Mondays suck. Especially if you hate your job. But the day doesn’t have to be a total waste. You can now look forward to reading about ReadyMakers who have worked their way into f*&%ing awesome jobs—and maybe find a little inspiration to jumpstart your own career in the process—right here, every Monday.

As the editor-in-chief of the site that Nick Denton originally envisioned as a "girly Gawker," Anna Holmes of Jezebel.com puts in 14-hour days, eats at her computer, and basically works harder than a team of Alaskan sled dogs---but she calls having the chance to turn her vision for a non-candy-coated women's website into reality the best job she's ever had.

VITAL STATS Occupation: Editor In Chief, Jezebel.com
Location: NYC
Age: 36
First Job: Ever? I was a newspaper carrier when I was 12. In my first job after college, I was an editorial assistant at Entertainment Weekly magazine.
Best Job: My current one.
Greatest Professional Challenge: Moving from the print media world to the web and starting up a website.
Salary During My 20s: It ranged from 28K at my first gig at Entertainment Weekly (not including overtime, which bumped up the pay considerably) to the 60K range when I worked at Glamour in my late 20s.

Hi, Anna Holmes. How did you get that f*&%ing awesome job?
I got the fucking awesome job because a friend of mine, Geraldine, was friends with Gawker Media owner Nick Denton and he had been in discussions with her about creating a "Girly Gawker.” She thought I might be a good fit (we were going to work on it together) and a meeting with Denton's deputy, Lockhart Steele, sealed the deal: I had lots of ideas and enthusiasm, and he liked both. In fact, I didn't   realize how many ideas and how much enthusiasm I had until I met with him: I had been quite happy working in print. Then Geraldine decided to move back to London, so it was like, do I want to do it by myself and assemble the team myself? I wasn’t expecting that, but I said okay.

 What’s Jezebel all about? Were you instrumental in getting the site started?
As I said, Gawker Media wanted to go a ‘girly’ version of Gawker, but I wasn’t given specific direction about what it had to be. I decided that we would cover women’s media, pop culture, and politics but with a female bent. I felt that a lot of the websites that were around and geared towards women were either all about consuming things—buy this, go to this great sample sale—or they were sites that were geared towards pop culture but they were misogynist, full of pictures of peoples’ cellulite and nasty comments about female celebrities. So I wanted the site to be a bit of an antidote to that.

I wanted to look at all the topics I just mentioned, but in a way that I wasn’t seeing in mainstream sites on the web. I wanted to take elements from different sites that already existed, and put them into a new one. I wanted to create a female-friendly site that acknowledged that women have all kinds of interests, including things that are fluffy and superficial as well as things that aren’t. Women don’t need to have just one kind of content spoon-fed to them. On Jezebel, a post about healthcare policy can follow a post about what was in the latest J Crew catalog. I had about four or five months between planning and launch. In that time, I hired two people, and went over designs for the site. We had to test-blog for a long time to get used to the pace of it. Jezebel went live in May of 2007.

How did you get your start working in publishing? Did you dive right into online, or start in print first?
I got my start in publishing as a journalism major at NYU and an intern at various publications: the New York Press, the New Yorker magazine, and Entertainment Weekly. My internship at EW led to a full-time job about six months after I graduated from college. I did work on the high school newspaper in my hometown in California but, for whatever reason, that doesn't count as much in my mind.

At EW, although we had administrative duties to the editor(s) we worked for, the editorial assistants were also given the opportunity—encouraged, in fact—to pitch, report and write stories. I usually had one or two pieces in the magazine per week, so it was great training in terms of thinking, reporting, and writing fast on your feet. I stayed in print until 2007, when I left my permalance senior editor job at InStyle to work for Gawker Media and create Jezebel. I was familiar with the web—and a somewhat voracious consumer of blogs and websites—but I was by no means an expert or a pioneer, which may have helped with regards to the creation of the site. I was more interested in doing what "I" wanted to see rather than following formulas that had already proven to work with respect to women's media on the web.

What skills are required most often of you as a website editor-in-chief?
That's a hard question because I feel like they aren’t skills that are easy to articulate. And I think that what I do is not necessarily the same as what the other heads of, say, the other Gawker Media sites do. But that said, you have to be kind of obsessed with your site, in the sense that you have to spend the majority of your waking hours actively working on it or thinking about it. On our site, I have to always be on the computer because I’m always looking at stuff on the internet that I can give the writers for them to do the next day. I’m thinking of angles that we could take on mainstream news stories. It takes endurance and it takes a bit of obsession.

The internet moves so fast, and there’s an expectation among readers that we’re going to cover anything. Other than that, a knack for coming up with original story ideas, or figuring out which stories to put on the site versus what to ignore. A lot of time it’s a gut feeling. We edit very quickly. Also important is the ability to communicate with the staffers. We communicate mostly via instant message, and things can get lost in translation. There’s an art to knowing when it’s time to pick up the phone because it’s too hard to talk over IM. And the job, unlike many others, is not a social one. The minute they’re done with one piece, my writers have to start on the next thing. It’s incessant. There isn’t really time for lunch breaks; people eat their lunch over the computer for the most part. We don’t have time to sit around and shoot the shit. The skills I’m mentioning are not exactly things that you can put on a resume, or even things that can be proven. You can have someone who’s a fantastic writer for a magazine or a newspaper, but you put them on a blog and they freeze up because they can't handle the pressure, or the pressure is not the kind they're used to. It's a working style, and either you can or you can't do it.

