How do people keep praising them for transparency when we don't have financial reports for most of Cohost's history? We literally have more months we don't have reports for than ones we do. When they put off doing them for months on end then finally came back and did any, they would just do it for that current month. We have nothing for the rest of Q1 of even this year. The March update is just March. It's not even all of March. And the updates were so sporadic and changed the values being tracked so much that you can't even do anything with most of the data.
I'm again urging people to read this article about Autostraddle:
And please pay attention to these parts:
While past fundraisers at the site were marked by a kind of let’s-put-on-a-show queer community camaraderie, this March edition furthered a trend from the last one with messaging that was intense, desperate, and signaled that Autostraddle had limited time left to live. Fundraising director Nico Hall’s post “We Need You To Buy Us Some Time Before Time Runs Out” set off alarm bells both in and outside the company. “I’ve never felt more at the end of my rope in this role or as uncertain of our future as I am right now. I’ve also never felt the extent of this gnawing guilt and anxiety that has made writing this post, draft after draft, harder than it’s ever been,” Hall wrote. “We need to raise $175,000 by March 29th, or we’ll be gone before Pride,” they added in bold. Readers and writers alike were extremely worried for the future, but like previous fundraisers, this one, too, was a quick success, implying to the community that disaster had been averted.
"We left the meeting feeling like, OK, mom and dad said ‘We’ve got money issues, but you’re good,'" Nicole told me.
Three weeks later, on May 10, the subject editors received—without warning—a Slack DM from Jones, informing them that their positions would be eliminated in three months’ time, and that afterward they would have the option to stay at Autostraddle for $500 a month while doing a fraction of their previous work.
"Part of what’s confusing for a lot of folks, myself included, about what’s happening right now at Autostraddle is that, in many ways, there has always been a commitment to public transparency," said Rachel Kincaid, who rose from unpaid intern to managing editor at Autostraddle before leaving in 2021. "There was always a lot of numbers available, but it’s in a way that I think I still never really felt clear on the holistic financial picture."
"The senior team decided that we shift our focus: Instead of determining our budget based on what we earned, we’d decide what we needed our budget to be and figure out how to earn it, even if that meant more fundraisers."
"While I was there (in 2020), I was like, 'I could imagine a way this could be profitable,'" Puligandla said. "Were those things a high priority? I don’t think so. I don’t know that they’re particularly the most business savvy, and it was at this turning point where it needed to become business savvy to pay people the amounts of money that are worth the kinds of changes they wanted to make.
