Media Storm - This Is How You Do It: QueerAF's Jamie Wareham

Episode Date: July 28, 2022

Bonus episode - This Is How You Do It: Jamie Wareham Media Storm hosts Mathilda and Helena meet their mainstream media matches! In this crossover bonus series with The Guilty Feminist, they interview journalists trying to make an imperfect industry a little bit less so, about their noble goals and - you guessed it - the hypocrisies and insecurities that undermine them! Brought to you by The Guilty Feminist, every other Thursday. Today’s guest is Jamie Wareham, the creator of Queer AF, a free weekly LGBTQIA+ newsletter that mentors and commissions queer creatives and reporters. He has worked for Forbes, Gay Star News, Attitude Magazine, and On Road Media, earning accolades such as a Radio 30 Under 30 and British Podcast Award. We talk about values-based journalism, business models that break from advertising, and trans fear-mongering by political elites. Subscribe to Queer AF here: https://www.wearequeeraf.com/subscribe/ The episode is hosted by Mathilda Mallinson (@mathildamall) and Helena Wadia (@helenawadia). The music is by Samfire @soundofsamfire. Get in touch Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/mediastormpod or Instagram https://www.instagram.com/mediastormpod or Tiktok https://www.tiktok.com/@mediastormpod like us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/MediaStormPod send us an email [e-mail] check out our website https://mediastormpodcast.com Media Storm is brought to you by the house of The Guilty Feminist and is part of the Acast Creator Network. Become a member at https://plus.acast.com/s/media-storm. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Watch the Hulu original series Murdoch Death in the Family, streaming October 15th on Disney Plus. Hello, Media Storm and Guilty Feminist listeners. We come bearing exciting news. We can't really believe it. Still absolutely in shock. But we just won Best Current Affairs Podcast at the British Podcast Awards. Best Current Affairs podcast. That shit is serious.

This was genuinely not something we predicted. Like I didn't even get my nails done. This is the kind of level we're talking about. Plus, we were shortlisted with absolute giants of the industry. The Economist, the Guardian, BBC Radio 4, Politico, Tortoise. When they went and the winner is Media Storm, the reaction is quite hilarious. We'll share that video. We will.

Honestly, it was like someone had just given us an Oscar. Personally, I think a British podcast award is better than an Oscar. I do. I'm proud of Best Current Affairs podcast. towards than of anything I've ever been in my life. Same. So now we have to tell you the story about how Matilda collapsed in front of Idris Elba. Do we, though? Yes, we do. We very much do.

Truly, it was absolutely bizarre. We came off stage having given our speech, which we hadn't really written because, like we said, we didn't really expect to be up there. We weren't going to win. So we come off stage and we find ourselves face to face with Idris and Sabrina Elba. Sorry, who? Literally, Idris Elba goes. congratulations. And I just look at him and I go, what? And then I look around and you're on the floor. Yeah. It was just the only place I could be in that moment. My face was about an inch of the

grass and I was just looking at the grass thinking, what just happened? And was that, and was that Idris Elba? Like, as an afterthought? Like, who was that bloke? He looks kind of like Idges Elba, but that would be ridiculous. So you were on the floor because of the award win, rather than because of dreamy Idris Elba. Yeah, it was only when I was already on the floor that my brain started clocking. That man was Idris Elba. Then I had to pull Matilda off off the floor

so we could go and be interviewed. We were holding hands throughout the whole interview. It was pretty adorable. John Soaple was looking at us, like, what is wrong with these millennials? John Soaple, for those of you don't know, big ex-BBC dog. He corresponded throughout the whole Trump episode,

Remember that. And he was giving out our award. But we wanted to share this news with you because, well, I mean, partly because we can't contain ourselves, but also because it's just so incredibly heartening to see that there is actually an appetite for what we're trying to do here, to shift the balance in the mainstream media and to put minority groups at the center of their stories. And we owe this to you, all of our listeners. Anyone who has ever heard or shared or talked about one of our investigations, There is a movement striving for values-based journalism and a change at the heart of our media.

