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CJR Audio: Delacorte Lecture with Bitch’s Andi Zeisler
The editor discusses feminist journalism
By The EditorsAndi Zeisler is the editorial/creative director of Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture. She co-founded the magazine as a ‘zine in 1996 with two of her high school friends—“we basically wrote the stuff for Bitch that we wanted to read ourselves, and that we weren’t seeing a ton of out there,” Zeisler says—with no financial backers or publishers; they wrote the ‘zine’s content, copied it themselves, and hand-delivered those copies to be sold in neighborhood bookstores. From its humble origins, however, the now-quarterly magazine has grown into a respected journal of cultural discourse. Bitch, Zeisler says, is “part of a bigger movement toward media criticism and media literacy.”
On March 27, Zeisler spoke at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, discussing the portrayal of women in pop culture, the mediating role feminist criticism can play in that portrayal, and why she loves magazines.
An audio file of the talk is available here. Enjoy.
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Previous Delacorte lectures:
• Jon Meacham, Newsweek
• Ted Genoways, Virginia Quarterly Review
• Rick Stengel, Time
• Jim Hoge, Foreign Affairs
• Jacob Weisberg, Slate
• Joanne Lipman, Portfolio
CJR
