Dear friend,
I’m by no means a writer. But after being here for a while, even I’ve picked up on the process at Bitch: Our Editorial team takes great care in the process of reviewing and accepting pitches, then they and our Creative team then carefully check the wording and imagery used for the final product, and then on our Slack channel, we discuss the best headline that conveys the essence of the article. At Bitch, we spend a lot of time thinking about what it means to use specific language or phrases, why a particular story should be told from a particular perspective, who is being left out or talked over.
But that doesn’t seem to be the case at other outlets. Whether it was the rampant racism exposed by the chefs and staff of color at Bon Appetit, the callous and dangerous op-ed calling for military intervention to stop the Black Lives Matters protests that apparently nobody even bothered to edit, or the fact that outlets are still deadnaming trans people in 2020, there’s a lot of improvement that needs to come from the outlets we rely on for information of what’s going on in our world.
To say that we’re disappointed is putting it lightly. Now, more than ever, it is critical that we all have access to media that holds everyone in our society accountable. Our media needs to be accountable to the community it repeatedly claims to serve.
We recognize that there are obstacles that are destroying media outlets from the inside, like the decline of advertising revenue and shadowy private equity companies who are bent on bankrupting every outlet they can buy. There are issues to address in media both in their internal workings, and the way we’ve devalued them. But as a completely editorially independent, reader-supported outlet, we just have to say it: There is an alternative.
For the next two weeks, as we aim to raise $50,000 by July 6, we want to show you the difference it makes to the news ecosystem to have community-supported media that you trust to provide necessary context and shine a light on what’s going on in the world. Your donation, subscription, or monthly Rage membership means that we can center our time covering real people who make a real difference in our world. (And will always pay our writers fairly to do so!)
Please support your favorite feminist outlet today and donate, subscribe, or join The Rage.
To media that informs and educates,
Alison
director of fundraising
Bitch Media is an award-winning, nonprofit, feminist media outlet. We're community funded because we believe that there's no for-profit way to make truly independent, intersectional feminist media. If our work has to compete with a self-interested advertiser or a major investor, it's never going to be the kind of world-changing, movement-making, uncompromising work that needs to be done. It'll just be another contract negotiated in a patriarchal world. You like our attitude? Us too.
