History
Jezebel was launched on May 21, 2007, as the 14th Gawker blog. According to founding editor Anna Holmes, the site stemmed from the desire to better serve Gawker.com's female readers, who made up 70% of the site's readership at the time. The Jezebel manifesto states that the site "will attempt to take all the essentially meaningless but sweet stuff directed our way and give it a little more meaning, while taking more the serious stuff and making it more fun, or more personal, or at the very least the subject of our highly sophisticated brand of sex joke. Basically, we wanted to make the sort of women's magazine we'd want to read." One of the site's guiding principles, according to Holmes, is to avoid saying "misogynist things about women's weight."
At Jezebel's launch, the editorial staff included Holmes, who previously worked at Star and InStyle; editor Moe Tkacik, a former Wall Street Journal reporter; and associate editor Jennifer Gerson, a former assistant to Elle editor-in-chief Roberta Myers. Gerson left the site in May 2008 to become the Women's Editor for the Polo Ralph Lauren website; Tkacik departed in August 2008 to work at Gawker.com, after briefly accepting and then rescinding a job offer from Radar. Tkacik was subsequently laid off in a company-wide restructuring the following October. Holmes left the site in June 2010; Jessica Coen replaced her as editor-in-chief. Other current staffers include Dodai Stewart, Tracie Egan, Katie J.M. Baker, Lindy West, and Madeleine Davies.
On its first day of operation, Jezebel offered a $10,000 reward for the best example of a magazine cover photo prior to being retouched for publication. The site received between five and 10 submissions. The winning entry, announced in July 2007, was a photo of Faith Hill that was used on the July cover of Redbook. Jezebel pointed out 11 different ways the photo had been drastically altered, including radically distorting Hill's left arm. Redbook editor-in-chief Stacy Morrison said that their retouching of Hill's photo was in line with industry standards and that Redbook was investigating how the unretouched image had been released. Media coverage of the controversy included discussion and interviews on NBC's Today show and in several other publications.
In December 2007, Jezebel reached 10 million monthly views. Gawker owner Nick Denton pointed to Jezebel's soaring popularity as one reason for a drop-off in traffic at the company's main site, Gawker.com, which fell from more than 11 million page views in October 2007 to about eight million in December.
A July 2008 article in the Ottawa Citizen included Jezebel as one of several sites launched as part of the "online estrogen revolution," referring to a comScore finding that community-based women's websites were tied with political sites as the Internet's fastest-growing category. The article also cited Ad Age's research showing that women's Internet use is outpacing men's.
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