Reclaiming the stories of real women and the South
Online longform magazines The Riveter and Scalawag Magazine hit their funding goals this week by promising to tell the stories they know – women writing about women, and Southerners writing about the American South.
Scalawag, with the tag line “Together toward a new South,” was born in part out of the frustrations of Jesse Williams and another Scalawag writer. Both were tired of hearing bias stories about the South from people who weren’t from there and failed to understand the culture or perspective.
Staff plan to report on politics, social issues, tell the stories of interesting people to cover “not just problems in the South but also the hard work of good folks trying to overcome them,” Williams said.
Scalawag hopes to eventually sustain operations with subscriptions. The quarterly magazine hit its $20,000 goal with 20 days to spare in a 30-day campaign.
The Riveter Magazine hit the $30,000 mark about an hour ago and plans to tell stories of women from a woman’s point of view. Founders Kaylen Ralph and Joanna Demkiewicz met at the Missouri School of Journalism. Natalie Cheng later joined the team. The trio live in Minneapolis, according to their Kickstarter campaign page.
“I remember when we were first starting out, someone made a comment that what we were doing is very radical. Like is it really that radical? All we want to do is feature women who are kicking ass,” Demkiewicz said in their campaign pitch video.
The Riveter was featured in a previous Through the Cracks story titled “Feminist journalists are kicking butt on Kickstarter,” which took a look at several women media entrepreneurs seeing great results on the crowdfunding platform.
Ruby Magazine, another magazine to tell women’s stories, launched their campaign earlier this week and is off to a good start.
