Gaithersburg maryland. This hourlong program is next on both tv. Today we are welcoming anna holmes the founder of the web site jezebel in conversation with john. John is written for many Media Outlets including the New York Times buzzfeed. His novel focuses your captain speaking is a highspeed satirical commentary about celebrity obsession and how Corporate America has learned to capitalize on it. We asked john to speak to and that today since he wrote a satire about 24hour days seven days a week media and not for a while anyway was the 24hour seven days a week media. And the homes founded the web site jezebel in 2007 to provide an on line presence for women by women about everything that women care about. Just about drove deep into nittygritty subjects that are covered by todays media. This includes everything from conversations about rape on College Campuses to scathing criticism on equal pay legislation to the pressing needs about beyonces personal life and fashion choices. The editors and columnists at jezebel have shattered the tiny glass ball ball that uses around the label of feminist media. They have no trouble calling themselves ladies. While they put the magnifying glass on the way women are portrayed in the media is the reality of what women deal with every day and how women view themselves. The commentary is sometimes irreverent and sometimes heartbreaking but always poignant. The site has become a mouthpiece for generation of women and men who see open discussion on an eclectic array of subjects is a thing of normal intelligent multidimensional people do. The ideas that the voices speaking to us through the media should reflect that. Anna and. Editors have put together a collection of those voices in a new book called the book of jezebel and illustrated encyclopedia of lady things. Its not a reprinting of the web site post but an original cultural review in alphabetical order in the state of womens lives today. Please welcome the founder of the web site jezebel the editor of the book of Jezebel Anna Holmes is interviewed by john matlin. [applause] thank you. Its a pleasure to be here and a pleasure to be with a fellow new york writer. Talking about the book of jezebel we can talk about this until we talk about the web site. Jezebel and is no longer working there this month celebrates its seventh anniversaanniversa ry of jezebel so talk to us about why you started this web site and what you hope to achieve . I had forgotten it would be seven years this month. I think it was launched on may 21 of 2007. Normally i would remember this and counting the days but i have forgotten it in seven years. To answer your question why i created it . I was asked to start a site for the Parent Company gawker media that was a womens web site out of the cover of celebrity insights and fashion and i had worked in a number of womens magazines. Throughout my career until that point. This was in 2006 that i started talking about starting a site for them. I have been working with that since i graduated from college in 1995 so a little over a decade. He also worked with about her of celebrity celebrity magazines for it and never enjoyed working at celebrity magazines to make a living but it was writing and editing that got me excited. Often it got me very angry because i thought it was quite patronizing, these magazines for patronizing to the leaders. Most of them that were female and tended to have a narrow definition of what it meant to be female and they assumed womens lives revolves around a few things namely shopping the acquisition of a mate, a male, dieting makeup etc. And gossip. Thats not to say that there are women you arent interested in those things that we are a lot more complex than the magazines. But i was working forward giving us credit for it. So when i was asked to start a web site for gawker media it would be a womens web site that covers topics and because gawker media is known for publishing sites that kind of punch up at institutions. So for example their sports sites tend to go after espn quite a bit. Their tech site has a history of going after apple. Some of the sites are somewhat scrappy and telling the truth in many ways about histories that have been kind of glossed over. It felt like it would be a perfect opportunity for me to do a womens web site that would go out to womens magazine that i have worked for but also to present an idea of what it meant to be a woman that was more complex and diverse and more reflective of 21st century america. That was another complaint of mine with regards to a lot of these magazines that they tended to be overwhelmingly they tended to feature over women played white very thin 22yearolds. None of the women far away from being 22 but most of them did not at that description and were much more diverse ethnically and in terms of their Sexual Orientation than the media was again representing. It felt like the perp benefit to do a site that would go after magazines and be its own womens magazine and the one that i would have love to read. I wouldnt call it a womens magazine. It was a blog posting 50 or 60 things that they. It was very high metabolism metabolism. We were also aggregating things that appeared elsewhere. We did do original stuff but for the most part you are reactor in tube things in the more traditional Mainstream Media and the ways in which the Mainstream Media talked about women thought about women critiqued women. They basically wanted to have fun doing a very spirited but also serious site. Yeah shall he going to read this is from the book of jezebel and this entry is cosmopolitan magazine. Pioneering frustrated womens magazine that began advocating for female sexual freedom in the 60s under editorinchief Helen Miller Brown and then defaults into sex advice mediocre fashion spreads and paranoid articles that tell you your man may be cheating if he talks to much doesnt talk much much talk enough or briefs. That is kind of the voice of jezebel and anna is responsible for that voice. You brought up an interesting point. You are putting out 50 to 60 pieces a day. There are a lot of people that their dream is to start a web site into started blog but then when they started or they started and they find success like you have. Talk a little bit about what thats like. That sounds to me