As newsrooms across the country scramble to cover Election Day, one worker-owned outlet is making its debut with some “feminist counterprogramming.”
The Flytrap officially launched Tuesday, a little over a month after its 10 co-founders announced a Kickstarter campaign for the project. The outlet has raised nearly $57,000 and follows in the tradition of feminist blogs through reporting and cultural criticism told through a feminist lens and delivered via a weekly newsletter. The first issue, free to all, is a piece from co-founder and journalist Katelyn Burns called “The U.S. Election Cycle Is Too Damn Long.”
It was the “perfect” piece for The Flytrap’s Election Day launch, said Andrea Grimes, a journalist and activist who decided to create The Flytrap after feminist website Jezebel briefly shut down last year. The Flytrap was founded with the goal of providing readers content that goes “against the algorithm,” which Grimes said means not participating in the news cycle in ways that feel inauthentic or “icky.”
“It means posting what we want to post, writing what we want to write, creating what we want to create, regardless of what feeds the algorithm.”
Burns’ piece argues in part that the country’s lengthy campaign cycles are detrimental to national political reporting. She writes that journalists tend towards horse race coverage and cover policies with ongoing campaigns in mind, focusing on how potential laws will affect polls, not people.
“I think that many of The Flytrap founders feel frustrated by the strictures created by the endless election cycle. We feel frustrated by the effect that the election cycle has on the press itself,“ Grimes said. “(With Burns’ piece) we really felt like we could do some counterprogramming — some feminist counterprogramming — saying something interesting, saying something that’s on everybody’s mind.”
The Flytrap is also hosting an election night Zoom gathering with 25 of its Kickstarter supporters. Though the outlet’s inaugural newsletter is free, its edition next week will only be sent to paid subscribers. The Flytrap is making one newsletter a month available to free subscribers.
“We really want to create a community of people who are interested in feminist political commentary, cultural criticism, reporting,” Grimes said. “It felt like the right thing to say when we were launching on Election Day is ‘We’re f—ing tired, and this is bulls—, and this should change.’”
