On Thursday, media conglomerate G/O Media — the holding company of private equity firm Great Hill Partners — shuttered Jezebel, the culture-shifting feminist publication that it acquired from Univision in 2019. In a memo sent to G/O Media’s staff, CEO Jim Spanfeller announced that the company was downsizing, with Jezebel’s seven-person editorial team being laid off and the website ceasing publication. Though Spanfeller called the decision “excruciating” and claimed that Jezebel’s “urgent, breakthrough coverage of reproductive rights in this post-Roe era, as well as other key issues core to modern women, affirmed the brand’s storied legacy,” his memo also stated that G/O Media’s “business model and the audiences we serve … did not align with Jezebel’s.”
Apparently, crafting stories with 50% of the population in mind isn’t considered a lucrative business strategy.
Apparently, crafting stories with 50% of the population in mind isn’t considered a lucrative business strategy.
Jezebel’s shuttering is the end of an era and a heartbreaking loss for feminists, me included, who’ve read the publication’s critical work for nearly two decades. Since its founding in 2007, Jezebel has published unapologetically feminist, rigorous and honest stories about pop culture and politics — always with a distinctive humor and edge that, over time, became its signature.
That doesn’t mean the publication never made mistakes, especially in its early days, when its editors were blazing new terrain. Sometimes, its coverage was contentious, and at other times, it was treated as divisive and provocative, but it was always impactful. As Jezebel’s founder, Anna Holmes, recently wrote for The New Yorker, she wanted to create a publication that combined “wit, smarts, and anger, providing women—many of whom had been taught to believe that ‘feminism’ was a bad word or one to be avoided—with a model of critical thinking around gender and race which felt accessible and entertaining.”
As author Lyz Lenz, a Jezebel contributor, perfectly captured on the social media platform X: “It was a place where women could unabashedly write about culture, politics, and everything with voice, humor, and the whole range of human emotions.” Its roster of writers, contributors and editors, past and present, always had their fingers on the pulse of feminist criticism, even as language has evolved and more nuances have been injected into the discourse around the social issues we’re all facing — climate change, abortion rights, police violence and rampant transphobia.
At the time, Jezebel and other publications, like Clutch, which I contributed to, and Feministing, were burgeoning digital receptacles of feminist thought. Their goal was not to produce the perfect feminist. They were not always perfect, sometimes messy and always above the idea of moral purity as the goal. Instead, these publications — and the writers they published — were learning in public, in real time, and we are all better because we were able to learn alongside them. As we evolved, Jezebel did, too, remaining a beacon for how to sustain feminist discourse in the era of tech billionaires’ attempting to control the internet.
A slew of feminist and women’s media outlets have folded in the last five years — The Hairpin, Wear Your Voice, Vice’s Broadly, The Washington Post’s The Lily, The Toast and Bitch Media.
The publication is as vital today as it was in 2007 and, in some ways, even more so, as a slew of feminist and women’s media outlets, like independent outlets in general, have folded in the last five years — The Hairpin, Wear Your Voice, Vice’s Broadly, The Washington Post’s The Lily, The Toast and Bitch Media, a publication I ran as editor in chief for nearly five years. Women’s media, especially publications that are unabashedly feminist and committed to speaking truth to power, has always been deeply undervalued and underfunded.
I began identifying as a Black feminist in 2012, when I was a senior in college. Once I committed to the political identity and worldview, I began scouring the internet, seeking community and further education. While I later attended graduate school, where I learned about Black feminism as both a theory and a political concept, social media became a gateway to articles and writers and thinkers who helped me sharpen my understanding of Black feminism.
Once I decided to pursue a career as an editor primarily in women’s media, I knew Jezebel could model how to prioritize feminism without losing sight of my own humanity. Jezebel and its writers told me I could have a journalism career without sacrificing or hiding my political commitment to the project of feminism as an ideology and a worldview. I could be honest about my disdain for police violence and my commitment to Palestinian freedom and my distrust for media conglomerates (like the one that sold Jezebel and the one that bought and shuttered Jezebel) without losing career prospects.
I knew I’d made an impact when Jezebel reported on a piece I’d published in Clutch, a Black woman-focused site that launched the careers of so many Black women writers and editors. Though I was only 23, I felt like I was on top of the world because Jezebel acknowledged my work. When I became the editor in chief of Bitch Media (RIP) in 2018, at just 28, I knew I was shepherding an iconic brand that had introduced generations of young people to feminism, just as Jezebel had.
What now exists for all those young feminists attempting to find their way?
What now exists for all those young feminists attempting to find their way? When conservative state legislatures are waging war on trans people, specifically trans girls, and the Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, feminists need publications like Jezebel now more than ever. That need is all the more urgent since Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, which used to be an epicenter for feminists to share ideas. In a single day, I could have conversations about the latest celebrity gossip to the plague of domestic violence facing Black women — and engage with others who could offer more nuance or even ideas I wouldn’t have considered otherwise. That’s now gone, ending a golden era for feminism online.
Feminists need spaces where we can consider and organize around the challenges of this time. We need publications where we can unapologetically hold power to account while also carving a path for unapologetic writers committed to the work of feminism. I worry, now, for the young feminists seeking places both online and offline to hone their understanding of feminism and being met only with archives. While some historically feminist publications still exist, including Ms. and Bust, the loss of Jezebel and even Bitch is still heartbreaking.
We can subscribe to individual Substack newsletters, which I’ve begun doing, or even follow newer feminist collectives, such as The Meteor, that are aiming to fill this void. However, the time of being able to scroll bookmarks full of feminist websites is over — and there’s no telling the long-term toll on the feminist movement, at a time when it’s needed more than ever. In the meantime, though, we still have Jezebel’s archives, a time capsule full of insight that will never get old.