It’s TLF’s eighth birthday. Big achievements unlocked! It’s hard to believe that we have been running this for eight years — and we are so glad that our readership continues to be strong. Until now, this has been a labor of love — meaning that we have done all of the work and paid for everything ourselves. We are committed to engaging with pop culture and technology in new and interesting ways that remain critical and fun.
Our biggest news items for the coming year are related. We’ve received a grant to support our push to expand the voices writing critical and accessible articles and essays about popular culture, fan studies, and online culture. And to help us, we now have a fiscal sponsor: San Francisco-based Independent Arts and Media.
And that has led to our next piece of big news — the TLF seminar series starting in January 2016! We look forward to sharing these new longform pieces that pay. We want to be part of the movement in digital media to prioritize paying people for the work that they do and to retain rights to their work — and this is a small step in that direction. We would love to expand further with additional grants, so that we can fund more great writing and media.
But we’ve also done lots of great work in the last year, including presentations at several conferences including C2E2, Wizard World Chicago, AlterConf, and the National Women’s Studies Association conference.
And within the last year, TLF has also been cited in a law review article: Daniel Cahoy, Toward a Fair Social Use Framework for College and University Intellectual Property, 41 Journal of College & University Law 485 (2015) (citing Copyright Hall of Janus?: Harvard University’s Two-Faced Approach to Copyright).
How can you support TLF, if you are one of our readers? We do have a Patreon, but what you can do for us mostly is to share our writing and talk about it with others. Help us make TLF a source for critical writing that isn’t found elsewhere.
How can you support TLF, if you are at another publication? We are interested in republishing our content elsewhere to get more readers, so email us about cross-posting or republishing.
How can you support TLF, if you have funds — or know of a funding body that would give us a grant? Email us!
Thanks for your support!
– Raizel and Keidra
Image credits: Bigstock photo and Muppet wikia