NYT OPINION: We’re Watching the End of a Digital Media Age. It All Started With Jezebel.
By Ben Smith
Section: Opinion
Source: New York Times
Published Date: May 3, 2023 at 03:00AM
But they didn’t turn out to be the future. Gawker shut down in 2016, briefly revived and shut down again this February. Last month BuzzFeed News closed up shop. The other iconic brand of the era, Vice, is reportedly near bankruptcy and has laid off many journalists in recent weeks. On television, still America’s dominant medium, social media also helped boost a new kind of confrontational, hyperpolitical style, but that seems to be fading, too. Also last month the corporate owners of cable networks pushed out two of the defining voices of the confrontational Trump years, Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon.
Media commentators from CNN to The Financial Times are using the same phrase for this moment: “The end of an era.”
But when did this era in media begin? Where in the media did this remarkable new openness and uncontrollable anger start? Answers, of course, are subjective, and I don’t claim to know who the first person was to be searingly honest online or demonstratively mad on the internet. But to understand the period we all lived through, we need to give it a beginning and an end. And when I went back to find the origins of this media moment while researching a book on our recent history, the earliest, brightest sparks I saw came from a particular place.
The site was Jezebel, a blog started in 2007 by the founder of the sharp-edged media gossip site Gawker, Nick Denton. Jezebel wasn’t intended to be revolutionary. He started it in the hopes of attracting makeup advertisements. But the woman he hired to create the blog, Anna Holmes, had an agenda of her own. She had been an editor at Glamour quietly raging at the two-dimensional women Condé Nast’s magazines and their rivals portrayed, and the vapid content she churned out when the magazine’s hottest topics were “sex and angels.”
By Ben Smith
Section: Opinion
Source: New York Times
Published Date: May 3, 2023 at 03:00AM
The feminist site Jezebel presaged major changes in the way America talks about race and gender and pioneered the fusion of audience, writers, politics and identity.
Ten years ago, a group of digital media companies thought the future belonged to us. New brands like Vice, Gawker, The Huffington Post, Business Insider and BuzzFeed News, which I helped start, had begun as blogs or something similar, outsider voices with audiences who were sick of the stuffy mainstream media. They’d grown steadily on the internet, and when Facebook arrived, they exploded with the social platform. They became expert in telling stories in a way people would like and share, and their links became omnipresent in readers’ newsfeeds. Their voices dominated the influential, sometimes toxic conversations on Twitter.But they didn’t turn out to be the future. Gawker shut down in 2016, briefly revived and shut down again this February. Last month BuzzFeed News closed up shop. The other iconic brand of the era, Vice, is reportedly near bankruptcy and has laid off many journalists in recent weeks. On television, still America’s dominant medium, social media also helped boost a new kind of confrontational, hyperpolitical style, but that seems to be fading, too. Also last month the corporate owners of cable networks pushed out two of the defining voices of the confrontational Trump years, Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon.
Media commentators from CNN to The Financial Times are using the same phrase for this moment: “The end of an era.”
But when did this era in media begin? Where in the media did this remarkable new openness and uncontrollable anger start? Answers, of course, are subjective, and I don’t claim to know who the first person was to be searingly honest online or demonstratively mad on the internet. But to understand the period we all lived through, we need to give it a beginning and an end. And when I went back to find the origins of this media moment while researching a book on our recent history, the earliest, brightest sparks I saw came from a particular place.
The site was Jezebel, a blog started in 2007 by the founder of the sharp-edged media gossip site Gawker, Nick Denton. Jezebel wasn’t intended to be revolutionary. He started it in the hopes of attracting makeup advertisements. But the woman he hired to create the blog, Anna Holmes, had an agenda of her own. She had been an editor at Glamour quietly raging at the two-dimensional women Condé Nast’s magazines and their rivals portrayed, and the vapid content she churned out when the magazine’s hottest topics were “sex and angels.”
Read more at: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/03/opinion/jezebel-gawker-buzzfeed-ben-smith.html
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