Jezebel to shut down after 16 years as parent company lays off staff

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/nov/09/jezebel-news-shut-down-layoffs-go-media

by r721 • 3 years ago

94 126 3 years ago

mjhay• 3 years ago

Countdown till they axe The Onion. G/O is trash even by private equity standards.

Is 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"?

shadowgovt4• 3 years ago

I 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.'"

superfrank2• 3 years ago

I 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• 3 years ago

If 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.

josteink• 3 years ago

It was a sexist website offering bad advice for impressionable, young women.

Nothing of value was lost.

slothtrop• 3 years ago

on par with Gawker

AlexandrB2• 3 years ago

It was a sexist website offering bad advice for impressionable, young women.

Maybe. However I feel obliged to point out that there are countless media outlets that fit this description for men, but when they get shut down a common reaction is that free speech is under attack and cancel culture has gone too far.

chikenf00t• 3 years ago

Out of curiosity, what media outlets are you referring to?

ameister142• 3 years ago

When they are shut down by their host because they disagree with the content or are being pressured by twitter, I can imagine that. When they go out of business? I haven't ever seen people complain about free speech under attack at that point. Could you provide an example from these countless outlets?

[edit]When Playboy shut down in 2020, for example, I didn't see people upset about it being an attack on free speech; it was a dated business model that didn't work anymore.

graphe3• 3 years ago

Which site? Can you name any? Subreddits are not dedicated websites.

busterarm• 3 years ago

The difference is that those media outlets for men are usually independent small businesses run by a handful of people and not giant corporate media entities backed by large corporate advertisers.

There isn't a single male-oriented media outlet on television and largely because men aren't giving television their attention.

Edit: I'm talking about news/quasi-news media like the sites mentioned, so don't come back to me with "duh, sports"

SeenNotHeard2• 3 years ago

I feel obliged to point out that there are countless media outlets that fit this description for men, but when they get shut down a common reaction is that free speech is under attack and cancel culture has gone too far.

Can you name one example? I'm talking about a male-oriented, so-called "journalism" site cut because it's unprofitable, leading to outrage and pearl-clutching about free speech and cancel culture.

api• 3 years ago

Agreed, but unfortunately this just clears the stage for influencers both if this variety and their young man grifting doppelgängers of the Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson schools.

It’s a golden age for toxic life advice. TV and movies always served up a diet of dysfunctional advice but it was at least labeled as fiction. Now we get a steady stream of cursed “how to be a victim” / “how to be an abuser” advice labeled as fact.

rs999gti• 3 years ago

It was a sexist website offering bad advice for impressionable, young women.

Didn't Bustle replace Jezebel?

Bluescreenbuddy2• 3 years ago

So where can women go for good advice?

whatshisface2• 3 years ago

Good 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.

graphe3• 3 years ago

What kind of advice? Relationship advice probably might not be the best to take clickbait seriously.

fullshark• 3 years ago

Their family and good friends. The attempts to replace those with technology/media for various uses have failed, beyond maybe some less important ones e.g. "what's a good refrigerator to buy?"

cmrdporcupine• 3 years ago

Glad we have you to tell us the value of other people's writing.

AlexandrB2• 3 years ago

I 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

pbj1968• 3 years ago

And the Deadspin offshoot Defector is bleeding money, too.

JStanton617• 3 years ago

I don't think that's correct. Their 2022 annual report shows them as profitable. 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• 3 years ago

Since they didn't take external investment, that's impossible.

damagednoob• 3 years ago

What 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

shortrounddev2• 3 years ago

The 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.

drewcoo• 3 years ago

G/O has a history of hostile relations with a number of its sites.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G/O_Media

It probably all makes some kind of private equity "sense."

Always_Anon• 3 years ago

Good riddance. Identity politics rags like Jezebel have made the world a worse place.

neilv• 3 years ago

Sade's song as eulogy? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yK3IlV3l9xY&t=45s

Eumenes• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

Yes… but the publications you're losing is not just the clickbaiters, it's a superset of that.

senderista• 3 years ago

Just leaving this here:

https://jezebel.com/have-you-ever-beat-up-a-boyfriend-cause-...

pengaru• 3 years ago

+831 comments

kylebenzle• 3 years ago

There 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_D3• 3 years ago

Another classic: https://jezebel.com/is-the-uva-rape-story-a-gigantic-hoax-as...

kergonath4• 3 years ago

Title: “'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.

kergonath4• 3 years ago

Today’s demonstration that it’s not because you’re part of a population on the wrong end of some phenomena that you cannot be an arsehole.

