can there be peace for Zambri, that hath killed his master? And Jehu lifted up his face to the window, and said: Who is this? And two or three eunuchs bowed down to him. And he said to them: Throw her down headlong: and they threw her down, and the wall was sprinkled with her blood, and the hoofs of the horses trod upon her. … And when they went to bury her, they found nothing but the skull, and the feet, and the extremities of her hands.”
- cultofmetatron 3y agoconsidering the content of that @$#%@$ rag, it was a worthy name.
- Tokkemon 3y agoCouldn't have happened to nicer folks.
- WesolyKubeczek 3y agoJezebel is being thrown out of the window by her own people. Such a headline opportunity missed.
- HumblyTossed 3y ago[flagged]
- wendyshu 3y agoWay to steelman!
- throw4847285 3y agoA real shame, though it was a shell of its former self by the end. Like everything under the Gawker umbrella, it was a Frankenstein of gossipy bullshit, legit good journalism, edgelord humor, and a devoted comment section of fanatical weirdos. If the comments section here is any indication, they succeeded at taking the "I don't care who I offend" energy of the internet and redirected it against a set of targets who are not used to being the butt of the joke. Sometimes they crossed a line, but not more than any given Twitter user, and with a lot more wit. I could maybe make the argument that what went wrong is that social media gave every fan of that kind of humor a platform to spew it on. You can blame Jezebel, but I blame social media algorithms, because the comments sections themselves tended to be far better moderated than, say, Twitter. It's worth reading one of the founders reflect on the site and what it meant to people (women specifically). https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/jezebel-and-the-question-of-womens-anger https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/jezebel-...
- maximinus_thrax 3y agoI will go against the grain here and feel bad for this. The staff will now disseminate to other outlets and further spread this infection they call 'journalism'. It was better to have all this toxic waste clustered into one easy to ignore spot.
- ReptileMan 3y agoTo go where? All the mainstream outlets are already like this. NYTimes/Vox ate jezebel lunch during the Trump years. There is nothing left to infect. There is a lot of production of perma outraged progressive content. Problem is that the american PMC is not able to buy and consume all of it. In the last year accusations of racism, sexism, transphobia and other tools of grievances politics just don't get traction
- norwalkbear 3y agoDamn you are right, the problem is the people themselves that must be removed from society. Institutional rot is people rot. I need to think more on this.
- graphe 3y ago>Laura Bassett, Jezebel’s most recent editor-in-chief, who departed the site earlier this fall, implored people on X to hire the Jezebel staffers who were let go on Thursday: “My heart is with the entire Jez staff who just got laid off, including incredible abortion reporters at a time when the beat couldn’t be more relevant to national politics. Please hire them.” This made me laugh really hard. They lost their platform of hate and want another one, I was going to write about how Twitter had artificially boosted unpopular viewpoints and now that it's no longer full of bots and trolls they're out of places to spew hatred from.
- nativespecies 3y ago[flagged]
- yterdy 3y agoI was not particularly fond of Jezebel, but I do think it's an interesting mental exercise to compare how one reacted to this news to how they did/would react to, say, the demise of Rush Limbaugh or Howard Stern. (Or, wrt the comment section, this site.)
- ReptileMan 3y agoThe common for all three is how little they expected from the audience.
- yterdy 3y agoI would argue, all four.
- downWidOutaFite 3y agoThis is still repercussions from Thiel's attack on Gawker. In an ideal democracy partisan billionaires should not have this kind of power over our media.
- Manuel_D 3y agoBy "Thiel's attack on Gawker", you mean "Gawker's consequences for publishing revenge porn" [1]. If Gawker had published Hogan's sex videos a few years later after revenge porn laws were passed, they wouldn't just have been sued they would have been the perpetrators of a crime. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollea_v._Gawker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollea_v._Gawker
- rmilejczz 3y agoThis really doesn’t change anything about the statement. Peter Thiel had nothing to do with the incident, and utilized it to get them shutdown via the courts. Whether or not it was legal at the time is not relevant to Thiels actions, which were not born from a sense of justice but from a desire for vindication.
- s1artibartfast 3y agoI don't think vindication is the word you were looking for.
- rmilejczz 3y agoYou’re right I should have said “vengeance” but it was early I guess, that’s my excuse anyway
- s1artibartfast 3y agoyeah, I think it makes for a pretty interesting and grey area. Presumably it is in the interest of society to enforce the laws we have on the books, or we wouldn't have them. Presumably we would want justice for Hogan. Im not sure it needs an analogy, but It seems a bit like reporting your neighbor for pouring oil down the storm drain after they piss you off.
- tonfreed 3y agoOk honest question, who was their actual target audience? I know there are a lot of people that are performative radicals that might spout this kind of thing, but you get them in a room alone and they're not at all like that. I don't think I've met anyone who read Jezebel unironically
- SeenNotHeard 3y agoI have. They read it religiously, and uncritically treated its journalism as the truth. I thought they were being ironic, until I got to know them better.
- tonfreed 3y agoI'd like to meet these people. I just flat don't understand where they're coming from
- maximinus_thrax 3y ago> you get them in a room alone and they're not at all like that You probably have a better quality circle of acquaintances/coworkers than me. I often iteract IRL with people who are very much just like that.
- tonfreed 3y agoI think a lot of people act that way because they fear retribution. I've never met a true believer behind closed doors, but I'm pretty openly conservative so maybe people know I'm not going to judge them if they don't parrot the newest internet trend
- at_a_remove 3y agoHrm. I could probably say "The women of Metafilter" but that's kicking the can down the road a bit.
- DoreenMichele 3y agoI can't recall ever reading anything on Jezebel except a piece about a female writer who performed an experiment and submitted her manuscript under a male name and got drastically different feedback when people thought the author was male. https://jezebel.com/homme-de-plume-what-i-learned-sending-my-novel-out-und-1720637627 https://jezebel.com/homme-de-plume-what-i-learned-sending-my... It's a rare piece of solid research into gender bias. Same author. Same piece. The only thing that changed was the supposed gender.
- RickJWagner 3y agoGoodbye and good riddance.
- vowen 3y agoQuite interesting to read the reactions to Jezebel shutting down on this British women's forum: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4939742-jezebel-bites-the-dust https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4939742-jezebel-b... Apparently the site was not too well regarded amongst serious feminists.
- amriksohata 3y agoMisandry website