Jezebel, which has provided reporting and cultural commentary from a feminist point of view for 16 years, is shutting down. After Silicon Valley weirdo Peter Thiel killed its parent site Gawker in 2016, Jezebel was sold to Univision, which then sold it to a private equity outfit. From New York Mag:
Jezebel’s folding comes amid high and well-publicized tensions between G/O Media and its editorial properties — most recently, over G/O’s increasingly abundant reliance on AI, a strategy the company has continued to pursue despite strong objections from its writers and editors. On top of that, Spanfeller reportedly started evaluating writers based on algorithmically driven “scorecards” that meted out points based on traffic and engagement, seemingly prioritizing quantity over quality. Staffers have also complained that he blocked internal opportunities for growth, while hiring and promoting his daughter within a year. In August, Jezebel’s most recent editor-in-chief Laura Bassett resigned, writing on X (formerly Twitter) that “the company that owned us refused to treat my staff with basic human decency.” She is one of seven editor-in-chiefs to quit G/O this year alone.
For fuck’s sake.
Jezebel alum Lyz Lenz said it best on another platform that is currently being degraded by a dude-bro douche-canoe: “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.”
Yep. Open thread.