Alanna Vagianos
Senior National Reporter at HuffPost
The urgency of stories around gender and politics
Alanna Vagianos started reporting for HuffPost (previously the Huffington Post) in 2013. She joined the site in its heyday: a company that found success by allowing its news, commentary, and blog to be easily shareable on rising social media platforms like Facebook.
Vagianos’ role while at HuffPost changed multiple times due to the many shifts within digital media. She went from associate editor on the Women team to the editor of that entire page before the desk was disbanded. She eventually moved to the National desk as a senior reporter covering gender and politics.
Vagianos survived multiple rounds of layoffs by a rotating cast of parent companies, including AOL, Verizon, and BuzzFeed. As coworkers disappeared around her, Vagianos focused on her work, writing daily hits or aggregating news pieces from other outlets and secondary features. Her work from that time includes “In an Attempt to Empower Sex Workers, Did Netflix Exploit Them?” about a documentary that outed some of the workers it profiled.
By Bill Meincke
I was hired as an editorial fellow in October 2013 and fully brought on the team in April 2014 as an associate editor on our “Women” page. The jobs were the same, but they use the fellowship as a sort of test period to see if they want to hire fellows. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. I got to write about feminism from a pretty progressive standpoint at HuffPost.
As part of my job, I was running the Facebook and Twitter accounts back in the day when Facebook was the behemoth for many online media outlets. I worked with a team of four or five other women, and we were given a lot of agency in our writing.
It was great! I wrote a lot about female pleasure and sexuality, including how to start out in the kink world and how to have anal sex. While I wrote about them in a fun way, I was always very grateful to my team and to HuffPost for letting me cover these topics. Being able to use my platform to educate people on safe and pleasurable ways to experiment sexually was revolutionary for me.
The Impact of Gender and Politics Reporting
I’m a white cis woman. My perspective is my perspective, but I do everything I can to ensure that I don’t have blinders on when I’m looking for the best story or source for a story. If there are more journalists reporting on gender, there are more stories representing people of diverse backgrounds. It’s detrimental to readers not to have more reporting on such a critical topic.
Imani Gandy from Rewire News Group [a site that covers sexual and reproductive health issues from a pro-choice lens] is brilliant — everything she creates is a must-read, in my opinion. Same for Tina Vasquez from Prism, a nonprofit led by journalists of color covering injustice from all angles. What I strive to do that Amani and Tina both do very well is shine a light on some of the most marginalized people in our communities.
I always love a story that points out something that I didn’t really think of before. It’s important as reporters to ensure that we’re promoting the voices that are not usually included, and reminding readers how policy, executive orders, or political stunts impact real people. When it comes to gender issues, systemic racism, classism or LGBTQ+ issues, ensuring that we represent those people as best as we can is really important.
My main goal has always been to help marginalized voices, specifically when it comes to gender. I spoke with a mother of seven in the fall of 2020 about how the housing crisis set off by COVID would impact Black and brown women. We did a feature on how this was affecting her. She was working three different jobs and still wasn’t able to find affordable housing. She got sick and then her kids got sick. I obviously didn’t find her affordable housing (we journalists can’t do that), but my story reached a lot of readers who wanted to donate to her cause, and passed along people who wanted to help her in that way.
If there are more journalists reporting on gender, there are more stories representing people of diverse backgrounds. It’s detrimental to readers not to have more reporting on such a critical topic.
Ensuring I can do that through a policy lens has been my most recent goal: by allowing people to tell their stories, showing how policies at these higher levels actually impact real people, and highlighting or explaining what that really means on a day-to-day basis. That’s what I take with me every day when I wake up.
Newsrooms Lacking in Resources
While I think there are a lot of readers interested in gender, there aren’t many roles in journalism that cover it. There used to be maybe half a dozen gender reporters here at HuffPost, but after all the layoffs over the last 10 years or so, I’m the only one left. That’s coming from HuffPost, where it’s really progressive and there are gender and politics sections separately and together, both big pillars of the type of news that we prioritize and report.
I am a senior gender reporter now. I basically fall under our team that covers politics, since politics and gender obviously intersect. I cover gender through a policy lens. When it comes to HuffPost as a news organization, a few of our big types of news coverage are politics and identity politics, which includes gender, race, socioeconomic classes, and things like that.
But there’s no business model to support online news organizations that have these roles. The main issue is that Facebook and Google have taken up all the advertising dollars that used to fund online news organizations. Without that ad revenue, there’s no way to pay for a salaried reporter who is specifically covering gender and politics.
We’ve seen more and more breaking-news reporters take on a lot of the more specific beats like gender and politics. Even our breaking-news reporters who are amazing reporters will tell you they don’t have enough time to delve into a story or to have the expertise that a beat reporter would. Unfortunately, you don’t get as good reporting.
But the pool for gender and politics reporters is so small, this could be my first and last journalism job. People pivot to something else when there’s no room left. And if you don’t get paid a lot, you get burned out real quick.