And it's actually making traction. Stay tuned and you'll hear a little bit more about that movement. Welcome to This Is How You Do It, the new mash-up series from The Guilty Feminist and Media Storm, where we celebrate the people working to make the mainstream media a little. bit better. I'm Helena Wadia. And I'm Matilda Mallinson and we're the hosts of Media Storm, the podcast that hands the mic to people with lived experience and cools out what the mainstream media could be doing better to report on marginalised groups. Our guest this week is the creator of Queer AF, the free weekly newsletter that sums up the LGBTIQIA Plus World and supports

queer creatives to kickstart their careers. He's worked for Forbes, Gay Star News, Attitude magazine and on road media and he's picked up a bunch of awards including a radio 30 under 30 Jamie how do you function being so talented I'm not sure I sleep that much if that helps answer that question it does yeah there's been a couple of places we've talked about queer a f on one of them was on the BBC and they wouldn't say the brand name because they was worried about it being a swear word for them we're queer and fabulous that is amazing if you need to be safe we're also as queer as flamingos the queerest of them all that is the Quearest bird, right?

Absolutely. If anyone listening can think of a queerer bird than a flamingo, please let us know. Do write in, but you're not going to find one. Oh, sorry, that's not. We don't need to go down that rabbit hole. Jamie, you're tuning in this week from Cornwall, which means you can't physically join us for some weekday wine and snacks.

Have you got a current tipple with you? I have some cherries and berries squash in a Toy Story Cup next to me, which is very cool, and so that's my tipple for the afternoon. Oh, where did you get the toy store? story cup. Oh gosh, I'm not sure. I feel like a supermarket. That was really not what I expected you were going to say. Cherries and berries in a toy story cup. Hey, we've all got our levels of coolness and that's where mine is at. Oh, man. Well, while Jamie's thinking of a better origin story for his toy story cup, we should probably talk about what we're here to talk about,

which is queer AF. And we love it because its goal is very similar to Media Storm in terms of promoting lived experience and getting that representation into the mainstream media. Kick us off by telling us what queer AF is and what it does. We are a independent platform. We're ad-free. And basically we set up because the media doesn't always represent queer folks, LGBTQIA plus people. And so I kind of set out to help people understand the LGBTQIA plus news, but with the kind of hope to then support queer creatives to change the media whilst we do that.

So it's kind of two prongs. How do you find it trying to counter the vast misinformation about the queer community that comes up in the mainstream media weekly? So we live like in this saturated world of like doom scrolling and constant media. Frankly, it doesn't reflect us and it's like driven so much by like short term revenue led incentives. It means like the beautiful spectrum of like witness, you know, the full set of letters in our community. We're just completely sidelined in the pursuit of clicks. And that's what this project is really all about.

Just talk us through the logistics of that. How are you creating this media that doesn't have advertisers behind it? What's the financial model there? Because if you have the answer to that, we can just wrap up and go home. Media solves. This is the thing about it. It's really funny. People really value journalism, right?

That's the thing that we can all agree on. And so when someone comes and says, actually, we're here and we're going to do values-based journalism, this is the kind of journalism we're going to offer you. And if you think that's valuable, then pay for it. So basically our newsletter every week goes out, it's free. It's always going to be free. I don't want like information about LGBTQer lives to be like a luxury. It's already tough enough to be queer without there being like a paywall right. And so the newsletter goes out for free and we say, look, if you think this is great, pay for it, but only if you can afford to. Most

newsletters that kind of launch that have like a paid version are lucky to kind of get one to three percent converting. So we're about 10 to 11 percent at the moment. And so that's how we're funding this work. And basically when you sign up for a query of membership, you're not just paying to make the newsletter possible. We say to you, what kind of stories would you like to fund? And so what I've got in front of me each week when I'm commissioning different people is a word cloud, if you will, of like different topics, different kind of intersectionalities and backgrounds that our audience is looking for us to deliver on. And so I'm constantly thinking about that, not what I think will deliver traffic or clicks. I'm thinking about what counts.

