Jezebel is dead. After 16 years, the women’s news site, launched by Gawker Media under the editor Anna Holmes in 2007, shuttered for good this past week. Its most recent parent company, G/O Media, announced that the site was not sufficiently profitable and that it had not been able to find a buyer. The site’s closure will mean that its robust abortion coverage will cease; so will its investigations into sexual abuse and its feminist critiques of culture and politics. The entire Jezebel staff lost their jobs.
There is one way to see the closing of Jezebel as a symptom of an ailing media business. Journalism layoffs have become something of a grim ritual, with dozens of talented, hardworking and well-sourced writers taking to social media to announce their need for new work whenever the industry turns the corner on a bad quarter. Media companies stumbled at the turn of the last century, when the advent of the internet made print advertising dramatically less profitable; they never recovered. Digital media arose, but has not been able to eke out sufficient profit growth as social media evolves and fractures, and traffic becomes harder to juice. Jezebel’s slow death over the past few years was exacerbated by the injection of private equity into the media industry, a medicine that has turned out to be worse than the disease.
