Five years ago, we launched a magazine for all the curious, smart, and bold women and nonbinary writers and readers out there. Today, we’re setting it aside for a time.

By Kaylen Ralph and Joanna R. Demkiewicz

To our readers, writers, fans, friends, and family—

Five years ago, we set out to celebrate women’s storytelling, in its bold, original, wry, and sharp varieties. We started a magazine. We launched it in a coffee shop in between classes; we were seniors in journalism school. Today, we’re setting the magazine aside for a time. But not before we take some space and time to express our gratitude to you.

Because of your curiosity and taste, we published more than 500 stories by 300 writers, women from Tunisia and Utah and London and Los Vegas, women who were being published for the first time, and successful women who’d been writing for years. (And Joan Didion!) We published stories about a Peruvian transgender community, and sexual assault on college campuses. We dedicated our content to stories that challenged, stories with brio.

Also because of you, we were able to publish in print. We raised money and ran a subscription drive in order to do so—and you supported us. While mainstream mags’ pages thinned and some mags shuttered, we pursued a model reliant on recognizing the magazine as a curatorial work of art, something to hold. We were lucky enough to feature Lizzo and Ilhan Omar as two of our cover women. We published investigative pieces on feminist mosques and cocktail recipes and book reviews featuring debut authors and independent presses.

We actually did something very simple, but very brave: we imagined something, and so we created it, over and over again.

We’ve spent countless hours working on The Riveter, but so has our gloriously talented staff of editors, writers, artists, photographers, designers, and creatives. It has remained one of the most energizing elements of running a magazine, to work with talented women. To brainstorm, collaborate, and produce together. It’s an understatement to say how grateful we are to their minds, their time, and their gusto.

During these five years, we’ve done this work outside of full-time jobs—in the mornings before work, at night after, over lunch and on the bus, if necessary. We’re beholden to this work, but we need a break and space to pursue our journalistic endeavors in a sustainable way. The Riveter’s mission was to always support writers by paying contributors, but we never paid ourselves, nor were we ever able to scale to a degree that allowed us to pay contributors competitively.

Having yet to establish a model that supports our work as magazine publishers and editorial directors, and supports the hiring of a staff, The Riveter must cease.

One unfortunate trend that hasn’t changed since 2013 is the disinterest in investing big in women’s media. We wanted to start a women’s magazine because we love them, and we are buoyed by the progress that the “women’s interest” area of media has made over the past five years. We like to think that The Riveter’s example perhaps had a little something to do with that, but the industry still has so far to go.

In the Spring 2018 issue of VQR, Lili Loofbourow dissected the trouble with “the male glance,” i.e. the passing nod given to media created by women.

“Generations of forgetting to zoom into female experience aren’t easily shrugged off, however noble our intentions, and the upshot is that we still don’t expect female texts to have universal things to say,” Loofbourow writes. “We imagine them as small and careful, or petty and domestic, or vain, or sassy, or confessional. We might expect them to be sentimental or melodramatic, or even…provocative, unflattering, and exhibitionist. But we don’t expect them to be experimental, and we don’t expect them to be great.”

Over the past five years, we have published stories that were big, dangerous, altruistic, thoughtful, measured and more. We did our best to move the needle on what the public expects from women who write. We did our best to be great.

Make no mistake—five years after launching The Riveter, we are still frustrated by the public’s seeming inability to sit with, grapple with, challenge or celebrate complex writing by women and nonbinary writers. We won’t stop our efforts to change this, but we are looking forward to utilizing the newly vacant space in our lives to figure out to continue doing this in a more sustainable way that allows us to support ourselves, as well.

In the meantime, we’re still (of course) working on a project—this time, a book series. In 2015, we worked as researchers for The Sager’s Group’s Newswomen anthology, and this year we’re editing the third volume in the press’s Women in Journalism series, featuring incredible journalists like Vanessa Grigoriadis and Nikole Hannah-Jones. We’ll be sending updates via this newsletter and our social media platforms. Keep an eye out for announcements and content—think of it like a magazine series about a book series. We’ll still be around.

We love you. Thank you. xxo