like a dream job that would be a huge grind. Job was was not my dream job. At the time that i agreed to do it i worked for in style magazine which was not one of the womens magazine that i hated working for. It was pretty straightforward. It wasnt giving diet tips or instructing its readers on how to keep a man by being good in bed. It was here are some outfits for spring that my dream was not to start a blog. This was 2006 and on my friends who were in the media were working on the web. They were all working on magazines. I started working in magazines. It certainly was a consumer of the internet. I read blogs. I used the internet to buy things. I would read the New York Times on line or cnn. Com but i was not someone who saw it as a career opportunity. I think a lot of it was because that then web sites were not paying very well. I was not making a lot of money but i certainly didnt want to be making 18,000 a year slaving away on a blog like some of the bloggers i heard were doing. A lot of them were a lot younger than me so it all into my lap. When i was hired to do to this site i was told that it would be matched to my salary at that at style. Blogs and web sites and i hate to use both those terms because they think they can be very interchangeable. Media Company Started investing more money in the internet and paying their employees. Error rates. I just wanted to make sure that i had never dreamed to working on the web that i dreamed of working on magazines but once a site launched in may of 2007 so we have six months to work on it to plot it out and planted out. I hired two people and we test blog and it launched. I wanted it to be successful but i think i was taken aback by how quickly, how strong the response to it was and how quickly that response came. With him i would say two months there were people on this site readers who were in the comment sections referring to themselves as jaycees which made me very and comfortable. I hadnt predicted this would happen. I dont want to say i was flattered. I was excited at their loyalty and their devotion but i was also terrified by it because i had not expected they would be such a media embrace of the site and what we were doing. I had no clue as to whether was going to work out. The fact is the site had not existed before. There were sites that took a critical view of pop culture and gender politics and they tended to be labors of love. They were not funded by a larger company. They were notforprofit. The women who worked on them were not being compensated very much if at all. So i didnt really have a model other than what ive wanted to see and a lot of my frustrations that it will to to that point by working in womens media. I didnt know for but was going to succeed. There was an abs web site editor that looked at an early version of the site before it went live our test site and express some concern as to whether it was succeed. On one hand i was grateful for his honesty. On the other hand it did light a fire in me to prove them wrong. So i felt like we had a lot to prove but also had a lot to lose because i had no indication it would be successful. If ive been asked to start a web site for women about celebrity sex in the fashion and more straightforward way if i copied in style magazine and put it on the web i would have felt confident there would have been readership for that because it was a good track record in the marketplace for that content. But to go after that content or to talk about politics whether gender politics or racial or electoral politics and talk about that at length and with such consistency i wasnt sure there was going to be a big enough reaction. I knew there were other women interested in these things but i decided the audience was bigger than i might think. You are not with the web site anymore but its growing. The readership has grown. How quickly you to see that growth when he started . Its almost expected when youre with gawker media to get that growth quickly. I think the site had launched independent of gawker media i dont think it would have run as quick as it did. There were web sites that were beloved and work very well now and we were able to at times to content and post it on sister or brother sites when it related to the content that they published. That would bring in and expose a hole at the readership to what we were doing. I do think if it hadnt been part of the gawker media we would have had a harder time building an odd is that quickly. I could be wrong though. Maybe we were the first to do something in a particular space at that level. But its hard for me to remember exactly the audience members back then and how they grew. It grew pretty rapidly but i think the more successful the site got which is to say not only the amount of traffic it was getting but the amount of feedback both in the comments by the readers and by outside media the bigger it got a more positive feedback, the more terrifying it was. If you worked at an even a highr level, we would get an even better result. And i think there was also the fear that it was all going to be taken away. So that the success didnt lead to complacency. And im not saying it should have. I think we were very competitive, and there started to be sites that were popping up within about a year, year and a half that were very obviously meant to compete with jezebel and that made me feel even more competitive. And, again, these are not, im not making judgments. These are not good or bad things, but there was never a moment when i sat back and thought, wow, were successful, and i can relax. Or felt that i think it was only in retrospect, i think it was after i stopped running the site that i was able to look back and maybe enjoy some of the narrative that had been playing out for threeplus years. And not all the feedback was positive. So you guys have been, the writers have been called everything from lesbian shit asses to hijackers of the feminist movement. Im going to read this is a quote from a review in the daily caller called angry ladies of jezebel. This is about the book. When reading the book of jezebel, you are confronted not just with humor, but deep, deep rage. Not anger, rage. It goes much deeper than politics, although this is where this rage finds its expression. Thats okay. Pollen. Pollen, yeah. Whats