When Gloria Steinem became the founding editor of Ms. Magazine in 1972, she hoped it would mark the start of feminism becoming a household concept and defy publications whose outreach to women cast them solely as beauty-focused homemakers.

Since the founding of Ms., periodicals of all types — from self-distributed zines made with copy paper and Sharpie to polished quarterly glossies and email newsletters — have taken up the cause of publishing feminist work. But women’s media, like much of mainstream news, has struggled with intersectionality. Black women writers both within and outside the publication found it failed to prioritize multi-issue struggles. Alice Walker, once featured on a Ms. cover, quit the magazine and wrote in her resignation letter: “I do not feel welcome in the world you are projecting.”

Feminist magazines still deal with intersectionality, despite decades of work by Black organizers and activists. In tandem with growing conservatism across the U.S., legacy publications have been eviscerated over the past few years. Budgets are slashed, editors who commissioned emerging writers have been laid off, and departments dedicated to engaging women on issues affecting their rights and cultural life are being gutted, like Teen Vogue’s politics section. Bitch Magazine, which shuttered in 2022, was one of the most recognizable places for intersectional feminist news and critique on pop culture and would’ve celebrated 30 years since its first issue this year. Since 2020, magazines like gal-dem, Self, Jezebel, and other blogs like Wear Your Voice that published on feminist issues have also closed or scaled back publication.

Related: Teen Vogue’s loss is an irreplaceable void in teen media

Five years after publishing my first article in Teen Vogue, I worry about undergraduate journalists who struggle to envision a future that supports freelance writing careers. If cultural criticism and journalism writ large tends to be exclusionary from the jump, where are new marginalized writers expected to go besides experimental, independent routes like Substack? 

So a collective of feminist publications — many independent and worker-owned — are taking different approaches to ensuring feminist reporting and critique persists in spite of a crumbling media ecosystem.

Maddy Myers, co-founder of indie publication Mothership, believes that the rise of feminist blogs in the late 2010s were a direct response to the onslaught of racist and sexist campaigns like Gamergate, Donald Trump’s first presidential term, and the #MeToo movement. Feminist media aside, the existing media landscape wasn’t enough to shield writers from misogynistic backlash, causing many to flee games journalism.

Much of the same political strands building in the late 2010s have only continued to intensify since then, compounded by the media literacy crisis, ongoing coronavirus pandemic, and influx of generative AI into culture.

“We had this robust legacy field of women's publications — a lot of them have been either shuttered entirely or severely undercut in terms of their staff numbers, and it's just been really demoralizing to watch all of that happen,” Myers says.

In 2025, Polygon was acquired by Valnet, known for exploitative work conditions. The company laid off most of its staff, including Myers. So she and Zoë Hannah, a former colleague and Mothership’s co-founder, used their shared fear and frustration to fuel Mothership.

The outlet launched in January with an advice column, reviews, criticism, and historical deep dives, so readers can reflect on the vaginal imagery in Metroid Prime 4 or dwell on advice given to the polyamorous partner of a gamer. Myers knew former employees of Kotaku, The Verge, and The Washington Post — the same writers behind worker-owned video game website Aftermath — who introduced them to other indie publications like 404 Media, a team of former employees at Vice’s defunct tech vertical Motherboard. 

“Everybody has their own journey of, ‘I'm fed up with traditional publishing as a structure, and I'm leaving to create something new,’” Myers said. But this meant having to come up with a new path to sustainability that didn’t rely on subscriber income. “A lot of us didn't have much experience with the business side of the publications where we worked.” 

Business questions were at the forefront of all of my conversations, especially with worker-owned outlets. 

Who will take on the feat of taxes? What if there are legal concerns with investigative work? At the same time, establishing a brand on an internet of folks whose attention spans are diminishing may be as difficult as convincing the same crowd to drive its subscriber revenue. And in the year of 2026, who is funding feminism?

For The Flytrap, the answer is over 1,330 people.

The worker-owned media group was co-founded by a collective of distinguished feminist writers, including s.e. smith, an author and journalist who explores disability and grief. One year after Bitch Magazine’s closure, fellow cofounder Andrea Grimes reached out to smith with an interest in reviving feminist blogging rooted in a values-driven framework prioritizing gender justice, racial justice, disability justice, and economic justice. Nearly one month after launching a Kickstarter in October 2024, The Flytrap surpassed its goal and raised $56,512.

Related: The Flytrap wants to bring back feminist blogging with teeth

smith, whose editorial expertise in disability justice inspired Myers and Hannah, beamed in conversation about The Flytrap’s subscriber bundle with Mothership and new reproductive rights and justice outlet Autonomy News. 

“[The Flytrap] tries to interact [as a partner and collaborator] with people outside the organization, as well, and to really live those values of collectivism as well as mutual accountability and care with each other,” smith said. 

