Happy Birthday Vanessa!

Today is Vanessa’s birthday, which means it’s our excuse to talk about how great she is. Yay!

I’ll be honest: Before I actually starting writing for Feministing, I didn’t fully appreciate just how valuable Vanessa is to making the site the wonderful blog–and community–it’s been since she and Jessica started it more than eight years ago. In part, that’s because, as managing editor, she does a whole lot of behind the scenes work that’s invisible–not only to all our readers but often even to us as contributors. Trust me, managing a group of passionate but busy bloggers is no easy task. And it’s not an exaggeration to say that, in no small part, you can thank for Vanessa for the fact that there’s content here every day.

But it’s also because I didn’t really get what an amazingly skilled blogger Vanessa is. Because before I started blogging every week, I didn’t truly understand just how damn hard it is. To blog well you must constantly have a grasp on the most important stories of the day and know how to quickly distill them into accessible and engaging posts. Vanessa is the best at this. I mean that literally. Not only does she seem to always have her finger on the many pulses of the online feminist world at once, she’s the most concise and snappy writer on the crew. Vanessa tells you what you need to know–and get’s straight to the point.

Vanessa, thanks for all the thankless work you’ve done to keep Feministing going and thriving for all these years. And to all you aspiring feminist bloggers out there, take your cues from Vanessa. She’s one of the masters.