Outlets including the New York Times. His novel this is your captain speaking as i highspeed satirical commentary about celebrity obsession and our Corporate America has learned to capitalize on a. We asked john to speak to an imperial rewrote a satire about 24 hours a day seven days a week media the 24 hour and seven day a week media. Founded the website and 2007 dug deep into our range of nitty gritty 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 need to know about beyonce is personal life and fashion choices. The editors and columnists said jezebel have shattered the tiny glass ball that used to surround the label feminist media. They have no trouble calling themselves ladies well they put the magnifying glass and the way women are portrayed, the reality of what women deal with and how women view themselves. The commentary is sometimes irreverent, sometimes heartbreaking, but all is poignant. A mouthpiece for a generation of women and men use the open discussion on an eclectic array of subjects, normal, intelligent, multidimensional people. The idea is that the voices speaking to us through the media should reflect that the reid and and her coeditors to put together a collection of those voices in a new book called the book of jezebel, and illustrated encyclopedia of lady things. It is not a reprinting of website posts, but an original cultural review in alphabetical order on the state of womens lives today. Please welcome the founder of the website jezebel, the editor of the book of jezebel has interviewed by john [applause] thank you. A pleasure to be here and a pleasure to be with a fellow new york writer. Talking about the book of jezebel, we cannot talk about this until we talk about the website. Now, jezebel is no longer working there. This month actually celebrates the seven the anniversary. Talk to us a little bit about why you started this website and what you hope to achieve. I think i have forgotten that it was going to be seven years this month, but youre right. Normally i remember this. Counting down the days, but i forgot a little bit. To answer your question, why i created it, well, i was asked to start a site for the Parent Company that was a womans website. Celebrity and sex and fashion. I worked for a number of womens magazines throughout my career up until that point. This was in 2006 that i started talking about starting a site. I had been working in magazine since i graduated from college in 1995. A little over a decade. And also worked a number of celebrity magazines and had never really enjoyed working at either celebrity magazines a womens magazines. It was a way for me to make a living but it was not the sort of writing or editing that got me excited. In fact it often got me angry because it was quite patronizing to these magazines were quite patronizing to the readers, most for female. They tended to have of very narrow definition of what it meant to be female, and they assumed that womens lives revolved around a few things, namely shopping, the acquisition of some eight, mail, dieting, make up, adds that trip. And gossip. And that is not to say that there are members of are women who are interested in those things, but we are a lot more complex than the magazines that i was working for giving us credit for. And so when i was asked to start a website that would cover these topics, because theyre known for publishing a site that kind of punches up that institutions, for example, tending to you after espn quite a bit. Gizmo has a history of going after apple. The sites are always somewhat scrappy. And they pride themselves on telling the truth in many ways about industries that had been kind of glossed over. It felt like it would be a perfect opportunity for me to do it womans website that would go after womens magazines that i had worked for, but also to of presents an idea of what it meant to be a woman that was more complex and diverse and more reflective of 21st century america. Another complaint of mind with regard to a lot of these magazines. They tended to be overwhelmingly they tended to feature overwhelmingly white, very thin 22 ewalds. None of the women well, far away from being 22, but most of the alumni do did not fit that description. Much more diverse ethnically and in terms of the Sexual Orientation in the media was representing. So it felt like the perfect kind of fit to do a site that would go after womens magazines. In no way its own womens magazine, the one that i would love to have read. I would not call it a womans magazine. Posting 50, 60 things a day. Turnover with regard to this sort of stuff we were putting a bomb line. We were all so aggravating things that appear elsewhere. We did do original stuff, but for the most part we were reacting to and commenting on an pointing out things in a marked traditional Mainstream Media and the ways in which Mainstream Media talked about women, bought about one, critiqued women. Have fun doing a very spirited but also serious site. This is from the book of jezebel. This entry is cosmopolitan. This is a magazine. Pioneering but extremely frustrating american womens magazine that began advocating for female sexual freedom and the late 1950s under editor in chief. But then devolve into recycled sex advice on the ever fashion spread and pernod articles that tell your man may be cheating if he talks too much, does not talk enough, sleeps on this side, calls a certain way to more breeds. So that is kind of the voice of jezebel that anna is responsible for, that voice. You brought up an interesting point. Putting at 50 to 60 pieces a day a lot of people that start. Their dream job is to start a website, start