Talked about on numerous blogs and Web sites, covered by the New York Times, attacked by The Daily Show and attracting upwards of 38m global page views a month, the women’s Web site Jezebel has clearly come of age.
It also needs to be noted that the site has overtaken its infamous sibling, the gossipy Gawker, in terms of notoriety after a public spat with Jon Stewart’s Daily Show. Gaby Darbyshire, Gawker Media’s chief operating officer, told the New York Observer that Jezebel “has received more complaints per year than any other [Gawker media] site,” while Gawker’s founder, Nick Denton, told the New York Times that it was no longer seen by advertisers as “a cute new entrant” on the blogging scene.
The spat with The Daily Show began with a report by the site’s Irin Carmon on the program’s hiring policies, which highlighted the lack of women in senior writing or on-air positions and argued that it was “a boys’ club where women’s contributions are often ignored and dismissed”.
Although The Daily Show had declined to comment for Carmon’s original piece, a visibly flustered Stewart attempted to address the issue a week later stating: “Jezebel thinks I’m a sexist prick.”
In the days that followed The Daily Show released an open letter rebutting Carmon’s report titled “Dear People Who Don’t Work Here” and signed by more than 30 female employees. Blogs ranging from The Awl to Slate weighed in on the controversy and a post signed by the Jezebel editors reiterated that, far from having an axe to grind, Carmon had requested a comment from The Daily Show for her initial piece and had been turned down.
Meanwhile, The Daily Show’s newest female hiring, Olivia Munn, whose controversial appointment had in part triggered the initial post, gave a forthright interview to Salon stating that “no one knew what the fuck Jezebel was before that story came out ... The Daily Show didn’t know what Jezebel was”.
In this, however, she was clearly wrong — not least because fellow Daily Show employee Samantha Bee is quoted in Rebecca Traister’s upcoming book Big Girls Don’t Cry as saying: “You can really tell when something resonates with people ... I’m always excited when one of mine [her clips on The Daily Show] ends up on Jezebel.”
The piece had attracted so much controversy because of the growing power that Jezebel wields. In September last year it surpassed the flagship site Gawker in monthly page views and now attracts over 38 million global viewers and 2.6 million unique global users per month.
When launching it in 2007, founding editor Anna Holmes conceived it as an antidote to superficial, consumer-led glossies. “I thought there was a way to talk about things that women were interested in without talking down to them,” she says. “It seemed possible to address serious issues with wit and to acknowledge that women want more from a magazine than consumer products.”
What really stood out, however, was its tone. “I knew that the one thing I didn’t want was for everything to be all about insulting people,” says Holmes, who stepped down as editor-in-chief two weeks ago. “I thought that there was room to be witty without being unkind.”
“Jezebel is a site for modern, intelligent women who do not want to be pandered to,” says Jessica Coen, the site’s new editor-in-chief. “We don’t want to talk down to our readers — we want to be able to discuss issues both high and low, and address them in a way that respects the intelligence of the reader.”
Coen, who edited Gawker from 2004 to 2006, agrees that part of Jezebel’s appeal lies in its rejection of the Gawker ethos. “A sarcastic note here and there is fine but nothing but snark is lazy,” she admits. Instead she hopes to continue to expand the site. “I want Jezebel to reach readers who want an intelligent version or a tongue-in-cheek approach to gossipy brain candy, and also readers who are looking for writers and reporters to be engaged in larger, deeper issues and have something to say.”
Not all the site’s vocal commenters are happy with that switch. Recent weeks have seen mutterings of “Jez-mopolitan” and suggestions that it is moving too far from its original incarnation as the anti-Cosmo or Elle.
Carmon, a former reporter at Women’s Wear Daily, believes that The Daily Show’s reaction (no comment, then the open letter) has led to “far more attention” being paid to her post.
Will the subsequent attention lead to change in how the mainstream media deal with requests from blogs? “I think we’re at the frontier of all this right now,” she says. “More and more people with traditional news experience are moving to work online and that does mean that the relationships between blogs and official sources will change.”
While the relationship between Jezebel and The Daily Show may not be recoverable, their falling-out could have fruitful results.
June 2 to June 8 Taiwan’s woodcutters believe that if they see even one speck of red in their cooked rice, no matter how small, an accident is going to happen. Peng Chin-tian (彭錦田) swears that this has proven to be true at every stop during his decades-long career in the logging industry. Along with mining, timber harvesting was once considered the most dangerous profession in Taiwan. Not only were mishaps common during all stages of processing, it was difficult to transport the injured to get medical treatment. Many died during the arduous journey. Peng recounts some of his accidents in
What does the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) in the Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) era stand for? What sets it apart from their allies, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)? With some shifts in tone and emphasis, the KMT’s stances have not changed significantly since the late 2000s and the era of former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九). The Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) current platform formed in the mid-2010s under the guidance of Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), and current President William Lai (賴清德) campaigned on continuity. Though their ideological stances may be a bit stale, they have the advantage of being broadly understood by the voters.
Artifacts found at archeological sites in France and Spain along the Bay of Biscay shoreline show that humans have been crafting tools from whale bones since more than 20,000 years ago, illustrating anew the resourcefulness of prehistoric people. The tools, primarily hunting implements such as projectile points, were fashioned from the bones of at least five species of large whales, the researchers said. Bones from sperm whales were the most abundant, followed by fin whales, gray whales, right or bowhead whales — two species indistinguishable with the analytical method used in the study — and blue whales. With seafaring capabilities by humans
In a high-rise office building in Taipei’s government district, the primary agency for maintaining links to Thailand’s 108 Yunnan villages — which are home to a population of around 200,000 descendants of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) armies stranded in Thailand following the Chinese Civil War — is the Overseas Community Affairs Council (OCAC). Established in China in 1926, the OCAC was born of a mandate to support Chinese education, culture and economic development in far flung Chinese diaspora communities, which, especially in southeast Asia, had underwritten the military insurgencies against the Qing Dynasty that led to the founding of
RSS