Hi Jezebel Readers,
I’m the new editor-in-chief of Jezebel, a position I assume with tremendous pride and great responsibility. Like a lot of you, Jezebel has played a formative, impactful role in my life, and made every other outlet seem pretty irrelevant. When I first moved to New York City when I was 22, I used to sit with my laptop in the kitchen and click refresh on the homepage over and over again—this was after spending my last semester in a women’s college in northern California ostensibly doing the same thing on my extra-long dormitory bed.
I’m not the kind of person who uses the term “dream job” in earnest—but when people ask me how my first seven weeks in the Jezebel chair have been going, I use this phrase at an alarming rate. And I’ve held many technically “dream jobs” in my career, having been an editor at MarieClaire.com and Vogue.com. But, as I’ve made a point to say to anyone who asks, I owe my career in women’s media to Jezebel—specifically because the alumnae made the topics I wanted to pursue as a journalist palatable for the entire landscape of “women’s media.” To now be the editor of the website that revolutionized the space is the emotional equivalent of being handed your favorite piece of history—and then being asked to improve upon it.
Jezebel’s legacy is something I hold very dear, but I’m also keen to take the enterprise farther than its been able to go before—across many platforms, content, and sprawling video efforts. I’m an ambitious person (on that same extra-long dormitory bed, I doubled majored in English and French literature specifically because I wanted to read more) and my hope is that you’ll see that ambition reflected here—and on your phones, within newsletters, Instagram, and podcast downloads.
To coincide with my own arrival, Jezebel turned 10 years old this year—an important birthday that the staff lovingly decided to commemorate with a wealth of stories, both personal and archival, that you’ll continue to see on the site over the next few weeks.
Going into 2018, the call for ambitious journalism across all platforms from women and other marginalized genders has never been greater—and Jezebel will hold this administration accountable for every travel ban, transgender ban, and erosion of civil rights that we’ve all aggressively witnessed in the last year. The Jezebel staff is well-equipped to meet this challenge, given its pioneering reporting on abortion at 32 weeks, sexual harassment at the Daily Show, and deep, deep dives into Ted Cruz. Additionally, I like to think that my time in women’s media—covering everything from abortion rights to (queer) rape culture to the wage gap to gender policing to racism—has prepared me to sit precisely here, in this chair, in 2017, in a post-Weinstein news cycle within a Trump presidency. And, as long-time readers of this important coverage, I think you are prepared too.