a block. But then when they started or they started and they find it successful, talk a little bit about what that is like. The dream job that would also be a huge grind. The job was not my gene dream job. At the time i agreed to do it i worked for in style magazine which was not one of the womens magazines. It was pretty straightforward. It was not really giving diet tips or instructing its readers on how to keep a man by being good in bed. Here is a celebritys house. Here are some outfits for spring, stuff that i did not really find. My dream was not to start a blocked. This is 2006. None of my friends who worked in media were working on the web. They were all working in magazines. I started working in magazines off. A consumer of the internet, read blocks, i used the internet to buy things, but things on amazon and would read the New York Times online in the dow was not someone who saw it as a career opportunity. A love that was because websites or not paying very well. I was not making a lot of money, but i certainly did not want to be making, you know, 18,000 a year slaving my off on a blogger like some of the bloggers i heard were doing. A lot of them were allowed him to then me. It fell into my lap. And when i was hired to do the side and was told that my salary was going to be matched. So that changed everything. I think that was about when, you know, blog and web sites and i hate to use those terms. I think they can be interchangeable, that is, you know, Media Companies started investing more money in the internet and paying their employees fair rates. I just want to make up i had not really dream of working on the web. You know, once the site launched in may 2007 we had 06 months to work on it, applauded out and planted out. I hired two people. I wanted it to be successful, but i think i was taken aback by how quickly how strong their response to it was and how quickly that came. Within two months there were people on the site, readers store in the comments section referring to themselves as jesses which made me very uncomfortable because i had not predicted that this would happen. I was i dont want to say i was flattered, but i was excited at their loyalty and devotion. I was also somewhat terrified because i has not expected that there would be such an immediate embrace of the side and will we redoing. And had no clue as to whether it would work out. The fact is that the site like it had not existed before. There were signs that took a critical view of pop culture and gender politics, but they tended to be labors of love. There were not being funded by companies, not for profit, not the women who worked on them or not being compensated very much, if at all. So i did not really have a model other than what i wanted his to see to be a lot of my frustrations built up to that point. I did not know if it would succeed. An early version. On the one hand i was grateful for his honesty. I felt like we had a lot to prove but we had a lot to lose because i had no indication that it was going to be successful. So website it looks like in style. I put it on the web. I would have felt confident that there would be a for that. To kind of go after that sort of content or to talk about politics, whether gender politics from a racial politics, an electoral politics and the talk about the length and with such consistency, i was not sure there would be a big enough reaction. It has grown. The is wrong. Abcatoo deasy that . Its almost expected. It would have lost independent. A stable of sites that were beloved and fairly well known. We were able to at times do content on jezebel that would then be riposted on sister wore brother sites when it related to the sort of content that they published. And so that would bring in at or at least expose us whole other to what we were doing. And so i do think that if we had not been part of the Media Network we would have had a harder time building an audience that quickly. I could be wrong, though. Maybe it was that we were the first to use something in a particular space or at that level. It is hard for me to remember exactly the audience numbers from back then and how they grew. I a good, you know, print out something that would show exactly how it grew. And it grew pretty rapidly. 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 that had a point of view. But, yeah, i cant take credit for, like, those little gems so much as id like. A lot of that was really the brilliance of individual writers. Now, you dont, i describe this as a pop culture book, and you corrected me, you know . Its, but its, you know, its the me, a coffee table book, something that i would keep out and look at similar to like what the daily show has done. They have books yeah. Same publisher. And also mcsweenys does this, and i collect all of this stuff. And i keep them around. And its not something i would sit down and necessarily read the way i would read a novel, but i would keep it around and read it. How do you describe this book . I just describe it as a kind of very opinionated reference book. If opinionated and noncomprehensive reference book because it doesnt cover everything. And, actually, that goes back to your earlier question. How we decided what was going to go in the book was really, it was, it wasnt a particularly, it wasnt a particularly great way to go about it, but it was really the only way i knew how to go about it because id never edited an encyclopediatype book before. So what i did was make a list of people and things and ideas that should be in the book. I put them in alphabetical order, and i asked all the writers who were going to be working on the book to tel