long goodbyes
There's no adequately poetic way to put this, so I'll just jump right in:
Jennifer Gerson is leaving us at the end of this week. Jennifer, as some of our old-timers know, has been with the site since virtually the very beginning: In early February 2007, she answered an "ad" I put up on our brother site, Gawker, looking for writers for the as-yet-untitled site I was working on, then known simply as 'Girly Gawker'. At the time she wrote me, she was toiling away as an assistant to
Elle editor-in-chief Robbie Myers, and although I was intrigued by her pedigree —
Elle, Sephora, NBC, the office of Senator Hillary Clinton — it was the intelligent, thoughtful yet energetic tone of her email that had me, if not at 'hello', at this: "I believed whole-heartedly then, and still, in a more idealistic place, believe now, that women's magazines just might be the site of large-scale revolution, if the people who make them ever choose them to be. Why couldn't stories on, say, universal health care run alongside a fashion news piece explaining the most recent grunge revival? As I said in my interview [with
Elle], 'I have been reading Maureen Dowd religiously since the 6th grade and I really, really love my shoes.'"
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