Earlier this year, Ben Smith, former editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News and former New York reporter Times journalist, published a book called “Traffic: genius, rivalry and illusion in the billion-dollar race to go viral.” It explores the creation of and competition among well-funded news and culture websites—among them BuzzFeed News and the Huffington Post—that began in the early 2000s, just as the professional blogosphere was taking off. A day after the book’s release on May 2, the Times published an article written by Smith guest essay, titled “We are witnessing the end of the digital media era. It all started with Jezebel.
Jezebel is an influential feminist website that I created in 2007. Smith had devoted an entire chapter of “Traffic” to the story of the site’s creation, its failures and its successes. He was complimentary, calling it “a new type of cultural politics,” one that builds “a community that rejects old gender and power structures and attempts to shape new ones.”
One could be forgiven for discerning a slight difference in tone between “Traffic” and the essay published in the Times. Smith’s book takes an in-depth look at the impact of a number of websites, but his Times The essay seemed to argue that Jezebel in particular reflected a “remarkable new openness” and “uncontrollable anger” on the Internet. As he said: “What makes Jezebel so relevant today is that it was one of the first places to crystallize the powerful forces that would define social media over the next decade: the politics and identity. »
I agreed that Jezebel embodied a “remarkable new opening” and was flattered by Smith’s acknowledgment of the site’s continuing influence. But some of what he wrote made me think. His essay positions the site as the beginning of an era that will culminate with the election of Donald Trump in 2016. I wanted nothing to do with that. As for “uncontrollable anger”? The expression seemed sexist and paternalistic.
I live in Los Angeles, so I wasn’t immediately privy to the trial conversation. People started texting me around 7 a.m. AM PST In the darkness of my cozy bedroom, I took a quick look at the work on my phone, admired the accompanying photo of myself (it was a good photo, and I can be conceited), I rolled my eyes at some of the conclusions. , then I go back to bed.
About half an hour later, I was awakened again, this time by a phone call from a friend. It appeared that a small negative reaction to the article was brewing online, particularly on Twitter. Some readers felt that by focusing his attention on Jezebel, Smith was blaming women for the culture of outrage. I read this with interest – after all, women are blamed for many things and don’t get enough credit for others – but I also didn’t have the energy to respond to it. I placed my phone on my nightstand and pulled the covers back over my head.
I felt ambivalent. The essay had awakened something from the past that I had failed to understand: what role, if any, I might have played in the evolution of mocking discourse online. Smith did not intend to answer this question: some of his language, perhaps deliberately, was a little vague. But he linked Jezebel’s often combative commenters to would-be users of social media platforms like Twitter, accusing the site of sparking “red-hot online mobs.” Jezebel was created years before the widespread adoption of social media, back when people still checked blogs and then refreshed them to see what new posts had appeared. According to Smith, “the immediate passions of social media picked up where they left off.”
Anger can be explosive. It can spark social movements and destroy calcified ideas about sex, gender, class and race. It’s also fair to say that when women express it – or are accused of expressing it – they are easily, sometimes viciously, mocked and derided. This is perhaps doubly true for women of color, who must contend not only with sexist tropes, but also with racial stereotypes and fear-mongering around anger and tone. (My deputy editor at Jezebel, Dodai Stewart, and I are black. The widely held assumption that the site was staffed entirely by white women may have done us a favor.)
But here’s the problem with tone: in many cases it do matter. And although I often agreed politically and personally with our commentators, their exaggerated rhetoric could alienate me. I worried that this kind of rhetoric might offend new readers and that it would detract from the new dialogue about gender politics that we were trying to influence and bring into the mainstream. Is there such a thing as “too much” anger? If so, who was I to determine what “too much” is? I felt torn, so I kept these questions mostly to myself.
When Jezebel launched, I was thirty-three years old, and I was soon to be thirty-four. The events that led to the creation of the site have already been discussed numerous times. So here’s the short version: Disillusioned with the state of American women’s media, I was given the unique opportunity to create and oversee a women’s media entity – in this case, a website. I imagined him as someone with a lot of personality, with humor and sharpness. I wanted it to combine wit, intelligence and anger, providing women – many of whom had been taught to believe that “feminism” was a dirty word or a word to avoid – with a model for critical thinking about gender and race that seemed accessible. and entertaining. Like one of my colleagues, Moe Tkacik, wrotein a first article, “Jezebel is a blog for women that will try to take all the essentially meaningless but sweet things that are addressed to us and give them a little more meaning, while taking the (more) serious things and making them funnier, or more personal, or at the very least the subject of our very sophisticated brand of sex joke. Basically, we wanted to create the kind of women’s magazine that we would like to read.
Of course, feminist websites and blogs were already exploring a new type of politics among young American women. But unlike Jezebel, they rarely incorporated robust, sustained analysis of pop culture, and they existed on the periphery of the Internet. (They also didn’t have the funding or other resources that my team and I enjoyed.) These independent sites, with names like Feministing, Feministe, Racialicious, and AngryBlackBitch, had cultivated a devoted readership, but their audiences were small and their language was often academic.
Our audience, on the other hand, started big and grew quickly, reaching over ten million page views per month in the first year. (We had the benefit of being part of a larger blog network, anchored by Gawker, which we would surpass in terms of traffic in less than three years.) I was delighted, if a little surprised, by the immediate passion and loyalty of our readers. Two months after the site’s launch, some readers spontaneously called themselves “Jezebelles” or “Jezzies” in the comments sections of the site. Familiar pseudonyms and avatars began to appear as regular readers filled the threads, chatting with each other and, occasionally, with the site’s editors.
The majority of our reviewers were very good. Smart, observant, knowledgeable, dynamic and incredibly funny, they added context and nuance to the stories we published and pushed us to do better. Less than a year after launching Jezebel, they even attracted attention from New York Times, which described them as meeting up for drinks and renting vacation homes together. But sometimes they were bad: sarcastic, mean, intellectually dishonest, and intimidating to each other. And sometimes they were awful, behaving like a twisted Greek chorus trying to upstage the main performers. (Years later, as comments on websites began to migrate to social media, I realized that they were the main performers.) “That’s kind of the nature of having a community of commenters,” Erin Ryan, an early commenter turned writer for the site, told me. “People are starting to think they should have a say in what happens there. And that’s really not how publishing works. At one point in 2009, I toyed with the idea of turning the site over to commenters for a day, just to watch them fail.
