RIP Jezebel
What does its demise mean for women’s media?
A song to read by: “Runner,” by Alex G
What I’m reading: “The Viking Heart,” by Arthur Herman
Published this week
— I got ahold of a recording of an all-hands meeting held by The Information in July, and the transcript offers a rare glimpse into the commercial health of the privately held company. The biggest surprise? How small its four-year-old brand partnerships business is. As one source texted me, “This is what success looks like?” (Link)
— My official story on the shuttering of Jezebel, which came coupled with 16 other layoffs (for 23 in total), including the dismissal of editorial director Merrill Brown, who only joined the company in January. In other words, the closure of Jezebel rightfully took the spotlight, but the larger story is the slow-motion implosion of G/O Media. (Link)
— I profiled Literally Media, the company that houses a stable of canonical early internet brands, including Cheezburger, Know Your Meme, eBaum’s World and Cracked.com. Under the new leadership of Oren Katzoff, who pioneered the video-centric editorial strategies of Condé Nast Entertainment, Tastemade and Yahoo, the company is planning its next act. (Link)
On my mind
On Wednesday, I began working on a story based on the tip that Merrill Brown, the editorial director of G/O Media, had been laid off by chief executive Jim Spanfeller. The next morning, the news broke that in addition to Brown, the decision had been made by G/O Media brass to shut down the publication Jezebel, as well as lay off around 16 other staffers from across the G/O Media portfolio.
G/O Media houses a diverse portfolio of individual publishers, including Deadspin (sports), Kotaku (video games), The Root (Black culture), The Onion (satire), Jalopnik (cars) and Quartz (business news), among several others.
Even amid such a heterodox group, though, Jezebel stood out. Reporters at the publication covered cultural and political news from a progressive, opinionated, feminist perspective. Its coverage of abortion rights, particularly following the overturning of Roe v. Wade last year, has been gripping, visceral and critical. During the Trump presidency, the site was an indispensable source of analysis on the rampant misogyny of the era.
Jezebel could also be, and very often was, hilarious. The site shares tonal parallels to The Onion, and few publishers have ever embodied the concept of “skewering” quite as well as Jez. In a nutshell, it made vital writing on women’s issues incredibly engaging.
As such, its closure is a particular loss to the editorial ecosystem, in part because there are so few publications waiting in the wings to take its place.
Gal-dem, which provided a similar service with a British bent, shuttered earlier this year. The 19th covers many of the same issues, but as a matter of neutrality it forgoes much of the vim and vinegar that punched Jezebel up and made its writing appealing to a broader base. theSkimm skews a little cheekier than the 19th, but it still plays it far too safe for fans of Jezebel.
You could make a strong case that Teen Vogue is best suited to fill the vacancy, and I would love to see it do so. Of course, Cosmopolitan is in the conversation as well, and Betches has made some gestures in the direction of political empowerment.
But the very thing that made Jezebel great — its acidity — is what doomed it. Shortly after the publication shut down, the phenomenal new tech publication 404 Media — itself born out of the rubble of Vice — reported that brand safety concerns made selling Jezebel to advertisers a challenge.
In the story, for instance, 404 Media reported that, “a couple of weeks ago, the ads sales team asked if it could remove Jezebel’s tagline—’Sex. Celebrity. Politics. With Teeth’—from the site.” (In a mordant twist, the tagline no longer appears on the site, so I suppose the ad sales team got their wish.)
If this sounds familiar, it is because I wrote about this exact issue two weeks ago in my post “Defunding the news.” Brand safety considerations are — first and foremost — almost entirely fictitious. There is no conclusive evidence that readers negatively perceive brands whose ads run against unpleasant news.
The business model is a shakedown, yes, and it is almost entirely predicated on fear, but it is effective. And as I wrote the other week, advertisers have every right to allocate their marketing spend however they want. Any argument against brand safety based on the finger-wagging notion that advertisers have a moral obligation to support the news is doomed to fail.
In the case of Jezebel, its highly opinionated reporting on highly divisive issues made it a third-rail for brands. In some regards, it is a miracle it survived as long as it did with the business model it had.
The commercial takeaway here is that G/O Media should have worked harder to diversify the Jezebel business, although admittedly that might have been easier said than done. Some readers certainly would have paid to subscribe, but the publication focused more on analysis than the kind of original reporting that converts readers into subscribers. And when you start paywalling content, you inevitably see a concomitant dip in ad revenues, making the calculus much more complex.
Other advertising avenues, like events and podcasts, would have suffered from the same brand safety hurdles. Plus, the podcast market is actively shrinking, and events require a sizable upfront investment, and G/O Media has little history of successfully doing either.
In my mind, the core issue is that Jezebel came of age in a media environment very different from the one we are in now. (Honestly, you could say the same thing about almost the entire G/O Media portfolio, which is why I am concerned for the future of the company.)
Its tone, its style, its subject matter and even its site design made it anathema to advertisers, but it also precluded virtually every other monetization strategy. If someone had pitched Jezebel as a start up media venture today, it would never see the light of day, as its model is so clearly incompatible with the few ways in which media companies make money now.
Unfortunately, every other women’s media publication — rather than seeing Jezebel’s closure as an opportunity, or a white space in the market — will see it instead as a cautionary tale. This week, I bet the ad sales team at all of the publishers I listed above are preparing presentations that use Jezebel as proof of why their editorial teams should stick to Taylor Swift slideshows.
In short, the problem is going to get worse before it gets better. Advertisers want safe, manicured editorial. A publication nearly synonymous with abortion was always going to be a tough sell.
But — and this is a big, important but — Jezebel fans really loved Jezebel. I know it is cliché at this point, but if I were a recently laid off Jezebel writer, I would be hopping on the phone with Jasper Wang at Defector, or anyone over at Hell Gate, 404 Media or Aftermath.
There is enough residual support, and such a dearth of like-minded offerings, that a focused, subscriber-supported Jezebel could almost certainly find its footing. It would have to be leaner, at least at first, but Jez has never been afraid of being scrappy.
You also have to figure that G/O Media would still love to see a buyer for the property, even after all the hoopla of its shutdown. The site is still running, that pesky tagline is gone and the whole world knows it’s for sale. Surely G/O Media would prefer some offer to nothing. Why would it not?
One good rumor
A few things made selling Jezebel difficult, and I can tell you one of them: Whoever bought the publication had to assume the whole staff, which presented some issues as the staff was unionized. As a result, the buyer would have to abide by the terms of the contract until it expired, which is not for two years.
Some good readin’
— In a fitting twist of irony, I read this great piece on Jezebel, written by its founder, just days before it closed. (The New Yorker)
— The best thing in the world is a New Yorker profile of someone crazy. (The New Yorker)
— I love this poison pill technology that feeds AI scrapers false information to screw with their data theft. (MIT Technology Review)
— RIP to good TV. I have been watching the new “Frasier” reboot and it is, as the old Frasier might have said, perfunctory. (The New Yorker)
Cover image: "Jezebel,” by John Byam Liston Shaw