Hello AF Media and AF+ Members,
We (Riese, Kayla, and Drew) are writing to you, because we assume we’re all feeling a lot of the same things: fear, confusion, anxiety, despair, frustration, anger. It’s the first stretch of a second Trump presidency, something none of us wanted, but alas, here we are. Here we all are together!
The media industry has been a tough landscape for a long time, and it feels especially fraught now in a time of escalated misinformation exacerbated by AI, an administration visibly endorsed and supported by an oligarchy of tech giants, social media algorithms that favor fascism and isolation over community-building, and politicians and lawmakers who seem intent on pedaling false and harmful ideologies about the most vulnerable members of our community: queer, trans and gender-nonconforming individuals. Autostraddle remains committed to fighting these forces. We are proud to be a QTPOC-owned company and continuing to survive as a queer- and trans-led magazine that isn’t owned by a corporation and maintains editorial freedom in a way few other publications do.
We’re going to keep doing the things we do best, whether that’s straightforward and candid political explainers that skip the bullshit and the fear-mongering, even if that means our headline isn’t quite clicky enough; in-depth coverage of queer art and entertainment that doesn’t hinge on respectability politics; hyperlocal reporting on queer communities and scenes; or bringing you the best personal essays by emerging and established queer and trans writers. We will keep publishing queer and trans content that’s for LGBTQ people and not merely about us. This administration can try to legislate queer and trans people from public life, but we’re not going anywhere, and we’re not backing down from putting out complex, authentic, and real stories of queer and trans life.
We wear a lot of hats on our three-person editorial team, and we want to make sure we’re using our time and energy in ways that ultimately serve you best, because we need you to make all of this happen and because there isn’t a point to our work if it’s not connecting with our communities meaningfully. So you tell us: What do you want more of? What stories do you want to read? What kind of news do you want to read? Where are you getting your news — are you stepping back from certain social media platforms and if so, what’s the best way to reach you? If you have thoughts on any of these things, feel free to just write back to this email with any of ‘em.
Autostraddle is in a unique position to deliver news with a clear point of view and eye toward collective justice and challenging the status quo. We don’t have the biggest staff or the most resources, but we’ve got a lot of heart and hustle! We’d love to hear from you about how and what you’re reading now. We hope to always provide a good balance of fun articles that can bring our readers joy, but we also want our audience to remain informed. Sometimes the stories we’re really excited about don’t end up being read as widely as we hoped, so we want to better connect with our most loyal readers — you, our members — to make sure we’re getting the things you want to read to you.
We can’t control the algorithms that put content in front of you on social media, and we cannot control the proliferation of AI-generated search engine results. But we can control our priorities in what we want to cover and what our readers want to read, especially if we’re all working together here. We can bring you the queerest news and culture writing you’ll read all day, and even if the algorithms don’t value it, we know you do. So we also hope you’ll consider going back to some old school news/media habits and actually physically go to our homepage and make Autostraddle a part of your daily routine. Relying on social media to deliver news you actually want to read means being as beholden to biased algorithms as we are, and this is one small way you can circumvent that.
And if you like a story you read, tell us in the comments! That really means so much to us! Whereas other publications keep comments sections around to encourage trolls and endless internet fights (that thereby increase traffic and encourage people to return to the page), we have comments sections because we actually want to have conversations. We read all of them! And our writers love to hear compliments! It also helps them know what readers want and therefore what to pitch and prioritize.
While we won’t pretend like sustained reader and member growth isn’t important for our longevity, we aren’t merely interested in quantity when it comes to our readership; we’re also deeply interested in the quality of our readership, by which we mean having readers that are engaged with the work we’re doing and less distance between our readers and ourselves. We take a community-based approach to journalism, and often our best stories are born out of reader requests and conversations we organically have as editors based on what we see people responding to.
All of this is to say: We genuinely want to hear from you. We want to feel connected. Tell us what you want.