In 2020, writer Michael Harriot interviewed Obama.īut over the past year, 15 of the site’s employees have left - a nearly 100 percent turnover since April, when it had 16 full-time staffers. During the last election cycle, writer Terrell Jermaine Starr interviewed Congress hopefuls Jamaal Bowman, Jaime Harrison, and Raphael Warnock. Ayanna Pressley first revealed her alopecia diagnosis. But it has remained one of the most popular Black news sites on the internet and a frequent destination for interviews with celebrities and politicians. The following year, the site was acquired by the newly formed, venture-capital backed G/O Media, along with the slew of blogs owned by the Gawker Media Group (G/O Media did not acquire this website, which was sold to Bustle Digital Group after it was shut down in 2016). The voice has evolved in 2018, then-editor-in-chief Danielle Belton told CNN the site had moved past its once “professorial” tone. Graham, with early contributions from writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates and William Julius Wilson - but fast-paced, topical, and generally in the business of critiquing culture and those in power. It was high-brow - founded by Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Tech, etc.) Proud to work with you all.”Ī large part of the idea behind Kinja is that by making a commenting system into a contributor platform, readers become writers and writers become commenters, turning a blog network into a sort of social network.When The Root launched as an offshoot of The Washington Post in 2008, it aimed to fill the gap between print and online media and elevate Black writers in the digital mainstream. It’ll involve more than just me to fix it so I need some time to get the right people involved. Johnson started a discussion thread on the post, which in this context functions like a company statement: “I’m in the middle of this company tech thing, but I want to say this: this is exactly the right thing to do when people aren’t paying proper attention to a real problem it’s not something I completely ignored but I obviously didn’t give it proper attention, and I’m sorry about that give me about 24-48 hours to figure out some sort of fix. I don’t have a solution yet but that’s my problem.”Īround an hour later, Mr. I’ve dropped the ball and they’re right to call me out. Johnson tweeted his support and took the blame: “Re: Jezebel. A little over half an hour after the post went up, Mr. Gawker top management didn’t immediately issue a comment, even as the readers and writers continued to discuss the post. Jezebel staffers, fed up with the problem and with the management’s lack of response, discussed it in a groupchat. Ryan said that although she didn’t see it, she was told it was a “wound oozing blood with the Jezebel logo emblazoned over it”) on a story by editorial assistant and writer Callie Beusman. This past weekend, the anonymous user or users responsible for the targeted spam posted an especially disturbing image (Ms. “Plus, you know, we were the ones who had to look at the violent and pornographic images in order to manually dismiss them. “It’s been a problem for months, and higher ups had been looped in but had basically told us that dealing with the problem wasn’t a priority, despite the fact that we’d get distressed emails from readers every time this came up,” Jezebel news editor Erin Gloria Ryan told the Observer in an email. This is a damn shame,” outgoing editor in chief Jessica Coen wrote in the comments of the post. I want to apologize to all of our readers.

Not reporting on it feels hypocritical, so here we are. “It honestly breaks my heart a little bit that this post even needs to exist - but the manner in which this has been handled (or not handled, really) by HQ is pathetic.

Jezebel and gawker