Stop, Look, Listen: What Happens When Women's Voices Vanish Online?

(Plus one of the pieces of which I'm proudest over my whole career – my Vice long read on maternal mental health – that may vanish very soon)

This post, by Dave Haslam, on his excellent Substack, spoke to me loudly today.

DISAPPEARING WOR(L)DS

This is why.

In 2007, I had big plans to set up a cool, DIY women’s magazine. Laura Barton had exciting ideas about it around my kitchen table (I still mourn her idea for a suffragette photo shoot, and wonder where we’d have got a compliant horse). We gathered a ton of women (and our then-music editor, Michael Hann) in a pub in Clerkenwell to talk about it. We were raring to go. Then I got “head-hunted” to set up a women-run culture website, driven by a partnership of Drowned In Sound funded and supported by Sky. It would be exactly the same, only modern, only with more money – and online.

I’d get a great salary for three days of work a week, a deputy editor (now-culture columnist Rebecca Nicholson, who became the Vice editor in chief in 2015, also looking after their female-focused channel, Broadly, which was “consolidated” into Vice four years later) and a team of regular writers (I’m still overwhelmed that one of them was Sylvia Patterson, writing about the best encounters of her interviewing life). I left Word Magazine to do it, a move I was thinking about anyway, as I was writing for so many people as a freelancer. Also, music journalism was starting to feel like a perilous industry, so I thought I’d get more something more solid. Oh, the irony.

Leaving for the new world, December 2007: my Word Magazine leaving party.

Lip became Lipster (I still despise that name). We’d get “creative freedom”. This was freedom we had to get by doing everything ourselves and then getting told by mysterious people we never met at head office what we were doing wrong. I got an exclusive online interview with Björk, her team flying me over to New York. I remember great features we ran with Goldfrapp, The Gossip and Johnny Marr, great new writers we employed, an advice column by ALISON MOYET (I know!). This was before Twitter. We relied on email mailing lists to get ourselves before people, but we were getting traction quickly. I also remember our wonderful launch party, its theme colours being black and bright neons, and our business cards having Dolly Parton and Pat Butcher on them.