Gibbon1• 3 years ago

No one is beyond reproach because they are a member of some group.

shadowgovt4• 3 years ago

I appreciate Jezebel sharing that this generally-undiscussed form of domestic violence exists and confirming it with their readers. It's certainly not something I would have considered had they not raised the issue.

jstarfish4• 3 years ago

let's just say that it'd be wise to never ever fuck with us.

Words one can only live by. "Damsels in distress" are the stuff of fairy tales. I get the impression we condition girls to think they're helpless so they don't rise against us. Women are formidable opponents.

According to a study of relationships that engage in nonreciprocal violence, a whopping 70% are perpetrated by women.

...and because men haven't been fighting back, the definition of "violence" has drifted. You stop yourself from throwing that punch and instead yell at her. No threats or assault, no raised fist-- just "what the fuck, cut it out you goddamn bitch." Yelling anything is now "verbal aggression," making you intimidating. And just because you're a big strong man who could inflict bodily harm, you're automatically physically threatening. You Monster. The verbiage is very specific-- any woman (except Chyna) can call any man "intimidating and physically threatening" and have it be a true statement.

The article is from 2007. Despite having sat through most of a major in criminal justice (four years of being told all of the FBI's statistics are wrong), a decade before that I had my eyes opened by a police instructor trying to instill in us just how dangerous domestic disputes were to respond to so we knew what to expect.

He had broken protocol by responding alone to a call from a neighbor about a disturbance between a couple. He was allowed inside the house, separated the parties and interviewed them. The man had defensive wounds, but the woman denied hitting him and the man did not implicate her. She also had defensive wounds, which the man acknowledged he had inflicted. Both parties were obviously throwing punches at each other, but with only his admission of guilt, only he would be going to jail. As the instructor was reading the man his rights, the woman realized what was about to happen, came up behind the officer and clocked him over the head with a rolling pin to try to stop the Police from taking Her Man away. The signs that she was a violent woman were all there, but we're conditioned to think women aren't violent, so they went overlooked.

Women are disproportionately victims of murder. The amount of battery and emotional abuse they inflict up to that point is grossly underreported. In the instructor's example (and in my own experience) men will very often cover for or conceal the offenses of women, which gives women a reputation of "purity" that is undeserved.

sohex• 3 years ago

Absolutely horrifying.

Another editor slapped a guy when "he told me he thought he had breast cancer." (Okay, that one made us laugh really hard.)

It's hard to fathom what kind of person hears that and laughs in response.

orblivion3• 3 years ago

I think I have ideas. I could imagine either somebody who's young and edgy and hasn't really made the connection to take reality seriously. I could imagine somebody who has built up enough animosity (due to involvement in the movement or personal bad experiences) to blow past and actively defy calls for civility; you see this play out in radical political discourse. Or, I suppose, a psychopath (which could also be formed by bad experiences).

kergonath4• 3 years ago

Someone who does not believe men can have breast cancer, I assume.

trashface• 3 years ago

Its also ignorant. Man can in fact get breast cancer.

orblivion3• 3 years ago

While I have my issues with modern feminism, I've seen rather little of what I'd actually call misandry and a lot of what I'd classify as resentment and anger, which is easier to at least sympathize with. But this article is pretty shocking to see, though it's from 2007. Perhaps this was a trend that came, the community got pushback, and they eventually thought better of it?

KennyBlanken• 3 years ago

And this: https://imgur.com/a/7OGEZmN

Jezebel screeched about Jennifer Lawrence nude photos getting distributed while their parent site gleefully refused to take down Hulk Hogan's sex tape (because something something journalistic integrity? looool.)

And then there's the time Jezebel linked to a youtube video of a woman being raped, and then when the video wasn't taken down, they posted screenshots:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/10/this-wee...

And then paying for photos of Lena Dunham: https://jezebel.com/were-offering-10-000-for-unretouched-ima...

And then there was this: https://jezebel.com/is-the-uva-rape-story-a-gigantic-hoax-as...

And then there's the coverage of revenge porn involving Seth Rollins by Deadspin: https://deadspin.com/lets-all-look-at-seth-rollinss-dong-nsf...

The list goes on and on of hypocritical bullshit, but there was also, I believe, an article insulting men for "dad bods". Ie, not being sculpted gods because between being the sole source of income for their family and being present at home for their wife and kids, they don't have the time or emotional/physical energy to work out, etc.

Hopefully the racebaiting shithole that is The Root follows.

RichardCA• 3 years ago

Never thought I'd have a reason to post this on HN. Don't skip the comment section.

https://youtu.be/U_gLDF2dGLY

hn30000• 3 years ago

Sadly, has been a shell of itself for many many years.

danjac2• 3 years ago

Regardless 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?

