Introducing The Barbed Wire
If you’re getting this email, it’s because you signed up for some writerly project of mine somewhere along the way. It would normally be a typical newsletter, with a bloggy post about whatever is pinballing around my frontal lobe at the moment, but today I have to tell you about The Barbed Wire.
I’ve been working on a new media company with a bunch of talented media and politics folks, and last week we launched a beta version of The Barbed Wire, a progressive culture site designed to cover all things Texas with some wit and bite—sports, food, pop culture, music, politics, trucks, and even bigger trucks. We got it all here, ya’ll: Pokemon crime rings, Dr. Pepper, Dallas Lowriders, horoscopes for football players. The team consists of media and politics veterans, and is led by former Daily Beast journalist, Olivia Messer. Olivia’s coming off of a year long investigative report into the cover up of sexual harassment complaints in the Texas Senate for Texas Monthly, and we’re lucky to have her.
We launched TBW because we believe more progressive media needs to exist in the media ecosystem and we need to figure out how to make newsrooms sustainable. I’m an advisor and helping in that capacity. The reason why I’m emailing you about this, even if you’re not a Texan, is that TBW’s model is audience driven, which means that while we do believe Texas is a giant market (Texas is pretty much its own country), we’re not trying to live off of mass scale. We want to build an audience, and don’t believe that audience and traffic are the synonymous.
So we need support from people who believe we need more progressive media, especially in places where many newsrooms skew right wing. If we can make it work, we can duplicate the model in other regions. We raised a small friends and family round of funding for our beta, and right now we have two primary ways of supporting our newsroom: membership and merch. We’re determined not to firewall anything because we want to reach anyone with an interest in Texas, even if they can’t afford to support us right now. But if you can, we have different levels of membership and you can sign up here.
Or, if the thought of yet another subscription fills you with anxiety, you can help by buying some of our ridiculously awesome merch, as shown below:
Or you can follow The Barbed Wire on social, which is also helpful. We’re at @thebarbedwire.bsky.social, https://www.threads.net/@thebarbedwiretexas
and @thebarbedwiretexas on Instagram. We’re not on Twitter institutionally because it’s run by a racist transphobic man-baby who now, unfortunately for Texans, spends a lot of time in Texas, but we’re on pretty much all of the other platforms, too.
As for other business, I am thinking about creating a separate occasional newsletter specifically about politics and media stuff. It will be painfully insidery and there will be a lot of shop talk, but if that interests you, here’s you can sign up here. Some of what I want to talk about has to do with the way media and politicians communicate to everybody else, and if you missed it, my related column on political operatives being brainwashed by Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing is here (gift link). Sorkin responded a week later in his own column, suggesting that Democrats nominate Mitt Romney for president and generously validating my thesis.
Lastly, I’m teaching an online opinion writing workshop on September 25th. (Details and registration here.) The fee is less than what you’d get paid if you end up publishing an op-ed at most places so it kind of pays for itself, and if your job includes “thought leadership” in any capacity, it makes for a great easily justifiable write-off. You don’t even have to start with thoughts to participate; come as you are.
Thanks for reading this far, and I appreciate your support—even in the form of signing up for occasional missives from my electronic trouble machine.
Talk soon,
Elizabeth