On March 8, the majority of the staff of Jezebel will be participating in A Day Without A Woman, the general women’s strike planned by the organizers of the Women’s March.
The site will still be fully operational, but you won’t see any bylines by the women on staff. Instead, Jezebel will be run entirely by the men we work with here at Gizmodo Media Group, while our women writers and editors will be joining the strike and participating in protests. If you read other sites in the GMG network, you’ll likely see some familiar names here, alongside Jezebel men Bobby Finger and Rich Juzwiak. On Thursday, our full staff will return to file stories on the strike and we’ll be back to business as usual.
Our intent here is not to give men a platform or to allow them to fuck with our website (though you can likely expect at least some JezSpin-style blogs tomorrow), but to force them to think about the jobs they’re being asked to do and how they differ from their usual day-to-day work. Publishing for a majority women audience is quite different from publishing for Deadspin or Gizmodo, and we want them to be thoughtful about how they package news and write criticism for Jezebel on a politically meaningful day for many women around the world. We’re asking them to take that responsibility on without much of our guidance and advice, and if they stumble in that pursuit, we hope you notice. A few of our brave volunteers have confessed to being a bit nervous about this experiment, and we agree that they should be. If the site feels different or off or even just “bad” tomorrow, that is very much the point. We wish them the best of luck.
Please tip your fill-in Jezebel staff tomorrow with the stories you want to read at tips@jezebel.com, and thanks for sticking with us. The rest of us will see you back here on Thursday morning.