Originally published at: Jezebel to close after owner G/O Media fails to find buyer | Boing Boing
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A little bonus for thin-skinned fascist billionaire Peter Thiel, unfortunately.
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Maybe Jezebel can pull a Deadspin to Defector and become Femme Fatale or something.
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i dont know the details but i can only assume the rest of that sentence originally read: “… and we couldn’t find a way to make enough money to satisfy our retirement needs.”
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Jesus, they don’t even have any mention of this on their website. The only way to find out about it over there is the people discussing the news in their comments.
I don’t know if there’ll ever be a media owner worse than Zaslav or Iger, but the Herb is way, way, way up there…
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It just kills me to see what they’ve done to AV Club. Once some of the most intelligent popular culture and film criticism and discussion, now a breeding ground for articles like “25 Worst Movies Featuring Musicians”.
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This is the same Jezebel link which is still active off the header on all the Gizmodo sub-sites (e.g. io9, A.V. Club, Deadspin, Jalopnik, Kotaku, Quartz, …and the rest)? well, Gawker stayed active until just about a month ago, with year-old content still loading. Always kinda lugubriously amused with dead but still served webpages, here’s Linux Gazette 12 years dead and still popping out of its grave nice and fast (see also the yet to be abandoned subreddit: abandonedporn)
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Is there anywhere else that’s doing the kind of stuff AV Club used to? I really enjoyed the episode-by-episode coverage they used to do, but now it’s really just become a beat by beat recap of the show. I know what happened in the show, I just watched it, I’ve come to read some commentary.
For instance, Jason Torchinsky and David Tracy left Jalopnik and started The Autopian (https://www.theautopian.com) and are doing some really good work over there. Is there anywhere like that for film/tv stuff?
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Sort of loosely related, kind of, in a way…
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They severely damaged one of their other sites by driving away all their good writers.
Jalopnik used to be articles written by car enthusiasts. Now it’s just another car website.
The old writers jumped ship to form their own site, The Autopian, that’s maybe a little too far on the eccentric car nerd side of things. It was better when they were somewhat tempered by corporate limitations and not all feature articles on conceptual taillights.
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They drove away readers with their tactics too. I remember being an active reader of various Gawker media sites, and then one day they posted a video of a person being burned alive. Cross posted it to all their properties.
Now, I don’t deny the harsh realities of war and torture IS a war crime… but I was reading about technology. I didn’t ask for a non-content warning auto playing video of a prisoner of war being tortured to death by burning.
Once they did that, they lost me forever. I’m sorry to see Jezebel go but hope their writers land at places with more scruples.
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True dat! To find anything worth reading you have to sift through all the “Ten new shows you should watch on Netflix” articles.
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I never visited AV Club but Mary Sue has some interesting commentary on shows
I’m sad about Jezebel. They’ve done such an amazing job on the stories about abortion
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RIP Linux Gazette and UserFriendly,
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I was just reading their coverage of this news:
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Hey, speak for yourself. As far as I’m concerned there can never be too many articles on conceptual taillights.
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Don’t get me wrong - I love that they’re all so enthusiastic about it. I just wish there was an option somewhere in the middle.
I’d still read all of them anyhow though.
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The web really is continually becoming a worse place (and journalism along with it). Being on this part of the trajectory is awful, but I’m terrified about where this is going to end up. Things of real value are being lost, with nothing to replace them.
We’ve got the enshitification process going on everywhere, we’ve got journalistic sites getting shut down or trimmed down to skeleton staff, even small personal sites aren’t what they used to be. Someone was complaining recently about how the “cool” websites had disappeared - the Flash games, the eccentric little sites and blogs, etc. My first reaction was that despite old sites closing, there must be the same number of similar new sites out there, as there are so many more people on the web, but they might represent a smaller percentage of sites. But then it occurred to me that social media sucked up a lot of energy - people who used to have blogs gave them up to tweet. Social media was there and easy, and people started altering what they made so that it would fit into those constraints - but the weird, interesting stuff gets lost, because it doesn’t fit into the engagement algorithms.
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I actually tried starting my old comics blog back up again a couple years ago, and I just couldn’t keep it going. Partly because I’d moved too far away from any comics stores, and partly from how badly I was getting worn down trying to write multiple posts a week. And it didn’t help that I had no readers. Blogging in the social media age is just too damn hard. 
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