Jezebel to shut down after 16 years as parent company lays off staff
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
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.
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-...
I didn't realize they owned The Onion though. Probably doesn't bode well for that publication either.
Maybe took a major downturn in the past year, but I haven't seen any evidence of that
The quality of their content has really fallen off a cliff and their sarcastic political takes are usually pretty dumb now.
And then there's OH1, with perhaps the most brilliantly surreal pop-culture satire of this century, Sex House.
The actress who played one of the two morning-show anchors went back to her original career as a pilot, presumably because it's a more reliable paycheck. I presume that she wouldn't have done that had The Onion continued with its videos, which indeed were amazing a decade ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G/O_Media
It probably all makes some kind of private equity "sense."
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.
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.
And since none of us are Superman, you better know when to back down if you want to keep breathing. That isn't hyperbolic advice - you can apply it as low as a street fight to as high as a war between two superpowers.
You may not like it. You may not agree with it. You may not want it to be true. But if there's one thing I've noticed here on Hacker News, which I would have thought so-called "smart" people could figure out, it's that Might Makes Right. We still live under the Law of the Jungle. We just think we don't because we've piled up load after load of bullshit on top of it to obfuscate that fact because we don't like what it says about it.
Don't believe that?
Stop paying your taxes. You'll eventually be fined. Keep on not paying them them. You'll eventually have government officials at your door. Resist them. You'll be forcibly taken. Resist by shooting dead every single one that tries to take you. You'll eventually be met with overwhelming resistance. And the reason for that is simple. The State must be the supreme authority which rules over all citizens and there can be no exceptions. It's no different than a mob boss or a pirate captain. None at all. Zero. Might. Makes. Right. The best we can hope for is a philosopher king - or in the context of Western civilization, an enlightened governing body that attempts to balance all things towards the flourishing of mankind. We're still a long ways away, but we're trying.
This seems like a gross oversimplification in the years after a mob boss who was also the duly-elected Commander-in-Chief of the United States tried to take over the US government and have himself instated President against the will of the electorate and failed. Is the argument "well, he just didn't have enough might?" Because that seems very circular.
This suggests the story is more complicated than "Might makes right" (I'd suggest that 'might makes right' may actually be a retroactive justification for disruption of status quos; 'they must have been strong enough to win because they won' may be correlation without causation, or perhaps 'strength' and 'victory' are synonymous, so 'might makes right' collapses into a useless tautology).
The gays get it. How often do you hear about gay-anything in the news anymore besides the occasional wedding cake drama? They wanted equality. They got it. Nobody's challenging DOMA. Nobody's trying to outlaw sodomy.
Women have been so aggressive in their politicking and rhetoric they've made themselves a threat to the male establishment. How the fuck did they lose the right to abortion? Like a bitter ex-spouse, they weaponized the offspring of Men--the Internet--against the patriarchy. Can't have that. The establishment turned their own biology against them, and now they're being muted too.
The trannies should learn from the blacks and gays before it's too late. After women, they're next.
I assume you meant that the other way: DOMA was the law that blocked gay marriage, which the SCOTUS overturned. You meant "Nobody's trying to reinstitute DOMA."
And, yes, they are. Obergefell V. Hodges is in the crosshairs; overturning it was avowedly the goal of the people who fought hard to get this slate of Supreme Court Justices nominated to the bench, right next to overturning Roe v. Wade.
https://jlsp.law.columbia.edu/2021/01/15/thomas-tees-up-futu...
Honestly I think you have only a cursory understanding of MLKs life and mission, otherwise you wouldn’t be saying such ignorant things and trying to make him some example of why you shouldn’t be too “uppity” if you want “equality”.
You’re acting like he got tea with Hoover after they signed the civil rights act together, like it wasn’t a brutal conflict marred by violence, a full on non violent revolution, that was snuffed out.
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.
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.
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.
https://jezebel.com/were-offering-10-000-for-unretouched-ima...
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.
Companies are stupid sometimes.
“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.”
Yet it wasn't able turn a profit?
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.
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)
No I'm not! sobs in corner. Sigh, good points.
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.
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
Institutional rot is people rot. I need to think more on this.
Apparently the site was not too well regarded amongst serious feminists.
Is there a stash of articles being released somehow? Do we rely only on the Internet Archive to get to it?
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.
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
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.
Nothing of value was lost.
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.
That's not the same situation as an otherwise successful outlet being deplatformed or cut off from commercial services.
[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.
Source: https://www.playboy.com/ is there, alive and well.
https://www.playboy.com/read/cunnilingus-101-what-you-need-t... https://www.playboy.com/read/legend-of-leveretia
However, I can't find any articles written in 2023. So, perhaps the magazine part is gone after all.
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"
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.
The OP's comment is really for themselves to feel an emotional charge of victimhood, it's a monologue not a dialogue.
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.
Didn't Bustle replace Jezebel?
Anna Karenina principle: all happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in it's own way. Or: there are many ways to be miserable, but only a few ways to be happy. Or: entropy increases.
A couple of pointers would lead the vast majority to better lives, but there are so few of these that you can't build a publication around it.
Such a headline opportunity missed.
https://jezebel.com/have-you-ever-beat-up-a-boyfriend-cause-...
First link below: “Rolling Stone Partially Retracts UVA Story Over 'Discrepancies'”, published December 5.
That’s quite a feat.
“ This is really, really bad. It means, of course, that when I dismissed Richard Bradley and Robby Soave's doubts about the story and called them "idiots" for picking apart Jackie's account, I was dead fucking wrong, and for that I sincerely apologize.”
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.
> 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.
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.
Im not sure it needs an analogy, but It seems a bit like reporting your neighbor for pouring oil down the storm drain after they piss you off.
I think we can do with less click bait "journalism" - good riddance.