It's so cool. It's doable as well, you know, this is the thing. If I had been given a lot of money each time, someone said, no, that's never going to get any clicks. AF would be fully funded forever. Like what's really interesting about, like, one of the most, one of the best traffic pieces up to this point was a piece about the like radicalness of queer joy being shown on TV about the great pottery throwdown and there being a non-binary person on there that just was able to just be cool and not asked about all of that background stuff that everything else seems to be focused on.

It just was, they were just happy. Like we saw gender euphoria, right? And that app was one of our most popular red pieces. It doesn't need to be trauma and rage all the time. Actually, sometimes we can just sit in the wonderfulness that is queerness. Is that a goal of queer AF as well to kind of bring out the more positive side of being queer and being part of this community? Because obviously, you know, you round up the news from the community and you counter a lot

of misinformation, but is it also important for you to, you know, show that positivity? Look, the news isn't always happy, right? and it can't be. So that's not a thing that you can constantly strive for. But I think what is important to remember when you're writing about, frankly, anyone and their lived experience is that actually, if you take the approach to try and focus on the joy,

which is something we don't get very often, you still talk about the issues. It's just we get it through a different lens. And so, like, I think like heart stopper, it was just so wonderful because at the end of every episode, I wasn't worried about what terrible thing was going to happen to those characters. Like, I watched Love Victor, the final season of that,

and I will avoid spoilers, but honestly, at the end of every episode, I was like, oh my God, is someone going to die? That was the level of, like, panic I was at. Whereas at Heart Stopper, it just didn't do that. And so it's not, it's less about, like, trying to be like a happy news outlet. I think that's difficult, and that undermines the difficulties that our community faces. But I think it's just sometimes about allowing that to shine through, that you can do both. Totally.

One of the most amazing things that Queer AF does is give queer creatives, their first bylines, so their first published work for anyone listening who isn't a journalist as if we can imagine. Could you share any stories about people who you've given their first byline with queer AF and how that has elevated them? I think the best examples for our work is from our podcast. So we started as a podcast about seven years ago because an editor at the time told me to stop pitching gay stories, which is in quote marks, because there was no quote marks money or audience in them. And so, um, again...

Sorry, sorry, we just need to pause. We just need to pause. An editor told you to stop pitching gay stories. I'm literally crying. I'm literally crying. Yeah. Went out and found an international audience and funnily enough made some ad revenue, which is what gave us the money to relaunch Quirayaf as a kind of community.

Oh yes. In your face, former editor. The, the wonderful thing about that podcast is that we work with 17 people that got their first or early commissions with us. Jacob, for example, went on to be the first non-binary presenter on Radio 1. And for me, the reason that that's valuable if like an editor or is listening at home, right? Like, I think when I first started out as a gay guy on campus in Basingstoke, doing my B-tech with, you know, lads being like, oh, where's the gays?

Back then we were fighting for equality, right? Like we were saying, we're the same. We want to be treated the same. We have the same rights to everyone else. I think the conversation has moved forward. Now, we want to be celebrated for how different we are. We want to celebrate how wonderful those differences are, that those differences are what makes us so incredible to be part of your team.

And that is what Guinness is about in 2020. And in the hope of that future possibility, I think we're going to take a break, have a chocolate biscuit, and come back in a few minutes. Welcome back to this is how you do it. It's genie time. Before my eyes, Helena is transforming into a glorious genie. Not that much for transformation because that pretty much describes Helena on a day-to-day basis.

