Most Influential Women in Technology [Fast Company]

The Rising Stars of Gossip Blogs [The New York Times]

Another site launch! I’m starting to feel like the Internet version of Octomom. (Don’t worry; this is the last one for a bit.)

Anyway, Blisstree is a re-launch of an existing b5 property that was essentially an aggregator. It’s now a stand-alone property that offers “a smart and saucy take on health, wellness, fitness, style, parenting and more.” It’s edited by former travel writer and Town & Country editor, editor-in-chief Christine Egan and deputy editor Briana Rognlin, formerly of Oyster.

From the press release: “Running a site like Blisstree comes with a tremendous responsibility to women,” says Egan. “So often, sites that cover women’s wellness are overwhelming, diet-obsessed, or simply not much fun. I want to create a space where women of different interests, backgrounds, professions, fitness levels, and stages of health can all feel welcomed, encouraged, challenged, and enlightened.”

The Gloss is the second site I’ve launched for b5media and it goes live today, as Peter notes here.  It’s a smart, funny mix of fashion, beauty and relationship features helmed by editor-in-chief Lilit Marcus (the former editor of Jewcy and founder of SaveTheAssistants) and deputy editor Jennifer Wright (formerly of AskMelissa).

From the press release:

The Gloss isn’t just another style website that mindlessly repeats the latest trends without providing take-away value. It’s a website for savvy, modern women who crave content that speaks to them as peers. The woman who reads The Gloss is as likely to shop at high-end boutiques as she is to shop at flea markets, and the site’s wide range of coverage speaks to that eclectic taste. In addition to covering beauty and fashion, The Gloss also publishes relatable features about sex, dating, career, and culture. Columnists include respected beauty blogger and Confessions of a Beauty Addict author Nadine Jolie, political pundit and former Air America news editor Megan Carpentier, and Fashism.com cofounder Brooke Moreland.

Introducing Crushable.com, a new site from b5media covering style and entertainment for women 15 – 25. This is the first of several site launches I’ve been working on recently. I hired Erin Carlson (formerly at the AP, covering celebrities and entertainment) as Editor-in-Chief, Amanda Ernst (formerly the editor of FishbowlNY.com) as Deputy Editor and Jean Bentley (also of EW.com) as a Contributing Editor.

From the press release:

“I’m thrilled to offer young women an online escape that reflects their interests and sensibilities,” said Erin Carlson, Crushable’s Editor-in-Chief. “We have an intelligent and unapologetic obsession for all things entertainment, through a wide spectrum of content that provides authenticity and humor. We’ll be live-blogging the Oscars, decoding a reader texts from their exes and offering tips on accessible ways to mimic Lady Gaga’s alien style, and much more.”

I’m also going to include some component that goes beyond shameless gratuitous self-promotion and is actually useful to readers—or at the very least, entertaining—but I haven’t decided what yet. But if you’d like to be part of the early, experimental SpiersList newsletter, you can sign up here.

If it sucks, you can always unsubscribe.

[SpiersList sign up]

One of my larger clients is launching a new lifestyle site and relaunching three others and I need new staffers for all of them. (We’re basically tearing them down and starting over—redesigning them, restructuring editorially and adding lots of new original content.)

Here are the positions available:

Editor-in Chief, women’s lifestyle and fashion site. (Full time.) The site targets women ages 25-40.  The site will be a smart online women’s magazine with a sense of humor.  Topics are standard women’s mag fare—relationships, beauty, fashion, etc.—but with unconventional takes. Less self-improvement, more escapism.

Editor-in-Chief, health and wellness site. (Full time.) The site targets women 25-50. This site skews a bit older and focuses on self-improvement, wellness, health, parenting and relationships. Tonally, it should be sophisticated, but sincere.

Contributors, men’s lifestyle site. (Part time.) Targets men ages 25-40. This site covers sex, relationships, health, recreation, fashion and gadgets, and offers original commentary and reportage on news, politics, sports and business. It combines original reported features with content aggregation, subject-specific blogs. I’m particularly looking for a relationship/sex columnist and people who can do fun stunt journalism pieces. I also need a few part time bloggers to do posts covering all of the topics above.
Contributors, young women’s lifestyle site. (Part time.) Targets women ages 15-29. This site covers celebrity news and entertainment, fashion and lifestyle issues. The tone will be smart, funny and appropriately skeptical, but never mean or cynical. I need contributors with some experience in entertainment coverage and people who’ve written for the teen market before.

Contributors can be located anywhere, but the full time positions are based in New York.
If you’re interested in any of these positions, please send me a cover letter and a resume. Some IMPORTANT guidelines:

1) Paste the cover letter and resume into the text of the email. Don’t send me attachments, or I’ll delete automatically—partly because attachments make it more difficult for me to organize responses, and partly because your inability to follow directions doesn’t bode well.

2) The cover letter is important. Don’t skip it. If you do skip it, I’ll assume you didn’t do it because you hate writing and would be terrible for any of these jobs anyway.

3) If you have a blog, mention it somewhere. It’ll be to your advantage because I’ll assume you already understand the basics of blogging and have a genuine interest in it.

