DAME's Kera Bolonik on legacy media's election coverage: "They keep playing this very dangerous game."
As journalism institutions face criticism for their election coverage, DAME's editor-in-chief makes the case for independent voices.
Since taking the helm at the progressive magazine DAME in 2013, Kera Bolonik has been fighting to keep independent journalism alive in an increasingly challenging media landscape. From her early days as an illustrator-turned-reporter for her high school newspaper during the AIDS crisis to her current role shepherding one of digital media's most distinctive liberal outlets, Bolonik has maintained a clear vision: journalism as a tool for social justice.
A veteran of New York City media, Bolonik’s path has wound through the worlds of book publishing, arts criticism, and magazine journalism. She spent over a decade at New York magazine, served as arts editor at Salon, and has written for national publications for more than 30 years. But it’s her work at DAME, where she’s helped build an ad-free platform for progressive voices, that perhaps best exemplifies her approach to journalism — one that prioritizes overlooked stories and perspectives while maintaining rigorous editorial standards.
In this edition of Depth Perception, we speak with Bolonik about the evolution of her career, the challenges facing independent media during election season, and why, despite the industry's struggles, she remains cautiously optimistic about journalism’s future. —Parker Molloy
You joined your high school newspaper as an illustrator, but ended up becoming a journalist. How did that transition happen?
It happened initially sort of by accident — I joined my high school newspaper as an illustrator my freshman year, but I wasn’t very good. But I loved being on staff, so I enrolled in a journalism class and started reporting. I immediately recognized the power of journalism — that we were not only in charge of which stories were worthy enough to be on the page, but how they would be told. And that those stories, and their framing, would become the historical record.
I was in high school in the mid-1980s, when the AIDS crisis was summarily ignored by President Reagan because he didn't care about the people who were most impacted — gay people, intravenous drug users, and other people on the margins. So I’ve always regarded journalism as a tool for social justice because it can expose injustice and mobilize people to action, and enlighten readers by putting on record stories and perspectives that often get overlooked or silenced.
What unique challenges do independent media outlets face in 2024, particularly during an election year?
With every election comes the cacophony of so much dis- and misinformation. We have to cut through all the noise and assure our readers that we are a reliable source of information. The news cycle is so fast and furious it can be hard for a publication like ours, which posts twice a week, to resist weighing in on every conversation and issue. We’ve learned to be judicious and are constantly learning new ways to weigh in without flooding the zone and adding to the din, but to recognize and bring attention to what isn’t being said that needs to be said. One way we’ve done so is through our media criticism, which I believe has been a major strength of ours in recent years — in my opinion, it’s one of the most important beats of this election cycle.
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Can you walk me through DAME’s editorial process? How do you decide what stories to pursue, given limited resources?
In addition to our regular columnists, guest op-eds, and occasional personal essays, we consider pitches on features and also commission features to trusted journalists with whom we’ve worked or whose work we've long admired. We choose angles and stories that we feel are missing from the larger conversation — that's our aim: What do we want to see out there, what do we want to learn more about, who do we want to hear from on this subject who we're not hearing from?
Because we have a limited budget, we also have to be mindful that we can't publish as many features as we’d like and we don't have the bandwidth to do, say, 7,000-word articles. I fact check our columns and our shorter features, in addition to editing and copy editing everything. For longer features, we hire an excellent freelance fact checker; it’s costly but absolutely necessary and so worth it, but we can’t do it for every story. The budget certainly helps determine what we can and can’t publish.
How would you describe DAME’s core audience, and how has that shaped your editorial strategy?
I think age-wise, our core audience primarily tends to comprise older millennial, Gen X and Generation Jones (1955-1964). Our readers are wide-ranging, and well-reflected in the subject matter and writers we publish — our readers are cis, trans, women, men, nonbinary, Black, brown, white, from a range of economic backgrounds. Our readers are interested in learning more about media and social justice and are very worried about the election and the precipitous state of democracy. While we listen and consider suggestions from our readers, we have found our readers come to us because they’re interested in the content we publish, and the conversations we have on social media.
How is DAME approaching election coverage differently from legacy media outlets, and what lessons did you learn from covering the 2016 and 2020 elections?
As with all our content, we can speak freely because we don’t answer to advertisers or venture capitalists or the like. We call a fascist a fascist, and refuse to sane-wash. We focus on the issues: abortion and other reproductive justice rights and trans rights — these issues we see as entwined as they are about bodily autonomy — voting rights and voter disenfranchisement, race, criminal justice, gun control, economic disparity, LGBTQIA issues, book bans, education.
This election, I think we’ve focused more attention on media criticism than ever because legacy media has been exercising such egregious practices. They shape the narrative for the U.S. audiences and they have a responsibility to inform us fully, but have instead aimed for clickbait and lean on access to Trump and his lackeys and devotees. Maybe we gave them a pass in 2016 because they had never dealt with Trump as a candidate before, but the memory-holing of his term and of January 6 told us they know better — they learned and opted to do it anyway.
Legacy media has an agenda, and they appear to go even harder on the only two women Democratic presidential nominees. Now, do I think the New York Times and the like genuinely want a fascist government? No, because that would destroy the free press. But they keep playing this very dangerous game. And one day, they’ll accidentally lose, and so will we all.
“Legacy media has been exercising such egregious practices. They shape the narrative for the U.S. audiences and they have a responsibility to inform us fully, but have instead aimed for clickbait and lean on access to Trump and his lackeys and devotees.”
—Kera Bolonik
What story are you most proud of — both written by and published by you?
I think the piece I love the most is "My Friend Michelle McNamara, the Crime Writer Gone in the Dark," a reported profile I wrote for New York about my late friend, whom I befriended when we were on the school paper together in high school. Michelle died in 2016 in her sleep, while she was writing I'll Be Gone in the Dark, about her pursuit of the Golden State Killer. The piece was about our friendship, her evolution as a writer, and her passion for justice and compassion.
As for publishing at DAME, I’m honestly just proud of everything we’ve been able to accomplish on such a small budget. Our media criticism and political coverage during election seasons, abortion rights coverage from the very beginning, and our wide-ranging voices, have made me especially proud. We are small but we are scrappy and determined to survive this cutthroat industry.
What makes you feel hopeful about the future of journalism?
In my heart of hearts, I have faith in independent journalists and media critics holding legacy media to account through tenacious reporting. We just need to outnumber the publications who have become so reliant on clickbait and access journalism, who haven't broken the mold, who think old rules still apply in this new world. And I think eventually we will get there, because more and more of us have lost faith in legacy media, especially after all the memory-holing of 2016, of COVID and Trump's first term, of January 6, 2021, of this entire election season coverage.
All of this faith is dependent, of course, on a good outcome on November 5 — any hope I might have for the future of journalism could be for naught if the unspeakable happens.
Further reading from Kera Bolonik
“‘I Was Told You Were Good at Giving Bad News’” (The New York Times, Feb. 15, 2024)
“The Most Gullible Man in Cambridge” (The Cut, July 23, 2019)
“My Friend Michelle McNamara, the Crime Writer Gone in the Dark” (Vulture, February 2018)
“Why Do We Police Each Other’s Grief?” (DAME, Nov. 16, 2015)
“I Can’t Believe I Lived to See My Marriage Legalized” (DAME, June 26, 2015)