Jezebel is a US-based website featuring news and cultural commentary geared towards women. It was launched in 2007 by Gawker Media under the editorship of Anna Holmes as a feminist counterpoint to traditional women's magazines. After the breakup of Gawker Media, the site was purchased by Univision Communications and later acquired by G/O Media.
History
Jezebel was launched on May 21, 2007, as the 14th Gawker Media blog. According to founding editor Anna Holmes, who had previously worked at Glamour, Star, and InStyle, the site stemmed from the desire to better serve Gawker.com's female readers, who made up 70% of the site's readership at the time.
At the site's launch, the editorial staff included Holmes; editor Moe Tkacik, a former Wall Street Journal reporter; and associate editor Jennifer Gerson, a former assistant to Elle editor-in-chief Roberta Myers. Gerson left the site in May 2008 to become the Women's Editor for the Polo Ralph Lauren website; Tkacik departed in August 2008 to work at Gawker.com, after briefly accepting and then rescinding a job offer from Radar. Tkacik was subsequently laid off in a company-wide restructuring the following October. Holmes left the site in June 2010; Jessica Coen replaced her as editor-in-chief. Other current staffers include Madeleine Davies, Kelly Faircloth, Hillary Crosley, Kate Dries and Callie Beusman.
In December 2007, Jezebel reached 10 million monthly views. Gawker's owner Nick Denton pointed to Jezebels soaring popularity as one reason for a drop-off in traffic at the company's main site, Gawker.com, which fell from more than 11 million page views in October 2007 to about eight million in December. Three years after its founding, Jezebel had surpassed the page traffic of its parent site.
According to the New York Times, feminist publications such as Jezebel have been particularly affected by financial turmoil within the news industry. Jezebel was one of six websites that was purchased by Univision Communications in their acquisition of Gawker Media in August 2016. Univision sold the site in 2019 to a private-equity firm, which combined various former Gawker publications under the name of G/O Media.
Contents
Founding editor Anna Holmes says she sought to create a counterpart to women's print magazines such as Vogue and Cosmopolitan. According to Jordan Michael Smith, Holmes "hated [Glamours] worship of luxury, the lack of racial diversity, and the shallowness of women’s publications generally". The site was launched with the tagline "Celebrity. Sex. Fashion. Without airbrushing." Emma Goldberg of The New York Times describes the site's hallmark as "feminist cultural criticism, with an edge".
A regular feature called "Photoshop of Horrors" documents retouched photographs in fashion magazines. On its first day of operation, Jezebel offered a $10,000 reward for the best example of a magazine cover photo prior to being retouched for publication. The winning entry, announced in July 2007, was a photo of country singer Faith Hill from the cover of Redbook. Jezebel pointed out 11 different ways the photo had been altered, including radically distorting Hill's left arm.
A 2007 post by Tkacik says, "Jezebel is a blog for women that will attempt to take all the essentially meaningless but sweet stuff directed our way and give it a little more meaning, while taking more the serious stuff and making it more fun, or more personal, or at the very least the subject of our highly sophisticated brand of sex joke. Basically, we wanted to make the sort of women's magazine we'd want to read." One of the site's guiding principles, according to Holmes, is to avoid saying "misogynist things about women's weight."
Editors-in-Chief
Media attention and influence
Jezebel's format has influenced other women-focused websites, including Slate magazine's Double X, xoJane, The Hairpin, and The Frisky.
Media coverage of the Faith Hill photo controversy included discussion and interviews on NBC's Today show and in several other publications. Redbook editor-in-chief Stacy Morrison said that their retouching of Hill's photo was in line with industry standards and that Redbook was investigating how the unretouched image had been released.
A July 2008 article in the Ottawa Citizen included Jezebel as one of several sites launched as part of the "online estrogen revolution," referring to a comScore finding that community-based women's websites were tied with political sites as the Internet's fastest-growing category. The article also cited Ad Ages research showing that women's Internet use is outpacing men's.