The Flytrap: New feminist media collective launching on US election day

It’s hardly news that independent media is collapsing and it’s increasingly difficult for readers and writers to get what they want from publications – while the golden age of feminist blogging appears to be over. That’s why a group of feminist writers and artists are launching The Flytrap Media on 5 November. (Yes, it’s US Election Day. On purpose. And we've begun to drop content prior to that date, to give readers a taste of what’s coming.)

I’m no stranger to media criticism given the topics I write about (gender, trans rights, religious fundamentalism to name a few) in hostile media contexts in the US and UK.

I’m confident many readers of indie media would agree that the corporate media in the era of Brexit and Trump have mishandled numerous issues, from climate change to transgender rights to election coverage, that matter to those who value human rights and democracy.

But while many readers desire thorough, values-driven, reader-centred reporting and commentary, the outlets that provide it have been dying off or barely holding on, as even major news organisations have cut staff. Some outlets have been bought out and gutted by predatory megacorporations, and many have been forced to make deep cuts, leaving writers and editors out of a job and producing less work as a result.

Feminist media has been especially hard hit. US feminist writer Andrea Grimes recently described the situation as follows:

"I wouldn’t be the writer I am today without outlets like Bitch, Bust, Nylon, Sassy, Tiger Beatdown, Broadsheet, xoJane, Jezebel, Femnisting, Feministe, Racialicious, Pandagon, Shakesville, The Establishment, The Hairpin, Racked, Refinery29, Bustle, The Toast … they’re not all dead today, but those that’ve survived have done so against the odds. Now, there are fewer destinations than ever for great, explicitly feminist cultural criticism, political coverage, and reporting."

British feminist media has not been untouched. The weekly column about US politics and society that I used to write for openDemocracy was cut last April (along with the jobs of many longtime oD employees) as a result of financial struggles here. I bear oD no ill will; the situation is what it is. To work as a writer these days is to deal with instability and a lack of job security.

To make matters worse, when Elon Musk bought Twitter, he pushed through changes to its algorithms to benefit right-wing trolls and suppress voices calling for social justice. As a result, newly displaced media professionals (now forced to compete with those who were already freelancing) faced major hurdles in their efforts to reach their audiences. I was among those that the app stopped working for – I could no longer get my work out to most of my audience, and I was no longer ‘discovered’ there by the occasional editor I hadn’t worked with before who liked what I did and invited me to pitch.

Writing for DAME Magazine, Grimes put it this way: “I could never have built the career I have today without Twitter as it once was.” That’s also true for me and for many others, and now that opportunity has gone.

Given this hostile landscape, is there any hope for a better media future, for both readers and writers? There might be – if readers are willing to pay for it directly.

What I call the ‘mediapocalypse’ has sent many writers scrambling to produce individual newsletters, competing for paying subscribers in a way that is clearly unsustainable. Readers can only keep up with, let alone afford, so many individual subscriptions. But what if we start thinking bigger than the individual newsletter?

Almost a year ago, Andrea Grimes started thinking about founding a worker-owned, values-driven, and reader-centred intersectional feminist outlet–the vision for what we came to callThe Flytrap. By December of last year, she had brought in writers s.e. smith and Aria Velasquez, and soon they started bringing in others, including me. We’re a team of ten at this point, and, after many months of Zoom meetings and preparation, we’re finally crowdfunding our launch via Kickstarter, hoping to raise an initial $45,000 to get this new project off the ground. As of Monday night, we’ve met that goal, and we’re now setting stretch goals in the hopes of being able to hire at least one freelancer a month and to deliver more content.

We know there’s an audience who wants what we’re willing and able to deliver, and we hope that subscriptions, and perhaps some advertising, will keep us afloat once we begin to produce the kind of high-quality, thoughtful, and sometimes snarky feminist content many readers just aren’t getting enough of anymore.

Of course, it’s not going to be easy to take on big tech and venture capitalism, working around the obstacles they’ve set up to independent media, not least of which is the fact that social media no longer works well to connect writers to readers – especially if those writers espouse intersectional feminist values. But it was Velasquez who came up with our nascent outlet’s name, The Flytrap, precisely because Venus flytraps adapted to survive in nitrogen-poor soil by evolving the ability to eat bugs.

If our launch is successful, The Flytrap won’t be the first of a new wave of worker-owned media collectives that is currently underway. New outlets like Defector and Flaming Hydra have paved the way, and we’ve learned from their models as we attempt to bring feminist cultural criticism back to the internet.

Our motto is ‘Fuck the algorithm.’ We chose that motto not only because we hate what Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and the other tech giants have done to social media, but also because we believe readers and writers are coming to an understanding of how we can connect outside of it, through a subscription model and the delivery of new content directly to their email inboxes. This is what individual newsletters do.

We say ‘Fuck the algorithm’ because we are a worker-owned collective that, with enough reader support, will help to usher in a new golden age of independent media that powerful reactionary billionaires won’t be able to quash or control.