The Flytrap wants to bring back feminist blogging with teeth
The intersectional feminist media co-op seeks to “un-fuck the algorithm” by creating a space for nuance on the Internet — without relying on artificial intelligence or the typical pace of the news cycle.
This story also appears in our newsletter, The Front Page, which examines systems of power and inequity in media. Subscribe here.
No artificial intelligence. No Substack. Trust readers. Those are three of the main tenets of The Flytrap’s motto and mission to “unfuck the algorithm.”
“We’re just going to say what we mean,” co-founder Aria Velasquez said. “And if people understand it, that’s great. And if they don’t, then that’s unfortunate.”
The intersectional feminist media co-op launched its Kickstarter yesterday and announced its founding cadre of 10 writers, editors, and artists who have freelanced for seminal feminist publications like Bitch Media and The Toast (RIP to both). It’s just one of several worker-owned outlets that have emerged in recent years, including The 51st, Flaming Hydra, Defector, Aftermath, Rascal, and Hell Gate.
The idea started to take shape when Jezebel announced its shutdown last November. Co-founder Andrea Grimes reached out to an array of writers, including Velasquez, who she thought would be interested in collaborating. The new year reduced some momentum, but the “Untitled Internet Bloggy Project” — as it was first called in email subject lines — took off on the cusp of spring and summer. By August, the founders group was finalized.
The final lineup of co-founders also includes Nicole Froio, Christine Grimaldi, Chrissy Stroop, Evette Dionne, Katelyn Burns, Rommy Torrico, s.e. smith, and Tina Vásquez.
“We want to bring back the fun, we want to bring back the nuance, we want to bring back a period of the Internet where feminism wasn’t a dirty word,” Froio said. “We are all feminists, but I think we’re also very aware that feminism and social justice language can totally be co-opted for rage bait, click bait, and we’re hoping to build something different than that.”
From a cooperative business model to rejecting the pace of the news cycle and writing without inherent Internet defensiveness, The Flytrap seeks to revive the ethos of feminist, community-oriented digital media spaces that are now scarce. Like Defector, comments will only be available to Flytrap members, and Froio says she hopes the newsletter can be a conversation rather than a unidirectional product. The co-op will house a blog and the “Cancel Me, Daddy” podcast, a previously existing podcast about cancel culture hosted by Burns and Grimaldi.
“Readers have the capacity to read complex stories,” she said. “They have the capacity to hold more than three truths in their brain at once. That’s part of how we want to build community — we want to trust our readers, especially the ones that are sponsoring us.”
The Flytrap also extols wholesale rejection of artificial intelligence and Substack, both with wide uptake across the journalism industry in recent years. The past year has seen numerous newsroom partnerships with OpenAI, from hard news-focused outlets like the Associated Press to flagship magazine journalism publishers like Condé Nast.
Velasquez said she’s sure the rise of AI isn’t necessarily “active conspiracy.”
“But we would be remiss — and it would be journalistic malpractice — to not take note of how quickly all of that happened and how it happened, if not in conjunction, then in rapid succession,” she said.
Related: News’ artificial intelligence fixation deserves more scrutiny
And The Flytrap’s commitment to not use AI is also a commitment to its future, Velasquez added: “The New Yorker or The Atlantic or Vox, they’re not going to wake up the day that OpenAI goes belly up and find that all of the stuff that they have put into those companies is now magically back under their control and is completely deprogrammed from those large language models.”
”It’s not just a matter of you are doing damage to people in the present. As an active journalist, you are damaging the archives of the future.”
She said it was a given that The Flytrap, hosted on Beehiiv, wouldn’t be using Substack due to its owners’ hardline free speech policy enabling its hosting of pro-Nazi publications — and the pay cut to revenue through monetization on the platform.
Froio also pointed out that several of the co-founders are trans, and “Substack is a place where a lot of transphobic hatred and rhetoric really, really thrives.”
“We just weren’t comfortable supporting that … if your feminism isn’t trans-inclusive, it’s just completely bullshit,” she said. (The Objective left Substack in 2021 for similar reasons.)
The publication’s initial funding goal is $45,000, with hopes to reach that sum by Oct. 31.Those funds will go toward hosting the newsletter, business operations, and paying the founding collective. According to The Flytrap’s Kickstarter, a stretch goal of $65,000 would allow The Flytrap to bring on guest writers and artists, at a rate of $0.50/word or fair rates for graphic artists, produce merch, and publish a second round-up of cultural criticism, commentary, and writing each week.
Both Froio and Velasquez said the goal is to be thoughtful about any expansions beyond the newsletter to establish sustainability.
“I don’t want someone to be talking about The Flytrap a decade from now saying, ‘Oh, yeah, they were really cool — sucks that they had to shut down after three years,’” Velasquez said. “I want to still be around in five years, ten years.”
The Flytrap’s members are also curating their internal editorial calendar, working on securing legal representation, and figuring out subscriber retention. Its first edition will go live on a day “scarier than Halloween in America,” as Velasquez quipped: Election Day.
While The Flytrap is still in its nascent stages, its name is also a nod to hope and longevity, even in what seems like an inhospitable landscape as layoff after layoff hits publications.
Venus flytraps have a very limited, specific native range, in North and South Carolina. Living in nitrogen-poor soil, they’ve adapted to get the nutrients they need by eating flies. Last year, they moved off the list of endangered plants in the U.S. And they’ve got teeth to bite back — just like the burgeoning feminist publication.
“Right now, the standard ways that we expect a media property to grow are closed off to us now,” Velasquez said. “We are planting ourselves in hostile soil. We’re not going to be the first reader-supported newsroom out there — hell, if you grew up watching PBS, you already know [we can build this] ‘because of members like you.’”
James Salanga is the co-director of The Objective and the podcast producer for The Sick Times.
This piece was edited by Omar Rashad. Copy edits by Gabe Schneider.
We depend on your donation. Yes, you...
With your small-dollar donation, we pay our writers, our fact checkers, our insurance broker, our web host, and a ton of other services we need to keep the lights on.
But we need your help. We can’t pay our writers what we believe their stories should be worth and we can’t afford to pay ourselves a full-time salary. Not because we don’t want to, but because we still need a lot more support to turn The Objective into a sustainable newsroom.
We don’t want to rely on advertising to make our stories happen — we want our work to be driven by readers like you validating the stories we publish are worth the effort we spend on them.
Consider supporting our work with a tax-deductable donation.
James Salanga,
Editorial Director
Related Articles
The Knight Foundation scrubs DEI section from its ‘About’ page
One of the biggest funders of nonprofit journalism in the U.S. no longer publicly lists an explicit section about “diversity, equity, and inclusion” on its mission page.
The resurrected American Penal Press Contest honors incarcerated journalists
2025 saw the revival of the historic journalism awards, once called the Pulitzers of prison newsrooms, after a 35-year hiatus.
Do newsrooms need a memeologist?
In the age of meme-slop and digital newsrooms shuttering, internet culture reporters say mainstream media is ill-equipped to cover not just trends, but a radicalization that doesn’t look how it used to.