Membership model fails for website Feminist Times which closes after a year

The website Feminist Times announced its closure yesterday, one year on from its “naming ceremony” and nine months since its launch.

The Feminist Times said it could not “survive any longer without having to change our values”.

The statement said: “Other projects like ours allow themselves to be co-opted by a big brand or not pay contributors. We would not be happy to do either.

“Having already crowdfunded and made it clear that we need more members to survive, we believe the boldest and best move is to put the project on ice exactly 12 months since our naming ceremony; to celebrate 9 months of incredible agenda-setting content from exceptionally talented writers and to acknowledge that we achieved what many others haven’t: we made a feminist online magazine that competed with the mainstream and we did it while keeping our principles intact.”

The final issue of the title, which lists Charlotte Raven as its editor-in-chief and Deborah Coughlin as its editor, consists of content provided free by writers “who wanted to help us”.

Feminist Times’s website will remain live “as a resource for the foreseeable future” and Raven “would like to hear from anyone who would like to be part of future incarnations of Feminist Times”.

The title had been planning towards a print launch. It had sought to fund itself by asking readers to become members by paying between £56 and £5 a month.

Topics in this article : Crowdfunding