your reaction . Why are you so angry, and why are you so full of rage, anna . [laughter] i love that review so much. I really do. It was, i actually told jon on the phone before this event that if youd asked me to write a review of the book by the daily caller, like a parody of what they would write, that would be it. [laughter] so when it came out, you know, i started sending it to all of the other writers in the book and the staffers and my friends, because it was so funny. It was predictable. Women who are full of rage or i think theres something in his review about daddy issues. Yeah. It goes for a long [laughter] i mean i just read a little bit. It gets into it. Its very predictable, you know . I wonder whether the writer of that review wasnt having some fun in some way, just kind of hitting all the notes youd think hed hit when talking about women of opinions. Who he, obviously, doesnt like. But its funny that he would describe the book that way because i think the book is very pointed and very upon nateed just like the opinionated just like the site was. There are definitely things for women and men to be irritated, frustrated, outraged about. And some of those are, you know, there are topics in the book that definitely touch on some of those things. But i wouldnt, you know, like my reaction to that review is that hes kind of selectively reading it or i mean, i think he did say it was funny. He complimented it. It was a backhanded compliment. Yeah, thats okay. He said its intelligence, but theyre so angry. I dont know that i would describe the they, meaning the staffers on the site and the writers of the book, as being angry. I would describe, i would say a lot of us are probably frustrated by the lack of discussion up until very recently about issues like pay equity, the assault on abortion rights. I mean, you know, i can tick off a list of things. But, yeah. I guess i also kind of reject the idea that theres something wrong with being angry, and i dont think that angers a permanent state. I think you can be irritated and frustrated and angry about things but also not live your life in which youre Walking Around curled up into a ball of fury, which is what i think he was kind of accusing us of. So im not really sure how else to respond to that, because it was a somewhat predictable sort of review, and i was kind of tickled by it. Also weve heard that stuff so many times before that it doesnt bother yeah, of course. You know . I mean, my perspective of if you havent read book, my perspective of it is i didnt know if it was going to be for me, but i found myself laughing through a lot of it. Its almost an encyclopedia of pop culture with an edge. And i wouldnt say rage, i would say it has an edge to it because youre talking about issues that are dear to everyones heart, and you have a very pointed, you know, you have a point of view that youre expressing. Just, you know, part of the point of the site or what i wanted to do was to use pop culture as a entry point to talk about gender politics. Because i was born in 1973, so i was an adolescent in the 80s, and certainly pop culture was important in the 80s. We all watched john hughes movies, but it didnt seem to have as much power over me and my peers as celebrity and pop culture do today. And i do think that a lot of celebrity culture is very disturbing in the messages that it sends to young women. Again, i didnt grow up ignorant of the fact that young women are expected to be so many things to so many different people and that in many ways sometimes their sexuality is valued above all else. But i feel that it got, it became a somewhat insane level in the early part of the 21st century. And it was very disturbing to me to think of 14yearolds whose only content and only content that they were subsisting on was celebrity gossip that reveled in pointing out cellulite, you know, on a 40yearold actress. So in a way we could attract young women as readers with Celebrity News or discussion, but in a way that wasnt denigrating of females. But also in a way that would kind of expose them to Media Literacy and gender politics. Then we could have some substantive discussions about superficial things. But also just have, you know, serious discussions about sub instant i things as well substantive things as well. These things could coexist. So thats what we were trying to do with the site, and i think its what you see in books a well. I dont know that id call it a pop culture book. I guess i feel theres lots of womens history in there too. There is a lot i shouldnt have i havent actually counted up number of entries in the book that fit into one category versus another. I think pop culture is definitely the driving force behind the book, i think its definitely the driving force behind the site. Well, talking about that, when youre trying to put together the book of jezebel, how do you decide as the editor, how are you deciding what goes and what stays . Because theres so many varied things, and one of the things i admired about the editing process is that youre linking, youre linking Something Like the movie dirty dancing to ayn rand. And how you do that is, its really interesting because i actually, you know, as youre reading through this stuff, i had to google what the fountainhead had to do with dirty dancing, there was a connection, but i wouldnt have known about that. Well, i cant take credit for that. I oversaw the book, and i but the individual writers of those entries were, you know, they share a sensibility with me, but their sensibility is also very independent of mine. I just happened to admire their sensibility. And so, for example, that entry which i believe was written by a former staffer she was very obsessed with the film dirty dancing and its commentary about, you know, all sorts of things, class, race, abortion, politics, and theres a scene in the book in which one of the sharkier characters is toting around an ayn rand book. So, you know [inaudible] yeah. It was the collective, it was the collective intelligence and wisdom of the writers of the book and on the site who brought owl those little nuggets in there. I mean, certainly i asked them to not just write entries that would sound like theyd been pulled off wikipedia, you know . Somewhat dry and overarching. But t