FredPret3• 3 years ago

That'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.

cantSpellSober2• 3 years ago

They 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)

danjac2• 3 years ago

Another viewpoint here:

https://www.404media.co/advertisers-dont-want-sites-like-jez...

Advertisers don't like "controversial" content to appear next to their ads. Which I can understand from their point of view, but it means that only the blandest, middle-of-the-road content has a future in an ad-driven business model.

Back in the day of print magazines companies wouldn't necessarily have an issue with placing ads in, say, Playboy, if the ad was appropriate to the readership (e.g. cigars or whiskey to an adult audience). Maybe with everything so centralized these days and every corporation is on a hair-trigger for getting called out in social media for accidentally backing this or that cause because their ad appeared in the wrong place, that targeted approach is no longer possible.

So if your site is "controversial" in any way, the only model that makes sense is subscription.

TuringNYC• 3 years ago

Putting 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• 3 years 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.

FredPret3• 3 years ago

Jezebel disappearing is a great leap forward for human knowledge.

red-iron-pine• 3 years ago

it's a stretch to call Jezebel's content "knowledge"

Bluescreenbuddy2• 3 years ago

Oh 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-ima...

chefandy2• 3 years ago

Closures 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.

yterdy5• 3 years 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. 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.

jstarfish4• 3 years 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.

chefandy2• 3 years ago

Behind every corporate media source making a stand is a pod of rich old white men pocketing the admission fee regular people pay to witness it. Any positive effect jezebel or any similar corporate media outlet had was a latent function of generating view-based profit which, for most of its life, supported the company that released the Hulk Hogan sex tape. Yay for challenging toxic gender dynamics?

I would never argue that the capitalist powers that be aren't actively trying to stifle the voices of and resources for marginalized people, but you've given me no reason to assume the shuttering of jezebel was any more idealogically motivated than starting it was.

ytoawwhra92• 3 years 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.

It's more a continuation of an ongoing cultural purge of niche works that appeal to under-resourced/under-privileged groups. Which include the groups you identified, but there are others too.

It's been happening for as long as I can remember. Things start to gain cultural traction only to be stomped back down again when they get enough momentum to attract the attention of opponents.

Somehow, we (collectively) keep going.

DoreenMichele2• 3 years ago

I can't readily find it to cite but I recall once talking to someone on HN who was decrying discrimination or lack of inclusion or whatever in discussion of an article about some wealthy, influential founders and I think one was a woman and one was gay and one was a person of color or ethnic origin.

I've also seen people talk about how successful people may be of different ethnicities but are "all well-paid Silicon Valley programmers" or whatever.

A lot of people seem to feel those who have "made it" in some sense are all insiders with the right connections, the same culture and yadda -- and don't confuse them with the facts.

lamontcg• 3 years ago

"yay! feminism is defeated!"

gjsman-1000• 3 years ago

It 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• 3 years ago

considering the content of that @$#%@$ rag, it was a worthy name.

Tokkemon• 3 years ago

Couldn't have happened to nicer folks.

WesolyKubeczek• 3 years ago

Jezebel is being thrown out of the window by her own people.

Such a headline opportunity missed.

throw4847285• 3 years ago

A 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-...

maximinus_thrax2• 3 years ago

I 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.

ReptileMan2• 3 years ago

To 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• 3 years ago

Damn 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.

graphe3• 3 years 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.

yterdy5• 3 years ago

I 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.)

ReptileMan2• 3 years ago

The common for all three is how little they expected from the audience.

yterdy5• 3 years ago

I would argue, all four.

downWidOutaFite• 3 years ago

This 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_D3• 3 years ago

By "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

rmilejczz6• 3 years ago

This 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.

tonfreed3• 3 years ago

Ok 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

SeenNotHeard2• 3 years ago

I 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.

tonfreed3• 3 years ago

I'd like to meet these people. I just flat don't understand where they're coming from

maximinus_thrax2• 3 years 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.

tonfreed3• 3 years ago

I 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• 3 years ago

Hrm. I could probably say "The women of Metafilter" but that's kicking the can down the road a bit.

DoreenMichele2• 3 years ago

I 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...

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• 3 years ago

Goodbye and good riddance.

vowen• 3 years ago

Quite interesting to read the reactions to Jezebel shutting down on this British women's forum: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4939742-jezebel-b...

Apparently the site was not too well regarded amongst serious feminists.

amriksohata• 3 years ago

Misandry website

Jezebel to shut down after 16 years as parent company lays off staff

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