The Flytrap’s charming and incisive coverage echoes Bitch’s legacy, identifying how media connects to larger context in society and culture, while tugging feminist threads and other overlooked angles.

smith referenced critic Jourdan Searles’ piece on online discourse in a post-#OscarsSoWhite world or a personal essay on trans identity and horror by cofounder Chrissy Stoop that swivels past SEO-driven headlines and monotonous trend pieces by overworked writers to flag the importance of cultural criticism and literacy.

Full-time media reporting has also been predominantly white, so Williams and Teen Vogue alum Brittany McNamara publish narratives that tend to get “lost in the shuffle” in newsrooms, such as how women of color are disproportionately affected by massive mergers and layoffs. (In July, Williams asked me for input on an audacious conversation about advocacy for women writers in music journalism.)

Niche features on motherhood and pay discrepancies, not to mention one of the website’s high-performing articles in lieu of the frustrating job market, offer solace to millennials, who may be realizing that their alleged ladder to success is broken. 

Williams hopes that La Fronde’s reporting “give some validation to women that think they did something wrong in their career to cause this.”

But she pointed out that media companies with a focus on women or BIPOC are losing sponsorship money because companies are retracting funds and ad dollars given during the early 2020s.

“A lot of these executives say, ‘Well, we're waiting until the next election for things to turn around,’ but one thing I'm a little concerned about is [that] that's three years out,” she said.

Without funders, feminist media companies are experimenting with other models of ensuring their work can survive — including print magazines. That serves a dual purpose now that the Internet is a highly-surveilled and hollowed shell of its former self. Lux Magazine is banking on the resurgence of print media reaching young people at a time they need it the most. 

As the campus coordinator for Lux’s nationwide college tour, I felt welcomed by the team’s mission to provide students with a chance to learn about politics and feminism, something I didn’t have enough of at my historically Black university.

It feels luxurious to flip through a magazine that covers global feminist movements, queer fiction, and underground abortion networks, but as Lux editor Cheryl Rivera tells me: we can have it all. Named after Marxist theorist Rosa Luxemburg, the socialist feminist quarterly print magazine launched in 2021, and Rivera, also the cofounder at community space Another World, finds it uplifting to discuss subway surveillance and abolition with youth.

Those two spheres have collided to create a pathway to magazine writing: Another World and Lux have begun working together to offer community reporting skills to youth becoming politically activated. 

“Because I work at [Lux] at a time when it’s increasingly hard to find an entry point into magazines, it’s a gift to connect young people to Lux,” Rivera said.

Polyester Zine’s dainty pixelated design and unparalleled cover stories featuring outspoken Hollywood darlings like Hannah Einbender and Melissa Barrera are a breath of fresh air for voracious readers, similar to the spectrum of work published by now-shuttered British feminist outlet gal-dem.

“What was interesting about Tumblr was [not just] a lot of the artwork I was seeing, but also how people were organizing around creativity,” Gamble said. “There were art collectives [like The Coven] with a shared mission of exploring gender, race, and feminism, and all of the people there were extremely young.” 

A similar legacy of collectivism is apparent across indie publications. Lux Magazine has held events with fellow radical magazines Hammer & Hope, Jewish Currents, and Acacia Magazine. smith at The Flytrap told me that negotiating group rates on health insurance, car rentals, and technologies is a delightful part of being in community with supportive independent outlets.

Hannah, with Mothership, said generosity of other editors helped the outlet’s launch. 

“Nobody out here is competing for space in the indie media pool,” she said. “There's plenty of room in this pool, so I hope that there's even more feminist blogs next time we all get together for a conversation.”

As journalists pivot out of the field into other sectors of writing, I’d like to see this infrastructure branch out to writers’ rooms, directors, and showrunners, but La Fronde seems to be ahead of the curve.

In an interview with Danielle A. Scruggs, the founder of Black Women Directors, La Fronde’s editor-in-chief Williams mentioned UCLA’s new report on the underrepresented diversity in the entertainment industry. 

“I really thought it was great that Danielle was building a repository of all of these Black women and non-binary film directors in one place,” Williams said. “Your algorithm wouldn't show you these names, but you can find all of these people in one list, free of ads and algorithms.”

Those directories echo the work of Zora Neale Hurston, who stressed the importance of archives in preserving the lineage of foundational feminist texts. 

The Flytrap has been reprinting Bitch Magazine’s articles since November 2025, giving them a second life on the internet. 

“We've been really excited in our second year to start reprinting classic articles from Bitch,” smith said. “I see other outlets also working on resurfacing and hosting old archives, because link rot is real. So much writing and art has just disappeared from the internet, and it's really important to think about those lineages and how these things influenced me as a writer and The Flytrap as a whole.”

Noella Williams is a Brooklyn-based writer from the South covering Black culture, queer identity, fandoms, music, and veganism.

This piece was edited by James Salanga. Copy edits by Marlee Baldridge.