Jezebel, the Feminist Web site that Punctured the Patriarchy, Shuts Down

Jezebel, the sassy feminist web site that launched from the rib of Gawker, is shutting down. Citing the “financial headwinds rattling [the] trade,” G/O Media, the guardian firm of Jezebel, stated on Thursday that it might droop publication of Jezebel after it didn’t discover a purchaser throughout a troublesome financial slog for digital publishers.

The choice will impression 23 workers, together with your entire Jezebel workers and G/O Media editorial director Merrill Brown, who will exit the corporate.

Launched in 2007 by author Anna Holmes, Jezebel rapidly turned a must-read for a younger era of third-wave feminists laboring amid a really a lot intact patriarchy. The New York-centric website supplied a daring and caustic critique of conventional girls’s magazines, with their male-gaze-centered concentrate on unimaginable beliefs of magnificence.

In an electronic mail to the corporate’s workers on Thursday, Jim Spanfeller, G/O Media’s chief government officer, stated the choice to shutter the location got here after discussions with “over two dozen potential consumers” for Jezebel got here to naught.

Spanfeller characterised the choice as “excruciating” and “very, very tough” and effusively praised the Jezebel editorial crew.

“They’ve had many successes over the previous yr…and proceed to do nice work in tough occasions,” he wrote. “The Jezebel crew has labored to satisfy and exceed their viewers’s wants…in an extremely vital time for the core subjects of the location. Their pressing, breakthrough protection of reproductive rights within the post-Roe period, in addition to different key points core to fashionable girls, affirmed the model’s storied legacy as the web site that modified girls’s media endlessly.”

Spanfeller’s letter, whereas decisive within the speedy time period, did depart open the chance, nonetheless slim, of a revival or new incarnation of Jezebel.

“I haven’t given up on Jezebel,” he concluded. “Media is nothing if not resilient. So are its practitioners. I’ll preserve you apprised if circumstances change.”