(Left: Anna Holmes at Joshua Tree National Park in California, on a decidedly not typical day.)

What is a typical day like for you?
I usually get up between 6:15 and 6:45 in the morning. I am absolutely not a morning person, but I’ve gotten used to it. I walk from the bedroom to the second bedroom where the office is, I sit down, and first thing, I go through about 2,000 items in my RSS feed that came in since the last time I checked the night before. That takes me about 45 minutes to an hour. My ability to scan headlines and decide what I’m going to ignore and what I’m going to open up has gotten better. I don’t tend to read the stories that I pull out, but I get a sense of what they are, and I copy the URL of the story and put it into a Word file with a header to remind me what the story is about. And I do this until the feed is empty. Then I start compiling emails to the different editors with the links I think they would be interested in.

The first post that usually goes up is a gossip round-up, so everything having to do with celebrity news goes into the email to that editor. I don’t send the emails until later in the morning. The RSS feed refreshes itself every half hour with a few hundred more stories, and I continue to add to them. Then I make coffee, and go back to the computer and I look for photos. We put up two photos an hour. I download 20 to 25 photos, and by the time I’m done with that it’s about 8:15. Then I scan through the first post for spelling errors or any sort of grammatical error or coding error, and I schedule it to post at 9am. By that time I’ve probably already done the coding of the first photo, and that goes up at 9:10. From the time the first post goes up, we post something every 10 minutes for the next ten to 11 hours. For the rest of the day, I’m alternating between talking to the writers about what they’re doing next, looking for more photos, talking to people over email, talking to my boss, looking through the emails that come from the readers with their tips, or if they're having technical problems or are angry about something. I try to respond to as many reader emails as I can but I can only get to about ten percent of them; we receive about 500 a day. So it's basically juggling all those things in no particular order until we're finished.

When the last post goes up, I'm done. The writers are usually done earlier—we all work at home and communicate over email and instant message. Each writer usually needs to write about five to six real posts a day, with a jump, and then will also post about four quick links, with no jump. A writer might be through at 3pm, and I’ll tell them, you’re done, have a good day. I’d say the earlier they get up, the earlier they stop working. The other editor who starts when I do usually stops around 3:30. And then usually when the posting day is over, I try to eat dinner, but I’m usually drawn back to the computer because I want to read something in its entirety. And then it’s 11:30 and I have to go to bed. And then on the weekends is when I tend to sleep in and read things for pleasure. On the weekends, I have a weekend editor. I give her notes, but she’s mostly on her own. So it’s an insane job. On the weekdays I probably work 13 or 14 hours a day. I’m probably not going to be doing this job in two years, probably. But you also get addicted to it. You get an adrenaline rush in a way.

Have you had any role models along the way, journalistic or otherwise?
The role models I've had have been some of the editors I’ve worked with. I never really felt like I had a mentor, though, so its hard for me to name names. I think I learned by osmosis from the editors I worked with at various magazines. They’ve taught me news judgment, how to package things, how to treat—or not treat—employees. I’ve had good bosses and bad bosses. With regards to Jezebel, I’ve had bosses who have been very helpful, but was on my own in a way with this, which is not a bad thing. I had to kind of make a lot of it up as I went. But in terms of foundational things like how one blogs, or how to get traffic, certainly all the other editors of all the blogs in our company have been very helpful.

What are the biggest pleasures of the job? What could you do without? 
I think the biggest pleasures of the job are feeling like I know about thins as they’re happening, and getting to create something from scratch and see it grow. We’ve been around for about two and a half years, and there are days when our traffic exceeds that of Gawker.com, and they’ve been around for about five or six years, so our rapid growth is exciting. Getting to write about whatever we want is also incredible. At print magazines it seems like everything’s done by committee, and everything goes through so many iterations that the story that comes out is often not the one you set out to write. The feedback and interaction with our audience is also great. Our commenters have really smart things to say; they’re a passionate, inspiring, vibrant community and their additions really flesh out the stories. What I could do without is always being tired. I could do without working that many hours in a day, but I don’t think that you can run a site and not be obsessed with it. So I’d love not to be tired or have to work as much, but I think that all the things that make the job difficult are exactly what the job demands.

What advice would you give to someone who wanted to run a major website someday?
I would advise that they should only take on this sort of job if they have the emotional, mental, and physical energy to do so, because it is so demanding. Someone who wants to work seven hours a day and then have their nights and weekends to themselves to do whatever they want—this is not the job for them. I would almost liken the hours to those of a lawyer or a doctor, since they often work weekends, they're often on call, they work late nights. A person who can basically devote their whole life to a site is going to do better than someone who can't. I’d also advise that to do this kind of work, you have to have a curiosity about the world and the confidence to try new thins, because I think that’s how the internet grows—not by copying things that are already being done, but by trying to think of new ways to approach topics. So I think that it’s important to be able to tap into one’s creativity. And the nice thing about the internet is that you know very quickly whether or not it works. It’s not like you’ve done something stupid and now it’s going to be on the newsstand for a month. In terms of how to get a job like mine, I don’t know what to say because I came at it in a strange way. It was an opportunity that presented itself. I had no larger career path mapped out that led to this.

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