Bustle

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Bustle is an online US women’s magazine founded in August 2013 by Bryan Goldberg that covers fashion, entertainment, politics and news. The current editor-in chief is Kate Ward.[1] Bustle was launched with $6.5 million in backing from Seed and Series A funding rounds.[2]

By September 2016, the website had 50 million monthly readers. In September 2016, Bustle launched a redesign using the company's $11.5 million series D funding round. At that time, the site had over 70 full-time editors and 250 contract contributors who posted over 200 articles daily.[3]

Controversy

In June 2020, Bustle was called out as racism and inequality towards Black staffs. Clarissa-Jan Lim, a Southeast Asian woman who worked as an editor there from 2017 to 2019, said that Bustle’s way to represent themselves as “intersectional feminist company” was nothing but “optic”.[4] During her nearly two years at the company, from 2018 to 2019, she says that no black women on the editorial team received promotions. Only one woman of color received a promotion over that period. Lim also added that most of the black employees were writers, she says, who at Bustle all work part-time at an hourly rate, usually for seven hours a day.

Until now, there’s no response from Bustle regarding the accusation, but the staffs at publications owned by Bustle Digital Group, which includes Bustle, Romper, Mic, Nylon and Elite Daily among others, have announced their plans to form a union with Writers Guild of America East. In a letter sent to BDG Management, staffers said they are unionizing to fight for fair and transparent compensation, diversity and inclusion commitments, and clear editorial independence and standards.[5]

Reference