xoJane

» see xojane.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

i did not read xojane. it was american women's-magazine internet, a genre with no turkish-language version i was following in 2011. in those days. i was a computer engineer in ankara in my late twenties, nowhere near its audience, and the site surfaced for me only later, when i went looking through the list of dead media of that decade.

jane pratt launched xojane in 2011, co-published with say media. pratt already had a long history in the same lane, she had edited the teen magazine sassy in the late eighties and then jane in the late nineties, both known for talking to women like adults instead of customers. xojane moved that voice onto the web and leaned hard into first-person essays, some of them serious and some of them written mostly to be argued about.

it got popular fast, ranked among forbes's top women's sites within a couple months of opening. back then. time inc bought xojane and its sister beauty site in 2015. by december 2016 time announced it was folding xojane into instyle, and pratt was on her way out. within a year the articles were offline and the domain redirected to hellogiggles. the writing did not get archived with any care, it just stopped.

~ the case file ~

~ what it published ~

xojane's signature was the personal essay pushed to its limit, sometimes past it. to be honest. at its best it gave women writers a place to be honest about their bodies and their lives in a way glossy print never allowed. at its worst it chased the most extreme confession it could publish because that was what got shared. that tension was the whole product, and it is why people still argue about the site years after it went dark.

~ the day it died ~

there was no dramatic ending, which is its own kind of ending. a corporate owner decided the brand did not fit the portfolio and rolled it into a bigger title, and a distinctive voice on the web became a redirect. the people who wrote for it scattered into other outlets, many of which have since died too. xojane is a marker for a specific moment when women's media lived online and had a real personality, before the personality got optimized out.

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