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Jezebel Shutting Down, Parent Company G/O Media Laying Off 23 Staffers

Merrill Brown exits company as editorial director

After more than 16 years, Jezebel, the sharp-edged feminist news and opinion website, is shutting down.

Originally launched in 2007 by Gawker Media, Jezebel — which carried the tagline “Sex. Celebrity. Politics. With Teeth” — is being shuttered by current owner G/O Media, after an unsuccessful attempt to sell the site. In addition, G/O Media editorial director Merrill Brown is leaving the company after less than a year as part of a company restructuring.

“As of this week we are making the very, very difficult decision to suspend publication of Jezebel,” G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller wrote in a memo to staff Thursday announcing the shutdown. “Few decisions over the course of my career have been as excruciating, and I want to make clear this is in NO WAY a reflection on the Jezebel editorial team.”

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The shutdown of Jezebel and the G/O Media editorial restructuring will result in a layoff of 23 editorial staffers (including the Jezebel team), Spanfeller wrote in the memo, adding that “Over the longer term we will be adding new positions with updated or perhaps new goals in mind.”

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“Unfortunately, our business model and the audiences we serve across our network did not align with Jezebel’s,” Spanfeller wrote in the memo. “And when that became clear, we undertook an expansive search for a new, perhaps better home that might ensure Jezebel a path forward. It became a personal mission of Lea Goldman [G/O Media deputy editorial director], who worked tirelessly on the project, talking with over two dozen potential buyers. It is a testament to Jezebel’s heritage and bonafides that so many players engaged us. Still, despite every effort, we could not find Jez a new home.”

Laura Bassett quit as Jezebel’s editor-in-chief in August 2023, writing in a post on X/Twitter, “I have reluctantly resigned from Jezebel, because the company that owned us refused to treat my staff with basic human decency.” On Thursday, Bassett said in a post on X, “I’m obviously boiling and have too much to say on this subject. But for now I’ll just say 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.”

Lauren Tousignant, who had been serving as Jezebel’s interim EIC, wrote in a tweet about the site’s shutdown, “Will have more to say soon, but for now, I am just so pissed and so sad, but mostly I’m so pissed.”

WGA East members at Jezebel, in a statement on the company’s shutdown of the site, said, “We are devastated though hardly surprised at G/O Media and Jim Spanfeller’s inability to run our website and their cruel decision to shutter it…. The closure of Jezebel also underscores fundamental flaws in the ad-supported media model where concerns about ‘brand safety’ limit monetizing content about the biggest, most important stories of the day — stories that create huge traffic because people read and share them. A well-run company would have moved away from an advertising model, but instead they are shuttering the brand entirely because of their strategic and commercial ineptitude.”

In his memo, Spanfeller praised Jezebel’s recent editorial coverage and said the team has “continue[d] to do great work in difficult times.” He specifically called out “Their urgent, breakthrough coverage of reproductive rights in this post-Roe era, as well as other key issues core to modern women, affirmed the brand’s storied legacy as the website that changed women’s media forever.”

With Brown’s exit, the top editors of G/O Media’s publications will “report into an office of editorial oversight,” with more details to come about what that is “in the coming days,” Spanfeller wrote.

In 2019, Spanfeller and private-equity firm Great Hill Partners acquired Gizmodo Media Group (previously part of Gawker Media) and The Onion from Univision. New York-based G/O Media’s brands include Gizmodo, The Onion, The A.V. Club, Deadspin, Jalopnik, Kotaku, The Root and Quartz (which it acquired last year).

Spanfeller, the former CEO of Forbes.com, owns a minority stake in G/O Media. In his memo Thursday, he cited “economic headwinds” affecting G/O Media’s financial health.

“The U.S. economy is expanding but the usual increase in marketing dollars that goes along with these types of numbers have not materialized,” Spanfeller wrote. “While we are not enjoying robust financial success currently, we are also not facing as dire a picture as many of our digital media brethren… The best we can hope to do here is to try new things in new ways with as much forethought as possible and to be as willing to accept when we miss the mark as we are to celebrate when we hit it.”

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