So, kind of hilariously, traffic on this blog has spiked since Wendie announced she was leaving Evil Beet earlier today. Most of the clicks are coming from that actual post. So what’s happening is people are all like, “Ohhhhh shit, Wendie quit, I bet there’s drama!!!!” and then they click over here to get the scoop. LOLs. There is no drama. I am very, very sad to lose Wendie — she has been a godsend and a blessing and nothing short of a lifesaver since she joined the EB Media family last year. She was the very first person I ever hired to freelance for me, and she has been everything I could have hoped for and more. She has busted her ass day in and day out, she has never let me down, and she has brought a phenomenal level of humor, wit, professionalism and personality to Evil Beet. I don’t know how I would have gotten through this last year without her, and I owe her an enormous debt of gratitude, and she knows that. She is leaving to focus more energy on the projects she’s passionate about, and she has my full support and expectation that she will be ridiculously successful at whatever she pursues.
That said, I am really excited about the future of Evil Beet and the writers we have on board. (No, we are not hiring right now, but thank you for all your unsolicited applications.) Molly McAleer will be taking over Wendie’s position as weekday editor, and she will continue to split weekends with Kelly. This is a little known fact, but, before I put an open call for writers out on Evil Beet last year, I offered Molly the position. I had absolutely fallen in love with her work on Defamer and her personal blog and her webshow. I was bowled over by her talent, and I knew her voice would be perfect for Evil Beet. At the time, she was focused on doing video projects, and she passed on the offer. I decided to write the site without help for a little while longer, and eventually I just couldn’t do it anymore. I was working 12-14 hour days every single day, and I had been for years. That’s when I posted an ad for a writer, got like a million submissions, and knew pretty much from the beginning that I wanted Wendie. And Wendie was definitely supposed to be the person I hired at that time. Much later, when Molly wanted to focus on writing again, we got back in touch and I hired her part-time. I couldn’t be more excited to have her as our new weekday editor, and I’m excited for readers to have the opportunity to fall in love with her the same way I did.
As long as we’re making statements, I just want to rant about something real quick: I am so fucking sick of everyone being like, “Beet’s posts are boring. All you write about is Lindsay Lohan and the Gosselins and all the promotions you’re running.” Like, first of all, I write about Lindsay Lohan and the Gosselins because those things do REALLY FUCKING WELL with the search engines, and so someone has to write about them because WE MAKE MONEY BASED ON PAGE VIEWS, and I don’t want to force the people who write for me to do that. And believe it or fucking not, we’re running a business over here, and a rather successful one, thankyouverymuch. EB Media is profitable and has been profitable even through the recession and employs quite a few people at this point, between freelance writers and PR professionals and coders, and we have advertisers and marketing obligations and a giant technical infrastructure and believe it or fucking not, someone has to manage all those advertisers and servers and code and marketing and PR so that all those people can stay employed. THAT PERSON IS ME. There is a lot that goes into running a successful blog that has absolutely nothing to do with actual blogging. If it were easy to make a living doing this, YOU WOULD BE DOING IT TOO. So I’m sick of these implications that I don’t care or that I’ve abandoned the site or that it’s going downhill or some shit. Actually, traffic is way up, advertiser interest is way up, and we have more cross-promotional opportunities than I know what to do with, and that is because I am busting my ass to make all that happen. And that means I can pay more people to do what they love, even if it means I spend less time doing what I love. So, ya know, that’s all. Rant over.
