Tag: class assignment

In which I give you Autostraddle’s elevator pitch

UPDATE published on June 18, 2017

Yesterday, I discovered that the basis I used to write the beginning of this blog post was false. AfterEllen was not shutting down. It has not since shut down. It has no plans to shut down.

I read Autostraddle’s report on Sept. 20, 2016 (see below), and I believed it. I wrote up an intro to a short explainer post based on AfterEllen’s supposed shuttering. I published it, presented on it, and went about my life. I wasn’t much of an AfterEllen reader, anyway.

Yesterday, I was on Twitter when the site suggested I follow AfterEllen’s account. “That’s weird,” I thought. I clicked on it. There were new tweets. I clicked on the website link. There were new posts. The site was full of content, far beyond what AfterEllen’s outgoing editor-in-chief, Trish Bendix, had originally said would be limited to “archives” and “periodically publish[ed] freelance pieces.”

I’m now aware that Bendix’s post seems to have been the singular font of information about AfterEllen’s supposed shuttering. Autostraddle ran with it. There was some confusion in the days following: see pieces from Nylon and Slate. Personally, I didn’t check it out. With total trust in Autostraddle, I didn’t think I needed to.

I do feel personally upset by this—an apparently non-amicable parting of ways resulted in misinformation from one of my favorite sites and a quiet drama between the two major online spaces specifically created for queer women.

I apologize for the incorrect information. If I had been doing original reporting, I would have contacted everyone and verified everything. I did not do my due diligence here.

* * *

ORIGINAL POST, published on Oct. 11, 2016:

This blog post outlines a presentation I will be giving in class this morning on a media site of my choosing.

Three weeks ago, Trish Bendix of AfterEllen, one of the world’s largest media sites for queer women, announced that the site would be shuttering. Heather Hogan, a senior editor at Autostraddle, wrote the following the day the announcement came out.

AfterEllen’s announcement comes during a year when the media landscape is changing more rapidly than it has in over a decade. Every week, it seems, news breaks of another site laying off dozens of beloved writers, as sites with big time capital — the BuzzFeeds and Vices of the world — suck up more of the market and more of the advertising money. And as Facebook continues to change the way websites find readers. And as fresh-from-college writers are forced to devalue their work for “exposure” and veteran writers are deemed disposable. The most vulnerable websites, of course, are those who cater to niche markets, particularly ones who cater to women, and super particularly ones who cater to queer women. AfterEllen, it would seem, has been swept up in this tidal wave of change.

With AfterEllen’s departure from the queer media scene, Autostraddle is now the world’s most popular independently-owned website for queer women, with over one million unique visitors and 3.5 million views each month, according to the site’s about page. But its future, too, hangs in the balance.

Autostraddle was founded in March 2009 by Marie Lyn Bernard, a.k.a. Riese, who currently acts as the site’s CEO and editor-in-chief. Riese established a foundation for Autostraddle by recapping “The L Word,” a soap-opera-esque show about a gaggle of queer ladies which has mixed reviews and which I am only mildly ashamed to have just started watching. Now, Autostraddle has six full-time employees, although its team — which includes senior staff, editors, staff writers, visual people, writers, interns, video people, general contributors, community moderators and A-Camp organizers — is much larger.

The site features daily content: aggregations, columns, comics, opinion pieces, TV show recaps, personal essays and so much more. I’ve never seen original reporting from Autostraddle, although that’s not really what the site is for. It’s basically a really big blog with a ton of contributors. It does provide news from outside sources, however, and is consequently the place where I — and I’m sure many other people — learn things like the tragic fact that Jazz Alford, a black woman from Alabama, became the 22nd transgender person killed in the U.S. this year on Sept. 23.

SimilarWeb, a service that provides information on website traffic and other statistics, gives us the following insights into Autostraddle’s readership.

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You could probably deduce that most people who read Autostraddle today don’t just stumble across it. More than 73 percent of viewers get to the site via direct or Google search – they already knew it existed, or they heard about it from a friend. Personally, I only discovered the site because I knew my girlfriend frequented it. (I don’t spend as much time on the gay Internet as I should.)

I mentioned at the beginning of this post that with the changing media landscape, Autostraddle, one of the last big independently-owned queer media sites in existence, might be in dire straits. That said, the lovely ladies running the site have employed a number of revenue strategies:

More than anything, Autostraddle is a community. There is an uncountable-from-the-outside number of people with Autostraddle accounts who comment on posts with anything from praise for the writers to insightful queer haikus. The team has also taken huge steps to make sure that the community is inclusive: the site has a trans editor, for example, and “Our Pulse,” a series of essays by queer Latina and Latinx writers, was launched just two weeks ago.

Autostraddle is a safe haven. It’s one of the very few places where queer women can congregate and just be queer women. We can learn and talk about things that have to do with LGBTQ+ issues, feminism or neither of those things – just the world at large. If you have any interest in supporting independent, queer media, check it out. Take a look. Support it, because it’s one of the last things we have.