I just got off the phone with a very excited Joni Evans, CEO of the about-to-launch (and maybe it will have by the time I post) site, wowowow.com (Women on the Web). "We're in chaos," she said, "Oh my god."
For those who don't know her name, Joni has been such a force in publishing that over the years, her job switches have made headlines. She's served variously as editor, subsidiary rights director, publisher, and top executive at Random House and Simon and Schuster, and most recently, as a top literary agent at William Morris, where she represented many big names (including the hubby of my close high school friend).
Then two years ago, at 63, she quit. "I wanted to do something on my own," she said. "This was around the time when people in publishing were still frightened by the Internet. Google was suing Random House; Random House was suing Google. That sort of thing."
So she spent a lot of time online and kept running into the same thing - which was nothing for women her, er, my age. "There were sites for very young women like iVillage with content about baby bottles, and sites that were highly geared toward politics like the Huffington Post. The sites for older people were for matchmaking. That was their thrust, so to speak." (She laughed.)
Meanwhile, her closest friends, columnists Peggy Noonan and Liz Smith, were lamenting the loss of column inches and the slow publishing cycle where "news" becomes "olds" by the time it reaches readers. The three of them, in turn, teamed up with advertising executive Mary Wells and broadcaster Lesley Stahl, and today, International Women's Day, they are scheduled to launch wowowow.com. Joan Juliet Buck, late of French Vogue, is managing director. (Excellent profile of their decision making process in Stephanie Rosenbloom's Boldface in Cyberspace: It's a Woman's Domain, March 6, '08 NY Times.)
Whether the site turns out to be a Web 2.0 kind of thing, where readers/users are filling out the interior landscape with their own content, or whether it's more of a publishing site remains to be seen. Women will vote with their clicks and their keystrokes.
As Joni described it to me a few minutes ago, she'll introduce a "Conversation" each day, where the boldfacers and their friends (Whoopi Goldberg, Candice Bergen, Lily Tomlin, to name a few) will hold forth on a topic of interest to women whom, as the press release points out, now represent half of all Internet users, with 47 million women over age 45 online. And there will be a "Question of the Day," the placeholder query being "If you could choose any women in the world, living or dead, which four faces would you put on Mount Rushmore?"
I answered with the names of Americans only (never have followed the rules), three of whom I've written about here:
1. Margaret Fuller (see The most famous woman in America, below)
2. Carolyn Goodman (see Carolyn got in the way, below)
3. Oprah Winfrey (what, I haven't written about Oprah!?!)
4. Eleanor Roosevelt (see Send the portrait back, below)
Good luck, sisters. I'll be watching as this unfolds.
UPDATE at 5:45 PM EST - the site is up. No time to really investigate as guests are about to arrive...
