A daily chronicle of creativity in film, TV, music, arts, and entertainment, produced by Southern California Public Radio and broadcast from November 2014 – March 2020. Host John Horn leads the conversation, accompanied by the nation's most plugged-in cultural journalists.
Vice Media Inc. has debuted its 11th digital channel, Broadly, which caters to women as a feminist media outlet. Broadly's new editor-in-chief and director of content is Tracie Egan Morrissey, who pitched the idea to Vice CEO Shane Smith. Morrissey previously worked on Gawker Media's feminist website, Jezebel.
Broadly, like other Vice outlets, will deliver material to its audience using everything from documentary-style videos to in-depth editorials and features.
Vice has been widely criticized in the past for delivering content from a male perspective. Morrissey believes that for the past couple of years, Vice has been working hard to combat that notion.
"The perception of Vice is that it skews male," Morrissey says. "They actually have been doing really great coverage of women's issues. But it was hard to shake that image. I pitched them this idea about a year ago. Shane hired me on the spot. Every since then we've been going at it."
You come from the website Jezebel, which is Gawker's women-centric site. How would you say Broadly will be different from Jezebel?
Well, the first thing is that we do original video content, documentary stuff. The other thing is that Jezebel does a lot of aggregation and we're not doing any aggregation.
We also are not doing what is known in the industry as "hot takes," which is a combination of a rant and an op-ed. So, everything that we do is reported. It's either reported or it's humor pieces. There is no real in-between.
Do you feel that what you call "Hot Takes" were becoming a commodity — that everybody was having an opinion about something without adding meaningful conversation or facts to the conversation?
This isn't to say that Jezebel is crappy or anything like that. Jezebel is an excellent website and they do great work. I just no longer wanted to be reactionary. I didn't want to just react to the news that was going on in the world. I wanted to drive discussion instead of join into a conversation that was already taking place.
It also seems like Broadly is going to focus a lot on advice, on guidance, and on things you should or might consider doing. You just did a piece yesterday on power suits. Now this is the kind of advice that you might encounter in different formats, other places. Outside of the occasional f-bomb that is in that piece, how would you describe what Broadly's take is on that story?
I wouldn't say that we actually give advice at all. I actually wanted to steer away from being prescriptive. The woman in that piece who is trying on the power suit has green hair. With her wearing a power suit, it's not ironic, but it's just a little bit out of place. It creates a sort of texture to a conversation.
Unlike Jezebel, Broadly for now, as far as I could tell, doesn't feature a comment section. I have to say part of the appeal of Jezebel and a lot of the Gawker sites was reading through the comments and the conversations people were having in the comments. Is that an intentional choice or have you just not activated the comments section?
No, I never wanted comments. I f---ing hate comments. It's so easy for a commenter to go onto a site and just totally take a dump on this really well-reported story that someone has done. Also the thing is, with women on the Internet, it is very difficult because you get it from all sides.
You get other feminists telling you that you're not doing feminism right. You get [mens' rights activists] calling you a "fat whore." People are totally within their right to say that stuff, but they are not going to say it on my property, on my time.
You're in the first week in the launch of Broadly. You're probably paying a little bit of attention into how many people are checking out your articles and your videos. Ultimately, how will you measure the success of Broadly?
I will measure the success of Broadly if every single day I want to read everything that is on there. I've spent so much time reading the Internet in my career that the bar is set pretty high for me on what I want to click on. As long as it is something that I want to read, that to me is a success.