Aww. Love you. Jamie, behold, your genie. here to grant you one wish to change anything you like about the mainstream media. What is your wish? One wish is hard. It's usually three. I feel like you've made this a lot of difficult than it. Everybody says this. Everybody says this. Yeah. No, sorry, it's a very stingy genie. Okay. This genie is kind of a selfish bastard and he only gives out one wish. So if I had one wish, I'm going to be as broad as I can with this. I think it would be that the media started to

understand the power of hiring people with lived experience and it is more than just hiring them to tell their own story it is hiring them to be part of a newsroom so that when a story comes up they can bring in the nuances of their lives so a great example of this is is COVID right a friend of mine did a report on the LGBTQA plus experiences and they told me that they really struggled to get any interest because the editors were saying it's COVID it impacts all of us What's that got to do with, like, why have you done a report on that? And I think for me, like, it's really easy to hire gay people to talk about pride and trans people to talk about, like, healthcare.

But actually having a trans person in your newsroom to understand all of the different nuances of the trans experience and all of the different parts of our lives, it feeds into everything you do and the beauty of it. And here it is for the people that do need to pass the click filter is that you start to get these amazing stories. when you start to delve into that. And so maybe the wish is more about trusting people's lived experience rather than just hiring them.

Then you will hire them and that's where the media will change. Oh, you really know how to play this genie game. Just trust the expertise that comes with lived experience. Wish granted. Grant it. Honestly, Jamie, it's so interesting you say that. I was working at a mainstream newspaper at the time of COVID and I actually pitched a story about the LGBT plus community in

lockdown in terms of having to be locked down with, for example, homophobic parents or for example, being at high risk of abuse. I got told by my editor, it's not a thing. Like, it's no different for that community. Like, why should COVID be different for that community? We're all the same. I love how many times we, we've, on these podcasts, ambiguously said. So I was working at a mainstream outlet at this time of year. I mean, it doesn't take an investigative journalist to work out where you are. You just need to look at your LinkedIn again.

Okay, I'm now shutting down my LinkedIn profile. Well, speaking about how the news media report on queer issues, A couple of weeks ago, we had Trans Pride in London. Now, estimates are about 20 to 30,000 people marched through Central London. But you'd be forgiven for not knowing that because the mainstream media didn't have a huge amount to say about it. Did that surprise you? It didn't surprise me. There was a fair amount of coverage in the end because Yasmin Finney, the heartstopper actor and it seemed to be Doctor Who,

superstar, frankly, went and made a speech. And so that was picked up a couple of days later. And so the reason that everyone went with that angle in the end is because trans pride on its own was not enough to pass the click filter. It was certainly important enough to pass the journalism filter, but it didn't hit the click filter. And that's because at the moment, the click filter for trans issues is when they are divisive,

when we're talking about them as a kind of quote-unquote cultural, or when it inspires that rage, when it taps into the like fear and the prejudices, the kind of moral panic that we saw in the 80s around gay people. That's the reason why we didn't hear about Trans Pride initially. We heard about Trans Pride a couple of days later because Yasmin Finney, who delivers all kinds of clicks because Heart Stopper was this huge success, said something. It says so much about the issue behind why we didn't hear it in the first place. You know what does seem to be on the journalist agenda when it comes to reporting on Pride?

I know this because I have reported on Pride in the past and every year when that time of year comes around, my inbox is filled with PR emails from companies that want a bit of free press because they're doing some kind of funky Pride spin on their new product. I don't know if this is something you're feeling lately that as the 50th anniversary of Pride comes around, is it becoming really so corporate? I get a lot of those emails as well. I've now got into a good habit of in May and June when I get those, replying to them and saying,

I write about LGBTQIA plus stuff all year around. And so if you're still interested in talking to me about your rainbow product, send me an email again in July on the 1st of July, and then we can have a chat about it. It will be of no surprise to you, but I get very few emails in the 1st of July. We're currently waiting to see. who our next prime minister will be, and quite a few of them seem to be focusing on transgender issues.

Of course, not the huge waiting times for trans health care or, you know, the mental health crisis in the community, but instead from this kind of panicky culture war perspective, any hot takes on who should be PM and their voting track record on LGBT Plus rights? So when I wrote the newsletter, when this was all just kicked off, I was like, I'm not going to repeat too much of the news. because you've had it from everyone else, but here are some, here are some hot takes.

