Jewcy’s money problems won’t hurt Zeek

Zeek magazine, which had a strategic partnership with Jewcy, said today that it would not be affected by the decision of Jewcy’s main backers to pull their funding out of the online magazine.

From Zeek:

For the past year, Zeek magazine has partnered with Jewcy at www.jewcy.com/zeek. On Wednesday, February 17, 2009, JTA reported that Jewcy had lost its funding and would close its New York office. The staff of Jewcy plans to continue to maintain the website at www.jewcy.com and Zeek will continue to publish at this site for the next month.

Zeek maintained complete editorial and financial independence from Jewcy; Zeek’s operations are entirely unaffected by Jewcy’s changed business structure. Zeek will continue to publish daily online and quarterly in print. We continue to hold events of significance, including an evening with Etgar Keret on March 21 in Boston and a panel on Jewish feminism at the 92nd Street Y on April 23.

The partnership with Jewcy brought Zeek many concrete benefits—a quadrupled readership, multimedia capabilities, and more attention from the mainstream Jewish world (including recent notices in Ha’Aretz and The Forward). The partnership also met Zeek’s mission, to be a catalyst for conversations about the Jewish tomorrow. We are currently looking at possible partnerships with other Jewish media sites, along with the possibility of returning to a redesigned Zeek site. We will be announcing a decision by mid-March.

We remind our readers that by keeping your browser tuned to www.zeek.net, you will automatically be taken to wherever Zeek lives online. Visit soon.

In the next two weeks we will feature a new short story by Riad Baidas, a revised Freedom Seder from Rabbi Arthur Waskow, a piece on affordable housing from David Gottlieb, an autobiographical essay from Jay Michaelson, poems by Maya Bejerano and Courney Druz, and of course, Angela Himsel’s Wednesday column, Angetevka.