Jezebel, I Hardly Knew Ye

About a year and a half ago, I discovered Jezebel. And I fell in time-killing, page-refreshing love. The blog had a pretty unique mix of news, politics and pop culture, all viewed through a feminist lens. It touched on alot of issues that are important to me, but in a snarky, irreverent, entertaining way.

Well, those days are gone. Sadly, Jezebel has betrayed me and now I have the data to prove it.





Jezebel is a horse in the stable of the Nick Denton/Gawker Media empire. It launched with a bang in July 2007 when their offer of a $10,000 prize for an unretouched cover photo from a big ladymag led to the dramatic reveal of Faith Hill as an actual human being (as opposed to the plastic glamour-cyborg published on the cover of Redbook).


Granted this coup de journalism was more monetary lubrication than reportage, but still- it was a pretty sensational, facade-busting way to come into the saturated women's media market. And it set the tone for alot of what came after- namely, revealing the market-driven nonsense spoon-fed to women for the bullshit that it is and shining a feminist spotlight on alot of the misogynistic (overt or not) crap that goes on in our world. With a healthy dose of humor to make the medicine go down.

All was well.

Then came the recession. There was "restructuring" and layoffs. And still, I thought, all was well. I mean, there might be less posting and different voices, but surely the content would remain the same? After all it is Jezebel's content and refusal to dumb-down that made the blog popular in the first place.

WRONG.

Since September-ish I've noticed a steady falling-off in, I don't know, the worthiness of the things Jez chooses to post about. In the days leading up to the hols, the drop-off became pretty steep. So now, with the holidays over, I decided to try to analyze, in a totally amateur fashion, NowJezebel versus PastJezebel. I categorized the attributes of every post put up yesterday, Monday, January 5th, 2009 and compared them to the posts of Monday, January 7th, 2008.

Here are the criteria I looked at:

1. Category/subject- ie, fashion, news, celebrity, etc.

2. Whether the post required an author or a journalist as opposed to an intern with an RSS feed. Is it just an image? Just a link to a real article? I did not count short summaries of articles, but I did decide to count any longer summaries, particularly if they were summarized through a lens of opinion or position.

3. Whether there was any sign of analysis, opinion or thought. I also credited the sharing of personal info or anecdotes. This is another of the things that made OldJezebel so fun- you got to know the editors and contributors through their posts.

4. Whether or not I personally was interested in or amused by the post. Obviously this one is completely subjective, but I like to think that I am fairly representative of the average Jezebel reader.

Here are the spreadsheets:

Monday, January 7th, 2008

Monday, January 5th 2009

Bottom line, the data supports exactly what I felt in my gut and in my increasing boredom with the posts on Jez. More celebrity crap, less news or feminist issues. More quick links and short posts, less actual writing. More of the hated TMZ-like paparazzied snap judgments. Less personality in the writing.

Here's how it broke down:

Jezebel Comparison

Publish at Scribd or explore others:

Kinda sad, no? That's a pretty conclusive ~10% fall-off in all criteria. The one thing I was suprised about was that there wasn't appreciably more Snap Judgments, cause lord, it feels like there's a new one every time i refresh nowadays. I guess cause there's less worthwile content posted between them...

And qualitatively, there was one post yesterday that particularly struck me as emblematic of the change. This item, "Couple Splits over Extreme PMS," is definitely something that would have elicited something more than a link and a pull quote in the days of OldJezebel. Comments on the way PMS, something inherent to female physiology and connected to propogation of the freakin species, is still so taboo and stigmatized that this woman was not only nearly divorced over it but didn't even realize that her symptoms were extreme? Maybe about why medication is always the instant answer to "female trouble"? Certainly at least an anecdote about the Jez editor's personal experiences with boyfriends and PMS. But no. Just a link, a pic and a pull quote. I'm all for commenter participation, but allowing them to generate ALL your content is just lazy.

I know Nick Denton and the most of the Jez editors would argue that this is temporary and due to the recession. Well, its a slippery slope guys, and I don't see you climbing back up.