4) Your cover letter will stand out more if you include some original ideas for any of these sites. For the editor jobs, story generation is a necessary skill set and if you’re applying for a contributor position, we’ll be assigning, but you’ll also need to pitch some stories. And if I can’t tell that you’ve had to generate story ideas historically from your resume, you need to demonstrate that you’re capable of it.

5) Apply for only one of these positions and note which one in the cover letter. I know a lot of people are unemployed and willing to work on anything, but I need to know which site you’re genuinely interested in. If you’re also appropriate for one of the other positions, I won’t rule you out.

That’s about it. If you’re interested, send cover letters and resumes to espiers AT gmail.  If I think you might be appropriate, you’ll hear from me in the next week with some additional questions. ]]> http://www.elizabethspiers.com/2010/01/im-hiring-again/feed/ 0 http://www.elizabethspiers.com/2009/05/the-stimulist/ http://www.elizabethspiers.com/2009/05/the-stimulist/#comments Tue, 12 May 2009 23:18:18 +0000 espiers http://www.elizabethspiers.com/wp/?p=227 My client, MSNBC anchor Carlos Watson, is launching a news site tomorrow called TheStimulist. From Jon Fine’s media column at BusinessWeek, on the same:

Carlos Watson, an MSNBC anchor who also hosts a weekend show on talk radio network Air America, and a small band of staffers are readying The Stimulist, a news and opinion site slated to go live on May 12. Watson bills The Stimulist as being aimed at what he terms “the change generation;” that is, an audience of young professionals between the ages of 25 and 49.

This is a totally bootstrapped operation,** and was really based on Carlos’s hunch that there was something important happening with the groundswell of young, engaged voters in the last election. They’re indicative of a progressive generation of people who are not afraid of provocation, are heavily informed already, and demand smart analysis of current events. Ideally, TheStimulist will provide that.

Go take a look.

(** Personally, I think this sort of environment is actually the best for entrepreneurs. But it takes a lot more determination to start a new business in a terrible economy*** and I think that should be acknowledged.
*** Good on TheAwl as well on that count.)

Today HalogenLife.com goes live. It is, to just come right out and say it, a luxury lifestyle blog. (One of my clients, HalogenNetwork, approached me months ago about re-doing their luxury travel site and this is what I recommended.)

But in this economy, even mentioning the word “luxury” is taboo. Luxury retail is getting hammered and it’ll probably get worse before it gets better. So why do it?

1) I can launch on April Fool’s Day and enjoy the irony.
2) If it’s not challenging, it’s not interesting.
3) Luxury doesn’t mean what it used to mean. The target reader for this site has $150K in household income (HHI). In the rest of the country, that’s a ton of money. Where I grew up, it would buy you a small McMansion. In New York, however, $150K is probably the average HHI for a two-income couple in their late 30s working in a creative industry and renting in Brooklyn. If you asked that couple if they considered themselves luxury consumers, they’d probably say no. But they are.

They’ll probably buy a Prius, but they’ll consider purchasing a Lexus hybrid, and compare the two rigorously before making a decision. They may not spend summers in Cap d’Antibes, but they’ll carefully plan and research a two week vacation in South Africa, which they can do because they have the financial resources and the vacation time. They’re not–generally speaking–materialists, but they are aesthetes and they appreciate well-crafted, well-designed objects. They’ll spend money to learn new things, save time and be more efficient. Luxury, for them, is not primarily about acquisitiveness. It’s about experience, quality of life and control over one’s own time.

Which is fitting, as they say, in this economy.

And that’s where I think the luxury market is going, ultimately. Traditional luxury retailers are weakening as consumers care less and less about the cache afforded by recognizable–and supposedly exclusive–brands, and they have to offer their customers more than just the promise of high-status items that may or may not appreciate over time. There’s more awareness of the social responsibilities that come with consumption decisions and everyone is looking for value–and not just in the quality-to-price-point-ratio sense.

And it’ll probably stay that way. Asset bubbles are easy to blow, but I don’t expect 2006 excesses to re-appear anytime soon.

So we’re keeping those things in mind as we try to execute an editorial plan that works in an already tough category (but one that’s changing very quickly and in an interesting way). It’ll be fun to see what works and what doesn’t. I expect some surprises. In the meantime, drop by the site, and if you have any suggestions, feel free to email me (ESPIERS at GMAIL) or HalogenLife’s brand new editor, Kyle Anderson. (You can reach Kyle at KYLE at HALOGENLIFE dotcom.)

The site is Flavorpill.com’s new omnibus culture blog, Flavorwire.com. The new site editor is Caroline Stanley, who was formerly the editorial director at GenArt. Week one posts: Flavorwire breaks news about a new Michel Gondry project, offers an extended ode to the Moleskine, an interview with composer Lukas Ligeti, Sheila Callaghan talks to Flavorwire about the underrepresentation of female playwrights on Broadway, Sloane Crosley offers essay recommendations, and we show you exclusive behind-the-scenes footage of TV on the Radio’s latest video.

FLAVORWIRE.com