Is there any inside take out there on whether the problem was "you can't run a news/political commentary rag profitably" or "you can't run it profitably enough"?
I don't know anything about their CEO, except that Wikipedia notes that in 2020, "GMG Union, which represents the staff of six G/O Media sites, announced a vote of no confidence in CEO Jim Spanfeller, citing, among other issues, a lack of willingness to negotiate for 'functional editorial independence protections.'"
I doubt they'd shut The Onion down. The brand is pretty well known at this point and that has value. If they don't want it, selling it to someone who does is likely the play.
The Escapist is a much, much smaller brand than The Onion. Looking at google trends, the search traffic for The Onion is about 35x that of The Escapist over the past 12 months. It's also in a much more crowded space than The Onion and a much younger brand. The Onion is a big fish in a small pond whereas the The Escapist is a minnow in a vast sea. I don't think they're comparable.
> It was a sexist website offering bad advice for impressionable, young women.
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.
Right, but that's not analogous to a media company going out of business. Nobody deplatformed Jezebel. Credit card companies, web hosting services, nobody refused to do business with Jezebel. There just weren't enough consumers of their content to make it profitable.
That's not the same situation as an otherwise successful outlet being deplatformed or cut off from commercial services.
When they are shut down by their host because they disagree with the content or are being pressured by twitter, I can imagine that. When they go out of business? I haven't ever seen people complain about free speech under attack at that point. Could you provide an example from these countless outlets?
[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.
The difference is that those media outlets for men are usually independent small businesses run by a handful of people and not giant corporate media entities backed by large corporate advertisers.
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"
> 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.
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.
On Jezebel's comment section you would have been banned for asking this impertinent question. Obviously they're unprepared to respond with anything resembling evidence for their claims and will repeat it elsewhere rather than engage.
The OP's comment is really for themselves to feel an emotional charge of victimhood, it's a monologue not a dialogue.
Agreed, but unfortunately this just clears the stage for influencers both if this variety and their young man grifting doppelgängers of the Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson schools.
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.
Good advice doesn't really exist in the same way bad advice does, because the same things can ruin anyone's lives but everyone needs something different to fix theirs.
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.
Their family and good friends. The attempts to replace those with technology/media for various uses have failed, beyond maybe some less important ones e.g. "what's a good refrigerator to buy?"
I think the writing has been on the wall since the Deadspin debacle[1]. G/O media seems to have little appetite for political commentary, so I'm surprised Jezebel lasted this long.
I didn't realize they owned The Onion though. Probably doesn't bode well for that publication either.
What I can't understand is that The Onion's YouTube channel[1] has 2.5 million subscribers and a billion views. You'd think they be able to do something with that amount of eyeballs.
The onion's most viewed videos are from over a decade ago when they put actual effort into their content. Now their most recent videos get a few thousand views whereas their older content used to get a few million.
The quality of their content has really fallen off a cliff and their sarcastic political takes are usually pretty dumb now.
The Onion circa 2012 was a trip. It's wild, given how much streaming video has grown in the decade since, just how much they left on the table abandoning such gems as Today Now, ONN News, Onion Talks (their devastating spoof of TED), and more.
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.
Didn't the onion videos die because of inflated view counts reported by Facebook Videos? IIRC there were some fairly expensive settlements around that.
Is that what happened? I wonder if the same thing happened to CollegeHumor: Like The Onion, very popular YouTube videos (as measured by views) a decade ago, then suddenly disappearing (again as measured by views).
There are a lot of scum bags in the word so it's easy for them to find companionship and bond over this kind of stuff. For me it was a huge unexpected outcome of the internet.
For whatever it’s worth, the “first link below” story contains this quote from the author of the first story
“ 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.”
Indeed. Without as much as a hint of questioning why they felt completely normal to write the previous article with such stupid headline and content. If it were a company, we’d say it was a non-apology apology and that it shows they don’t want to admit the problem.
I think it's telling that the author's remorse was for being mean to a fellow opinion writer, as opposed to fomenting a culture of guilty until proven innocent
Each of those links is a published correction and retraction of previous statements as new information came to light so they seem like principled journalists, with their tongues planted firmly in their cheeks.
... and unlike here, they had to do journalism (in this case, polling their readers) to generate the content with the comments on it. We just get to kibbitz on someone else's reporting.
It's what this site's for.
Hm... Now that I think about it... This is a link aggregator that doesn't run ads. It loads faster than the news sites it links out to, and comments happen over here instead of over there. Is HN part of the problem? Do sites like this pull the online advertising revenue out of journalism that journalism needs to survive?
If you can't find any decent articles in the jezebel archives I feel for you son that's a level of hater I could only aspire to be. I'm not endorsing their whole deal over a fifteen year run but they published more than a handful of good articles in that time.
I'm asking you to post these great articles that definitely exist (according to you). Its not my job to wade through clickbait looking for good articles someone told me definitely exist to prove I'm not a 'hater'. Until you produce any your statement is as valuable as jezebels valuation.