And my hot take, where the time was, it's going to be a messy feel, it's going to be a tough time, but look, Penny Morden looks right. And then literally the day after I wrote that, she put out a thread that was kind of just as divisive as everyone else. And so I think the thing that, like, upsets and disappoints me about all of this is the fragility of trans lives is so tough. And just imagine waking up every day and being like, right, what's the prime minister said about me today? is what is the newspapers said about me today? And the issue I have with it is that we pull our norms from the media. We pull our norms from the prime minister. Great example of us about how we all wear masks and how we all want to protect vulnerable people like myself from COVID. And then

overnight, Boris decided now we're had enough of that. And that was it. It was gone. It was going overnight. That's an example of a dramatic norm change very quickly. And in the media, when we get constant bombardment headlines that are anti-trans, whether like aggressively so or like moderately so. People at home, they absorb that and they start to internalize that. And in the same way that LGBT people grow up internalizing their shame in that world and then have to, frankly, we will have to have constant therapy. Like dating is basically therapy. It's not like, it's not like a real dating. For people at home, they take that on board as well. And so this norm that they're creating, it starts to not just be a norm. It starts to become a narrative. And if it's

a narrative for too long, it becomes a deeper narrative. And that deeper narrative then takes decades to unpack. And I think we've reached that point already. And I think we can again look at the parallels rather than similarities to what happened around gay panic in the 80s. It's happened again. And it's going to take 40 years to get us to a point where we're now talking about gay stuff. You're right. We do feed those messages such a targeted attack on 1% of the population. And I think that, you know, it's interesting the majority of the public. frankly, don't really care. The majority of the public is more like live and let live and trans people are just trying to live in peace. And what are we doing? In the media, we're very

good at the us-ve-them narrative. Life is way more complicated than that. It's way more nuanced. There's always a bunch of grey in the middle. There's never someone that is completely one-sided. This is the thing that those headlines are searching for. They're searching for the one-sided click. And that is just to serve advertisers and that is to go into the pockets of a very, very, very small. Like, we're talking about like three or four people that own most of the media in the UK have an agenda. But it's really interesting because young people are starting to recognise that and they're well read and they know that. I actually have a lot of hope because despite constant bombardment, people do have compassion for trans people and there isn't as much

hay out there as they're betting on. And so to bring you back to your, the how are the Tories go in question? I think they're betting on the wrong thing. And actually, if you speak to young people, I think they're cutting off an entire generation of voters in this election. Like, they're very focused on the short term, and it sure might win them some votes in the next couple of years, but, like, they are absolutely ruining their chances of being in power

in 10, 15 years' time. And that will be something that, again, coming back to that deep and narrative point, will take them 40 years to undo. And I think that is their mistake. Jamie Wham, thank you so much for joining us on This Is How You Do It? Where can people follow you? And do you have anything to plug? Absolutely. Our newsletter helps you understand all of this that I've been banging on about.

It's like a TLDR for the queer news, right? So we are queryf.com forward slash subscribe. Give it a try, right? You can unsubscribe any time. So like, why not? If you're less of a reader, we've got the podcast. Our Instagram also has like very colorful versions of our stories. So if you just want to swipe through them quickly. That's another advice that you can find us and say we are query F everywhere. And you are? Mine is at Jamie underscore Wareham, so you can find me there. And the reason we are Query F is because Matilda, so are you.

Thanks. I feel so excited. Lovely listeners, make sure you catch the latest Guilty Feminist episode, which was recorded live from Cardiff with special guests, including Melon, Edomone, Talk to Coco and Music from Jess Robinson, all presented by Deborah Francis White and Sophie Duker. On next week's media storm, we'll be talking about masculinity and body image with an investigation into disordered eating in men and why men may take longer to seek help than women.

That'll be out on Thursday, August the 4th. Plus, you can listen to us on the media podcast with Matt Deegan. We were interviewed right after our British podcast awards win, and so I'm surprised we even managed to string a sentence together. Just search the media podcast and listen to their special episode.