Pour one out for OldJezebel. RIP.

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Eye for an Eye

Four years ago Ameneh Bahrami was blinded after a man she had refused to marry poured sulfuric acid over her head. Now, an Iranian court has ruled that five drops of the acid be put in each of her attacker's eyes. Bahrami emotionally stated, "At an age where I should be putting on a wedding dress, I am asking for someone's eyes to be dripped with acid. I am doing that because I don't want this to happen to any other women." I understand her reaction, I understand the desire to show people that there are consequences for such horrible examples of social violence. But...


An eye for an eye? Really? Hammurabi's code was created in 1760 BC- hasn't the idea of justice evolved at all since then? Isn't part of the reason for a modern legal system to ameliorate individual desire for revenge? Retribution is not justice. Torture is not justice. The best thing that can be said about this (and it is a very good thing) is that the crime is being taken seriously by the courts. After all, this is a region where honor killings, disfugurements, stoning and myriad other forms of social violence go ignored, unreported and unprosecuted. I hope that other victims of such violence take courage from Ameneh's example and demand justice. But I also hope they remember that women's rights cannot be separated from human rights. One cannot be achieved at the expense of the other- that is a dangerous road that leads toward no rights at all.

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Hide Your Firstborns

Cause this is some End of Days shit, right here.




I'm freaked out by this sudden plethora of species undergoing a catastrophic population decline. I mean, we've had "endangered species" for decades, and there are plenty of animals and ecosystems we're driving into steady decline. Loss of habitat (generally and due to global warming), pollution, over-hunting/fishing...these have been in the works for a while. Yeah, its starting to catch up with us in a big way, but its still something we've been able to see coming.

But for the last couple years there has been an increasing trickle of news stories with headlines like "Mystery Deaths Spark Fears of _____ Extinction". The sudden, devastating spread of colony collapse disorder among honey bees is the most famous, but there also dramatic die-offs among amphibians, North American bats, oak trees and probably a bunch more that I haven't heard of. And probably even more that no one has heard of. This is scary to me. After all, the accelerating decline of, say, polar bears is sad and totally our fault, but it doesn't give you Ten Biblical Plagues images like this one:



With the trees its not a rush of plague death, but its equally spooky. It seems that oaks in many areas of America produced ZERO acorns this year. None. People talk about walking in the forests near their home and just feeling like something was wrong. They couldn't figure out what it was until they realized they didn't hear the familiar crunch of acorns underfoot or the the thwock of one hitting the ground. I have a feeling we're in for a lot more of these unsettling absences when we go out into the natural world.

And I don't get how cavalier some of the scientists in that article are. Its always "cyclical" or a "bad season"...until suddenly you're looking at population collapse. Here's a quote: "What's there to worry about? If you're a squirrel, its a big worry. But its no problem for the oak tree. They live a long time. They'll produce acorns when they're ready to." Setting aside the potential for thousands of starving squirrels mobbing family pets and small children, I would think that something as unusual as zero production would generate a little more concern from that guy, especially given the equally unheard-of problems occuring in the populations of other species. And especially especially given that there is starting to be a pretty strong consensus that we're in the midst of a sixth mass extinction event, with extinction rates thought to be higher than any previous extinction event, and estimates that as much as 50% of species will be gone by the end of the 21st century. Come on, dude, why you think oak trees are immune?

I also like how "EUREKA!" everyone gets when some research team can stick a name on whatever disease is cutting down a species. "Oh its Chytridiomycosis that's killing all the frogs. Phew, glad we figured that one out." Well, I don't know about you guys but I would be more concerned with why all these diseases and disorders are crawling out of the woodwork to decimate perfectly well-adapted animal populations. And I'd want to do more to predict which one of these diseases is going to develop a taste for h. sapiens, y'know?

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Eloquence on a Sad Issue

Olbermann responds to Prop 8 passage with poignance and heartfelt eloquence. There's nothing I can say that would add to this. Please watch, please tell other people to watch.

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