We’ve had a lot of questions thrown our way lately. Is the site a lot of work? Are donations still coming in? Are you making a print version? You look tired, are you sick? Mostly, people want to know what The Media is going to be like now that we’re not in Boston anymore.

We left Boston last weekend and it was weird and confusing and we both cried a lot in public places but it was the right move for us. We’d been in Boston for five or six years each, and while we will forever love it there, it is time for new adventures. Faye is back in DC at the moment, and moving to L.A. next month. Liz is traveling this fall (hi Europe) but will eventually land in New York.

When we launched this site, we were to an extent trying to fill the void left by the demise of The Phoenix. We knew Boston needed to have more alternative and progressive voices. But as support and excitement has poured in from all over the country (all over the world, really), it’s been pretty obvious that more publications like The Media are desired by readers, writers, artists, radicals, feminists everywhere. With that, our contributors have started coming from all over the place. Without even really trying, The Media has grown out of the confines of Boston. And without even really trying, we did too.

Going forward, The Media intends to stay connected with its Boston roots, to stay engaged with our readers and writers there, but will shift to take on a more decentralized scope. As you may have noticed, our monthly Boston calendar is gone; instead, we will now have a monthly calendar curated and designed by guest contributors from different cities, serving as event guides as well as alternative travel guides. If you want to share what’s rad about your town with The Media through a monthly hand-made calendar, email us!

Even though we might be removed from one specific geographical community, it’s important to us to stay tuned to art, activism, and social issues at a local, grassroots level. It’s an interesting prospect for us: can the spirit of an alternative weekly newspaper be applied to a decentralized publication? We really hope so.

While every issue of The Media will always be free and accessible to all online, we’re working on ways to continue making the site more sustainable. We are still 100% committed to remaining advertisement free. This fall we’ll be launching an online store to sell pins, patches, postcards, and t-shirts – all of the proceeds from these purchases will go directly into making The Media. We’ll also be launching a mobile app, which won’t be free, but all proceeds will support the future of this site.

Between the store, the app, and other boring web stuff we need to work on, there is going to be a lot of infrastructural re-organizing going on for us this fall. To make this manageable for ourselves, we are going to be switching to a bi-weekly format as of this issue. From now until the end of the year, we’ll be publishing the same number of articles, but in bi-weekly double issues. Look for our first double issue on September 20th. You may be thinking, what am I supposed to do on the off-weeks? Well we have good news: Powerpuff Girls is available on Netflix Watch Instantly and that show holds up!

It feels pretty ~*surreal*~ reflecting on the past four months, thinking about how this little site we created has led us to read so many amazing stories, hear so many cool mixtapes, watch so many inspiring videos, and mostly, meet so many rad people. Included in this issue is a video from a show Faye booked in Boston on her very last night in town. The video features our friends, Mean Creek, performing their anthem for adventure, "Young and Wild." Before the song they comment that it is sometimes really hard to make friends, but they've found them here, in Boston, in us. We just want to say that our northern star will always point us towards Boston, the official hometown of The Media and the official hometown of our ideals. Driving away from those familiar streets has induced our most public displays of emotional instability. Leaving has been really tough, you guys. To second Mean Creek, it can be very hard to make friends, but it's even harder to say goodbye to them.