Thanks for sharing with me. The first two are pre trump, I don't remember them back then but they're well written compared to the articles I usually see shared from it, however the last one has nothing to do with women and is from 2019, it's not something I'd look for on the site. The first one seems like a retraction for was the gang rape real, and I'll admit the articles are better written but they don't go anywhere. I could have skipped most of the article for the information it gave me.
How did you use the site? I used to read Lifehacker looking up stuff until around 2009 but gawker was bad way before it became clickbait farms.
I don't want to make it out like I'm a huge fan of the site or something. I originally followed it on google reader back in the day, and skipped most of the articles without reading even then. But they've also always had at least some truly excellent writers doing good work there.
I edited my response and although the articles are better written I didn't get any insight from them. The first is a retraction to their other bad article, and the 2nd was a nice story about following a reporter and the 3rd one could have been summed up as they want to make Christian movies more diverse and include nonwhite and less rigid stories.
The Unabomber predicted the futures today in the 90s. I hope we can agree that one person had more insight than the whole jezebel publication.
I appreciate Jezebel sharing that this generally-undiscussed form of domestic violence exists and confirming it with their readers. It's certainly not something I would have considered had they not raised the issue.
> let's just say that it'd be wise to never ever fuck with us.
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.
I think I have ideas. I could imagine either somebody who's young and edgy and hasn't really made the connection to take reality seriously. I could imagine somebody who has built up enough animosity (due to involvement in the movement or personal bad experiences) to blow past and actively defy calls for civility; you see this play out in radical political discourse. Or, I suppose, a psychopath (which could also be formed by bad experiences).
Psychopathy is mostly genetic and has little to do with “bad experiences”. It can be diagnosed in kids as early as a few weeks of age. These kids will always lack empathy but most are able to avoid being detected as psychopaths by becoming good at pretending to be normal people.
While I have my issues with modern feminism, I've seen rather little of what I'd actually call misandry and a lot of what I'd classify as resentment and anger, which is easier to at least sympathize with. But this article is pretty shocking to see, though it's from 2007. Perhaps this was a trend that came, the community got pushback, and they eventually thought better of it?
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:
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.
Regardless of whether people liked the content or not: it only employed 23 people (not sure how many were freelance or part time), and I assume it had good traffic throughout its life.
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.
They were pulling in about 4 million pageviews a month, I'd expect $50-100k, but it's not that simple.
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)
If you don’t see the writing on the wall with AV Club, you’re in denial. They’ve lost all of their best writers via attrition and forcing staff to move to LA. Half their content is mindless videos, and the main long-form content they have now is AI-generated listicles. No more features or music reviews, very few TV reviews. What value is that website providing these days?
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.
Putting aside differences with their politics and angle, what happens to all this content when they are gone? I feel a piece of culture gets lost in the process.
Is there a stash of articles being released somehow? Do we rely only on the Internet Archive to get to it?
Closures like this are a Rorschach test-- many people are going to think it supports their view because the lack of opposing evidence is more visible than the lack of objective supporting evidence. As far as I can tell, Gawker media's strategic shortcomings damaged all of their subsidiaries, and Jezebel's style, content strategy, and cachet was more of a fad than a broad cultural shift. I'm open to actual supported evidence that this is anything more significant than that, but so far I've seen a bunch of people assuming that it's evidence of something larger and more significant than the evidence supports.
It's part of a broader cultural purge across media outlets that has seen the cancellation or destruction of works that appealed to marginalized people, including minorities, women, and queer folk. Belligerents include large companies like Warner Bros/Discovery (we are currently witness the destruction of American traditional TV animation), astroturfed parent groups (going after the teaching of both newly-discovered and long-known histories of American civil and human rights abuses), wealthy entrepreneurs (Musk's direction has has devastated Twitter on both a technical and community level), and the government itself (from That One SCOTUS decision to state bans on city decision-making).
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.
> It's part of a broader cultural purge across media outlets that has seen the cancellation or destruction of works that appealed to marginalized people, including minorities, women, and queer folk.
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.
jstarfish's point is, "Know when to back the fuck down, or be invincible."
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.
> It's no different than a mob boss or a pirate captain
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).
MLK being shot is entirely irrelevant. His mission succeeded, and because blacks knew when to quit, the Civil Rights Act still stands. Nobody repealed it a generation later.
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.
> Nobody's challenging DOMA. Nobody's trying to outlaw sodomy.
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.
MLK did not succeed in his mission, that’s just a blatant lie. He won a few battles, and once he got close to real progress he was killed. No one “knew when to quit” they were decapitated and beaten into submission.
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.
Behind every corporate media source making a stand is a pod of rich old white men pocketing the admission fee regular people pay to witness it. Any positive effect jezebel or any similar corporate media outlet had was a latent function of generating view-based profit which, for most of its life, supported the company that released the Hulk Hogan sex tape. Yay for challenging toxic gender dynamics?
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 part of a broader cultural purge across media outlets that has seen the cancellation or destruction of works that appealed to marginalized people, including minorities, women, and queer folk.
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.
I buy this. I would just argue that there's been a "surge" in the campaign of late, as it were. It's also more public and panicked than in the past. When it happened in the mide-late Oughts, things just went away quietly. Now, there's an almost constant drumbeat of x was cancelled, y is looking for a job after being laid-off on Twitter, etc.
