The Toast
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|
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Type of site
|
Magazine Feminist Satire |
|---|---|
| Editors |
Mallory Ortberg Nicole Cliffe |
| Slogan(s) | "A willing foe, and sea room" |
| Website | http://www.the-toast.net |
| Commercial | Yes |
| Launched | 7 January 2013 |
| Current status | Inactive |
The Toast is an American anthology, humor and feminist writing website, founded in 2013 by editors Nicole Cliffe and Mallory Ortberg and publisher Nicholas Pavich. The website is known for its parodic reworkings of classic literature and art. Ortberg has described its target market as 'librarians'. The Toast has also published on feminism and ethnicity-related topics, including a lengthy series on adoption. Its name originates from the toast of the British Royal Navy hoping for "a willing foe, and sea room", which was used as its slogan.
Ortberg and Cliffe previously both wrote for The Hairpin, through which they met. Ortberg's book, Texts from Jane Eyre, was a development of her writing on The Toast.
Co-founder Nicholas Pavich, who was credited as publisher, left the site in summer 2015. Ortberg and Cliffe announced 13 May 2016 that they are "closing" the site as of 1 July 2016. They cited declining advertising revenues for the decision, and the difficulties of managing the website alongside their writing careers. Ortberg had previously commented that sustaining the rate of material needed to earn advertising revenue was difficult: "I generally write anywhere from 2-4 posts a day, and they're very rarely blog posts, it's almost all original fiction or humor or essays and a lot of our site's traffic is dependent on that. Luckily, I enjoy it, but it can also be creatively demanding, and if we have a slow day, it's kind of my fault and if I half-ass it, we look stupid and boring."The Toast will remain on the web, but additional content will be added seldom or never.
The final contribution to the website before it ceased publication was a column by Hillary Clinton, in which she reflected on the blog's importance to female writers.
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