Ignota In Corpora
Meet The Ignota Media Corporation
We have a secret.
With a pair of scissors you could slice your daily newspaper into fiefdoms. To the LGBTQ writers goes the Style section; to Black writers, music criticism; to the women, the Sunday supplement’s more confessional corners. Success in the media industry as a marginalized creator means knowing what we’re expected to produce — means knowing, to a greater or lesser extent, our place.
Legacy media institutions are failing marginalized readers and writers. They are failing to represent us to ourselves; as a result, they are failing to occupy meaningful territory in our minds and in our markets. Imagining our worlds as irrelevant, they have become irrelevant to our worlds.
We know this firsthand, as queer-identified writers and editors of exhaustive and exhausting experience; we know this from working with and within our own communities, and from outreach work with communities in similar political positions; and we know this from long exposure to the institutional–structural realities of the media industry, with its lumbering monoliths and lowest-common-denominator, will-it-play-in-Peoria approach to audience building.
Our secret is that these institutions’ failure is more catastrophic than they have the tools or the insight to calculate, let alone remediate. Our secret is that it is already too late.
We shouldn’t be telling you this.
You might not know it, but LGBTQ writers are sick of coming-out stories. They are exhausted from performing their abjection, drained from strip-mining their pain and presenting it to cishet readers as vacuum-wrapped, upbeat-angled nuggets of sampler-pattern wisdom.
We know it because we’ve written these pieces, and solicited them, and edited them. We’ve been there. And later, over cocktails, wearily sighing to another queer writer that “well, at least they pay,” or “if nothing else it’s great exposure,” their sympathetic eye rolls told us they’d been there too.
Marginalized writers won’t dance for you forever. It’s tiresome, and demeaning, and cheap — and the cost, the gradual loss of the capacity to speak in our own languages to our own communities, is too high to bear.
This, dishy and daring and eternal and enraged, is how we talk to and amongst ourselves. It is not, or not usually, how we talk to you. This kind of talk is vital, and vitalizing. The challenge is to create platforms that cultivate, inspire, and advantage it.
We’re building Ignota.
Ignota started life as an LGBTQ literary and cultural quarterly. Our first and last issue featured brilliant work by queer-identified writers speaking in their own patios and poetics to their own communities, wrapped in ingenious and technically ambitious editorial designs.
Content curation followed a straightforward principle: we hired the most talented queer editors we could find and we got out of their way. They brought their deep community connections and their impeccable taste to the work that they solicited and created, and we supported them without cloying or questioning. We activated those same networks to find our first readers, and we were thrilled when they responded with enthusiasm and delight. In a few short months, we managed to build a product that fit its market like a distinctively queer glove.
We’re proud of the work that went into it and we’re proud of the result. Nevertheless, we quickly become cognizant of the fact that it wasn’t enough. In order to publish Ignota Magazine, we had to create a technical architecture and infrastructure that would allow us to use a single code library to publish may different styles of work — we designed it to support multiple media, several genres, and an infinity of issue-by-issue themes, all from a single code base.
If we could do that for one publication — if we could architect one publication such that no two issues resembled one another — then why not do it for two? Or ten? By skinning the same code in different ways, we could bring the accomplishments that made our flagship LGBTQ magazine such a technical anomaly to editorial team after editorial team working in community after community to build voice after voice. The hard part — crossing the bridge between zero publications and one publication — was already behind us.
We can do it again…
Like any learn-startup-minded enterprise, we’re looking for learnings. Specifically, we want to learn how to get better and better at building media properties for markets that are underserved and underadvantaged by legacy publishing institutions. Jammed as we are into the liminal spaces between markets, tasked as we are with surfacing and delineating markets that did not previously exist, this for us means looking for patterns — for the learnings that will guide our learnings.
Some of these patterns will be purely technical: we know, e.g., that we can only survive by building microservices supported by a central library that encompasses all iterative feature development. Some will be editorial: we know now that we have a responsibility to cover spaces between the arts qua the arts and clickbaity trade in trade. Some will deal with how we surface markets: how will we identify emergent identitarian groups at a critical mass where they can support an independent publication? And some will arise from our deepening insight into the industry: ads and platforms are dead, long live ads and platforms.
The point is not that fitting a publication to LGBTQ readers becomes a blueprint for fitting one to Black readers. The point is rather that every time we succeed or fail to capture a new market, what we learn will shore up the trellis on which every previous and future publishing product grows. We look to architecture, pattern, and design to rescue us from enmeshment in detail.
…and again.
Here is what we hypothesize. We hypothesize that the craving for a distinctive voice is present in, and fundamental to, a preponderance of the communities currently underattended by legacy publishing institutions. We hypothesize that we can build media properties that fit those communities in all their specificity — efficiently and repeatably.
In so doing, we and the communities we serve will forge a virtuous cycle. Each market we delineate will become a productive and consumptive force in its own right — attending to the community’s voice, we invite new readers to hear it and new writers to speak it. This distinguishes the publication further from the common mass of mainstream publishing products and encourages new readers and writers to take up its voice. This, in turn, shores up both the voice itself and the market it represents.
And at each turn of the cycle, we shore up the architecture that allowed us to kick it off in the first place.
We’re excited to pivot aggressively into this new space — into the infinite space that most publishers discount as nothing more than the margins.
To learn more, or to work with us, visit our homepage or say hello.