I can't readily find it to cite but I recall once talking to someone on HN who was decrying discrimination or lack of inclusion or whatever in discussion of an article about some wealthy, influential founders and I think one was a woman and one was gay and one was a person of color or ethnic origin.
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.
It was always strange to name a magazine for women after a biblical wicked queen who was ultimately thrown off a rooftop, run over by chariots, and eaten by dogs.
“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.”
A real shame, though it was a shell of its former self by the end. Like everything under the Gawker umbrella, it was a Frankenstein of gossipy bullshit, legit good journalism, edgelord humor, and a devoted comment section of fanatical weirdos. If the comments section here is any indication, they succeeded at taking the "I don't care who I offend" energy of the internet and redirected it against a set of targets who are not used to being the butt of the joke. Sometimes they crossed a line, but not more than any given Twitter user, and with a lot more wit. I could maybe make the argument that what went wrong is that social media gave every fan of that kind of humor a platform to spew it on. You can blame Jezebel, but I blame social media algorithms, because the comments sections themselves tended to be far better moderated than, say, Twitter.
I will go against the grain here and feel bad for this. The staff will now disseminate to other outlets and further spread this infection they call 'journalism'. It was better to have all this toxic waste clustered into one easy to ignore spot.
>Laura Bassett, Jezebel’s most recent editor-in-chief, who departed the site earlier this fall, implored people on X to hire the Jezebel staffers who were let go on Thursday: “My heart is with the entire Jez staff who just got laid off, including incredible abortion reporters at a time when the beat couldn’t be more relevant to national politics. Please hire them.”
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.
I was not particularly fond of Jezebel, but I do think it's an interesting mental exercise to compare how one reacted to this news to how they did/would react to, say, the demise of Rush Limbaugh or Howard Stern. (Or, wrt the comment section, this site.)
This is still repercussions from Thiel's attack on Gawker. In an ideal democracy partisan billionaires should not have this kind of power over our media.
By "Thiel's attack on Gawker", you mean "Gawker's consequences for publishing revenge porn" [1]. If Gawker had published Hogan's sex videos a few years later after revenge porn laws were passed, they wouldn't just have been sued they would have been the perpetrators of a crime.
This really doesn’t change anything about the statement. Peter Thiel had nothing to do with the incident, and utilized it to get them shutdown via the courts. Whether or not it was legal at the time is not relevant to Thiels actions, which were not born from a sense of justice but from a desire for vindication.
yeah, I think it makes for a pretty interesting and grey area. Presumably it is in the interest of society to enforce the laws we have on the books, or we wouldn't have them. Presumably we would want justice for Hogan.
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.
Ok honest question, who was their actual target audience?
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
I have. They read it religiously, and uncritically treated its journalism as the truth. I thought they were being ironic, until I got to know them better.
I think a lot of people act that way because they fear retribution. I've never met a true believer behind closed doors, but I'm pretty openly conservative so maybe people know I'm not going to judge them if they don't parrot the newest internet trend
I can't recall ever reading anything on Jezebel except a piece about a female writer who performed an experiment and submitted her manuscript under a male name and got drastically different feedback when people thought the author was male.
155 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 215 ms ] threadCompanies are stupid sometimes.
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.
I didn't realize they owned The Onion though. Probably doesn't bode well for that publication either.
[1] https://deadspin.com/the-adults-in-the-room-1837487584
Maybe took a major downturn in the past year, but I haven't seen any evidence of that
[1]: https://youtube.com/@TheOnion?si=WyE-hvhrR6cRpFFT
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."
I think we can do with less click bait "journalism" - good riddance.
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.”
... and unlike here, they had to do journalism (in this case, polling their readers) to generate the content with the comments on it. We just get to kibbitz on someone else's reporting.
It's what this site's for.
Hm... Now that I think about it... This is a link aggregator that doesn't run ads. It loads faster than the news sites it links out to, and comments happen over here instead of over there. Is HN part of the problem? Do sites like this pull the online advertising revenue out of journalism that journalism needs to survive?
https://jezebel.com/rush-after-a-rape-on-campus-a-uva-alum-g...
https://jezebel.com/bearing-witness-to-the-rise-of-isis-the-...
https://jezebel.com/a-journey-into-the-righteous-risk-averse...
Should be a solid afternoon's reading I'll check back tomorrow maybe.
How did you use the site? I used to read Lifehacker looking up stuff until around 2009 but gawker was bad way before it became clickbait farms.
The Unabomber predicted the futures today in the 90s. I hope we can agree that one person had more insight than the whole jezebel publication.
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.
https://youtu.be/U_gLDF2dGLY
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)
https://www.similarweb.com/website/jezebel.com/#traffic
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.
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.
https://jezebel.com/were-offering-10-000-for-unretouched-ima...
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.
“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.”
Such a headline opportunity missed.
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-...
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.
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.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollea_v._Gawker
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 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.
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.
Apparently the site was not too well regarded amongst serious feminists.