“This was just what happened when 28-year-olds managed 24-year-olds who managed 20-year-olds, right?”
They should have called in physicists to measure the astronomical pressure building up around our eyeballs when we read yesterday’s Allison P. Davis story on The Wild Ride at Babe.net, because hooooooooooooooooo boy, it’s just a merciless detailing of all the disastrous things that happen when you take (1) media dude with Murdoch money, throw in with a handful of energetic early 20-somethings together, subtract (1) HR department (“it couldn’t afford one”), and build an editorial strategy/business model around “first-person and reported pieces about being young,” with a heavy office drinking culture sprinkled on top. The oof is intuitive.
And while it’s the easiest game in the world to bash a young women’s media site for being inexperienced and questionably run, we’re super glad this look inside the boozy rush party trajectory of babe.net was done by Davis of all people — the result is a smart, fair piece that also includes this great bit of context on the very brief history of digital women’s media:
Every internet era gets the insurgent women’s site it deserves. Jezebel broke new ground with an article about a tampon stuck up a writer’s vagina; xoJane, a microgeneration later, outdid that with a cat hairball found in the same cavity. The Betches defended their right, as feminists (or not, who cares), to Brazilian-wax their vaginas, via sorority-girl screeds. Like the Betches, babe.net certainly wasn’t built to be feminist in any kind of traditional sense (after all, Murdoch was a funder and anarchic page-view-getting was the ethos). And yet babe.net was created during an era when to be a woman saying just about anything online was now, theoretically, classified as feminist.
Anyway. Buy whoever you know who survived any type of predator-in-chief a coffee (and maybe a lawyer), and IMHO, always always be sus as hell of any 20-something dude who thinks women’s media is a brainless game to get into.