Jezebel turns three (but is it worth reading anymore?)

Jezebel, Gawker's "feminist" blog turns three today.

Former editor Maureen (Moe) Tkacik also provided the well-timed cover story for this month's Columbia Journalism Review, regarding the navelgazing hybrid of journalism and blogging that seems to be the fate of modern media (it's kind of TL;DR but I actually did read the whole thing and loved it. It explained a lot about why I ultimately walked away from journalism as a female writer in my 20s and haven't looked back since.)

And most importantly in this string of fateful events, I got promoted to a Gawker "starred commenter" after several years of commenting on Jezebel, a privilege that I'm not sure if I should be more proud or ashamed of.

Moe's article provided a lot of interesting insight to Jezebel:

"2007, I took a job at Gawker Media helping launch a sister blog targeted at Gawker’s demographically attractive female readership—a property that was named Jezebel, at the insistence of Gawker CEO and founder Nick Denton and against my vociferous objections, after the blasphemous Old Testament whore who was eventually eaten alive by dogs."

and

"For most of my time there, bloggers earned bonuses that were tied to the page views their posts received, so the leisurely three minutes required to download a haggard image of Amy Winehouse from a celebrity photo agency and post it with a five-word caption was rewarded as generously as the frenzied hour and a half spent compiling the daily roundup of celebrity gossip, and at least twice as generously as anything I actually wanted to spend an hour and a half writing about."

That would explain the glut of "filler" that the site suffers from- celebrity tweets, cute animal pics, reposts from tabloids, lazy re-hashes of articles written better elsewhere.

I read Jezebel to kill time at work, I don't read it because I think it actually offers that much of substance at this point. And while it boasts its fair share of feminist indignation, it's 90% fluff that I'd probably ignore if I wasn't bored at my office job.

I actually got into reading Jezebel through editor Tracie Egan's blog One D at a Time, which appears to have gone AWOL since Tracie got married and promoted to Senior Writer (though the majority of her "writing" at this point reposts of celebrity tweets and clips from trashy TV shows, which is a shame because she's an awesome writer. But it all goes back to page views=dollars, and that's what's easy and gets hits.)

Back in the day, Tracie(then a staffer at Jezebel's underpaid paper analog BUST) wrote One D at A Time under the moniker "Slutmachine." Slutmachine was like an X rated Williamsburg version of Chelsea Handler- coked out, shamelessly promiscuous and snarky, the crazy friend we all like to live vicariously through. She reminded me a lot of myself- we were the same age and we both had a lot of weird sex and wrote about it, except she was making a lot more money than I was at what I then considered to be my dream job. She took impressive risks as a writer, and it paid off. She wrote about having herpes and why this is wrongfully stigmatized (which is fucking brave, in my opinion.) She and another Jez blogger took secret video at American Apparel of them trying on skanky outfits in what is possibly the greatest Jezebel post ever. Her piece de resistance was an essay she wrote for Vice about paying a male hooker to fake rape her- it's shocking, hilarious and brilliant. Pictures appeared on Jezebel of her getting out of a car sporting a giant fake bush, and re-enacting the Lindsay Lohan knife play photos with other Jezebel staffers in her kitchen. It didn't hurt that she was a gorgeous brunette with huge boobs and amazing fashion sense either. OTOH, she also posted various and sundry fat-phobic and uptight/conventional shit that made me like her a lot less (loosely quoted via Pot Psychology:"I'd rather fuck a fat dude than a dude in a kilt." I'm sorry, that's just weak.)

And then, in her coup de grace, she got got married, retired the Slutmachine moniker, got rid of One D at a Time, and now posts reality TV clips to Jezebel in lieu of, ya know, actual content.

I totally understand and respect why Tracie retired the Slutmachine persona, putting one's scandalous personal life in the public domain has the potential to really fuck up your life. And now she's married and (presumably) monogamous, which changes everything. I hope she's happy, but I do feel a weird sense of loss as fan.

I keep reading Jezebel because I hope that someday it'll be what it once was- sloppy and occasionally gross, brave, and funny, but instead I find another sterile fashion roundup or debate on potential photoshopping of Blake Lively's boobs.

This is what feminism looks like? I want my money back.