Feminist nonprofit Bitch Media folds after 25 years

To say a lot has changed in the media landscape since the late 1990s would be an understatement. That’s when a small feminist zine began publishing in San Francisco. Soon it became a nonprofit, publishing the magazine “Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture.” In 2007, Bitch Media relocated to Portland, a move cofounder Andi Zeisler said landed it “at the right place at the right time.” The organization expanded online and started producing podcasts and other digital content. But with the pandemic and the pressures of making an independent media nonprofit financially sustainable, Zeisler says the decision to close was simply one that had to be made. She joins us to talk about the last 25 years as a feminist media organization and her take on the role of independent publications today.

The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Twenty  five years ago, a small feminist zine started up in San Francisco. It became a nonprofit, publishing Bitch Magazine. It’s idea was to provide a feminist response to pop culture. The organization expanded over the years into podcasts and other digital content. It moved to Portland in 2007, but a few days ago, Bitch Media announced that they’re going to cease all operations in June. Andi Zeisler is the cofounder of Bitch Media. She joins us now to look back on a quarter century. Andi, welcome back.

Andi Zeisler: Thanks for having me.

Miller: You wrote in the goodbye post that Bitch started as a stapled together zine. What were your hopes for it at the time?

Zeisler: Well, my two cofounders and I, we really loved popular culture. We were consumers. We loved watching movies and TV, we loved reading magazines. We wanted to make something that took popular culture seriously as a force that shaped our lives, that shaped everyone’s lives, often without us really knowing it. We also wanted to show at the same time that feminism was still important. The three of us grew up in the 1980s, which was just an era of real obvious feminist backlash. And we wanted to sort of reframe it for young people of a new generation as a really useful lens through which to examine popular culture, to examine the stories and the messages that are sold to us. Honestly, we really created the thing we wanted to read and to start the conversations we wanted to have. Because we love pop culture, but we also believe that you can love something and still want it to be better.

Miller: The writer Riese, who co-founded the site Autostraddle, had a loving and sad response to your news. She included a line from an earlier piece she’d written that your magazine was ‘smart, dorky, funny, educational and somehow also friendly’ and she italicized that word friendly. Was that a conscious tonal decision?

Zeisler: In many ways, yes. But also that was just our voice. We were sort of conversational writers, and we did see humor in a lot of things. We also were of a generation that really processed heavy information best through sort of a humorous approach. But the friendly thing… I really loved Reese’s piece; I just, it was very, very touching. Again, because of the backlash during which we grew up, we were really aware that feminism for most people was not something that sounded fun. It was not something that sounded friendly. It was something that had some really ugly baggage

Miller: This was the time when Rush Limbaugh would talk about ‘feminazis’.

Zeisler: Yeah, exactly. It was not a label that people wanted to associate with. But, at the same time, we were coming off the heels of, for instance, the Riot Grrrl movement and the Beastie Boys making sort of a feminist shift in their own music and rhetoric. We felt like, well this is a moment where people are open to these ideas in a way that is not necessarily academic. It’s not necessarily activism focused, but it is very evident in the culture that’s around us and the media that’s around us. We were writing about it in the same way that we were kind of processing it ourselves.

Miller: What has it been like for you over the last couple of days to read the responses to your farewell post?

Zeisler: Oh my gosh, it’s been just incredibly moving. I have cried a whole bunch because, really, the kinds of things that people have said: that it’s really changed their lives, that it found them at a time when they were really questioning who they were and who they could be, that it opened up avenues for their futures that they didn’t know existed. That is all I could have asked for from this project. It really made me feel like, okay, so, we’re closing, we’re closing up shop and that’s sad. But at the same time, I feel pretty confident that, in a lot of ways, we accomplished what we set out to do, which really was making a piece of media that people connected to and that became a really important part of their understanding of the world that they were living in.

Miller: Do you see Bitch Media as a casualty of the pandemic?

Zeisler: It’s a hard question because definitely some of our programming took a hit. We publish a magazine, we publish a website, but on the other hand, we also had this very robust campus programming that brought speakers from all over the country to colleges and universities that worked with women’s studies departments and communication studies departments on putting together anthologies and reading lists for syllabi. That absolutely took a huge hit because colleges and universities were really not bringing speakers to campuses, even virtually, other than in a few cases. So, yeah, like so many organizations that depend on fundraising and often fundraising year round, which as a nonprofit we essentially had to do, it wasn’t simply the pandemic. It was the whole past few years in which there have been a lot of emergent kind of fundraising needs, whether it’s bail funds or abortion funds or political donations. And we can’t begrudge people that. It really has been a time of emergency in so many ways. I can’t really measure the impact that had on us. But we just took a really clear eyed look at things like our strategic plans and our print margins and we just didn’t see a viable path forward. In order to meet the financial commitments we had to our existing staff and our partners, we had a short runway; we had to move fast.

Miller: You are a nonprofit, an independent publication with a subscription model. Do you see a viable way forward for independent media broadly?

Zeisler: That’s a really excellent question, and it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot. Being a reader supported organization, it gave us a lot of freedom in so many ways. We were not beholden to advertisers. We did not have a parent company telling us what we could or could not spend money on. We had a lot of freedom, but money was always a struggle. We never had a safety net, and we never really had any real traction in a media market that increasingly had made feminism into a commodity. I wrote a book that came out in 2016 called ‘We Were Feminists Once’ that was about the commoditization of feminism and the kind of decontextualization of feminism in the marketplace and about what happens when a social movement, that is still very needed and very important, becomes a trend or a label. I think that, in many ways, independent media in general has been a casualty of a landscape in which media is less about information and more about profit at whatever cost. So it’s difficult because being independent and supporting other independent media – like in the 90s and early 2000s – we were really coming up amidst people who valued independent media as a force and as something that worked collectively to platform different voices and underserved voices. As more and more media became venture capital backed and expected to turn a profit in shorter and shorter timeframes, we realized that the landscape was just indelibly changed into one that was about headlines and blurbs and social media tags and less really about the content itself.

Miller: Andi, congratulations on 25 years, and I look forward to seeing what you do next. Thank you.

Zeisler: Thank you so much, Dave.

Miller: Andi Zeisler is a cofounder of Bitch Media, which is closing up shop in June.

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