The Flytrap Opens Up

by Maria Bustillos

It’s been exciting to see the new feminist cooperative, The Flytrap, gathering funds for a launch on Kickstarter, just as Flaming Hydra did last year. On this, the last day of their crowdfunder, we caught up with co-founders s.e. smith and Nicole Froio to hear about their adventure.

The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Maria Bustillos: So how did The Flytrap begin?

s.e. smith:  Oh, gosh. This started when Andrea Grimes called me on an absolutely dismal December day and said, “Hey, do you want to restart the tradition of feminist blogging and put together a project that captures all the fun and wonderful things about that era, while also taking a note from the not fun parts of that era,” and I was like, “Yes, I do.”

I want to bring back this flowering of feminist media that wasn’t one-directional. The really important thing about The Flytrap, to me, is that we are building community. That was at the core of the feminist blogging heyday. It wasn’t just writing, it was the comments, these incredible conversations that happened there.

At this moment, with the media under attack and feeling all this pressure to feed the maw of the algorithm, it was really important to me to build a sustainable feminist media collective that is a community, and not just “Here’s our newsletter.”

Maria:  What are the core values guiding this project for you personally?

s.e.: As both a blogger and a reader, one of the things I loved was never knowing what was going to be at the top of the page when I logged on to a website. People were writing what they wanted to see and what their readers were telling them that they wanted to see. Not like, ugh gotta do my 10 Wild Moments on ‘Game of Thrones’ Last Night. I might log on and find a deeply researched 4,000-word essay about being fat on public transit, or a quick hit on some pop culture thing that everyone had been enjoying.

That sense of joy and eclecticness, and discovery, is something that we are trying to recapture. Which you can see in the Flytrap Fridays we’ve been doing, a series of very different introductory pieces showcasing the talents of our collective. Something wild and new is going to hit your inbox every week and it is going to startle you every time, we hope.

Maria: We’ve had a similar experience at Flaming Hydra, and are learning how to harness the power of a very diverse collective. This to me is how media should work: actively working out, combining, and reconciling even conflicting perspectives, to the extent possible. Which is exactly the juice that corporate media has sucked out of us, what with people being fired even for tweeting, “Free Palestine.”

It’s so valuable and necessary for us to all keep talking, and create a better reality for our readers and each other.

s.e.: One thing I want to say is that it’s really important to us that we are not all U.S.-based. This was another great thing about the feminist blogging heyday; you had people in Australia and the U.K. and France and Canada and all over. It’s really important for us to not be America-centric, not to be imperialism-centric, and to make sure that we are talking about the global politics.

Nicole: I’ve never had a staff job, but I do have a lot of experience writing from the Global South about topics that Americans don’t know that much about, and my experience has been that newsrooms will try to impose the American view on things that I’m reporting on after the fact. Then I have to fight back and be like, “No, that’s not what my sources said. That is what you guys want it to sound like.”

It is really important that we have a really diverse array of perspectives, because one of the things I really struggled with as a freelancer is that a lot of newsrooms don’t really recognize the fact that American imperialism exists.

As a freelancer, whenever I’ve tried to broach that topic, I always wondered, “Will I ever write for this place again?” That kind of thing. I really appreciate being embraced by the folks at The Flytrap, because my perspectives are very different from the median U.S. perspective; being in community with a group of diverse people, but who still believe in social justice as a goal—as, hopefully, most feminists do—is just such a great opportunity.

s.e.: It’s one of our core values, which Aria Velasquez articulated: Conflict is not harm. We really thrive on generative disagreement, and we are constantly encountering different perspectives—in Slack, in meetings. I think we all have the ability to be really respectful and thoughtful in these conversations. We never want to be in a place where we are telling each other what to think, or making people feel like they can’t speak up.

We’re all pretty aligned on Palestine, for example, but if there is a hotly contested issue, even within social justice spaces, we want to make sure no one is ever afraid to be like, “Yes, I don’t think like you do.” We are a collective, not a top-down newsroom where you’re going to get punished for making a comment on social media. I’m sure we’re going to be publishing work that I disagree with, or that Nicole disagrees with.

Nicole: That is the hope, right? That we will be in dialogue with each other. Like, “Oh, I disagree with this. Maybe in a couple of months I can write something about why I disagree with it.” That’s generative. Looking at issues from all sides, or all opinions, from a shared standpoint of social justice as the goal.

Maria: Yes, we’re developing a lot more than just a new kind of newsroom. I’ve already learned so much. Nobody’s going to be shut up, each member can speak out exactly as they want and be respected, because this is a community of very serious people. I mean a lot of them are goofballs, but also, they’re serious people trying to do their best for the egalitarian society that we hope to bring into being someday.

Maria: We’ve also talked a little bit, s.e., about joining forces to raise money for archival projects—for our own publications and for others, like Flaming Hydra is doing with The Awl and The Hairpin.

I have so enjoyed talking with journalists who recognize that the money doesn’t have to come from readers alone. We can do all kinds of projects together that advance shared goals—web monetization, archiving, investigative projects, local journalism projects. I love the idea of cooperative organizations working together to get more money to pay more people and create and build better practices for this business.

It’s beyond great that we can raise enough money to get to launch, but anybody can get a calculator and see that if we want to build real longevity, sustainability, the costs are quite high. The highest being for people: You’ve got to have at least like $150,000 per seat to pay for a proper salary, healthcare, and all the other incidentals for a junior professional to work full time, and more for a senior one.

s.e.: Yes. Defector’s annual report was a really informative read on this.

I would really like to start a collective of all of the collectives as a publisher network—whatever you want to call it?

Nicole: Journalists Collective Union, I don’t know.

Maria: Right on. Wow!

s.e.: We are really inspired by Defector’s really detailed and worker-forward contributor agreement.

Maria: I’m so on board with all that.

s.e.: I’ll be poking you about this in the new year.

Maria: There’s a lot of work ahead with respect to understanding and negotiating contracts, even. Particularly in a feminist context, I can’t tell you the number of people I’ve told… an assigning editor once told me that 80 percent of the men she worked with automatically ask for more money, right out the box. You’re offered $500: “Can you do $750?” just as a matter of course. But none of the women, none, ever asked for more money.

Nicole: I’m sure I’ve never asked for more money. [laughs]

Maria: You have to ask for more money. Promise me right now, you will never not ask for more money. Even if it’s ten percent. We have to, and particularly because we’re women. Anyhow this all sounds great and I’m going to write this little thing up and put it up tomorrow and tell people.

Super fun talking. There’s going to be way more to come.

s.e.: Yes. Thank you for your support. Nicole, also, I’m obsessed with your nails. I can’t stop thinking about them.

Maria: They’re amazing.

Nicole: They’re like—oh my God, colored pencils.