Non-profit and volunteer-run, the website Bad Subjects is an open forum and news source for left-leaning thought.
Bad Subjects urges its readers to see the politics in everyday situations through editorials, reviews, news and blogs.
The site presents arguments and conversation starters that are “too clear and polemical to pass muster in either the academic world or the mainstream progressive press,” according to founding member Charlie Bertsch, an associate professor of English at The University of Arizona.
The idea to form Bad Subjects stemmed from a discussion group called “Politics Collective” at the University of California at Berkeley, Bertsch said.
Initially a small campus magazine, Bad Subjects went cyber on a gopher server at Berkeley before web servers even existed, according to co-editor Jonathan Sterne, an associate professor of art history and communication studies at McGill University.
Bad Subjects “predates all of the news/blog sites in existence” and is the second longest continuously running publication on the Internet, Sterne said. Bertsch added that Bad Subjects “was one of the only progressive publications listed in Yahoo’s first indices of web content.”
Even through the transition from print to online, Bad Subjects has always acted as a bridge between the academy and people “working nine-to-five jobs … [who don’t] have the time or inclination to read scholarly books or journals” but are having similar ideas regarding current politics, according to Bertsch.
The production team of Bad Subjects is collectively run by numerous editors in different locations, ranging from Berkeley to Arizona. The editors form groups to gather articles and topics for each issue, communicating mostly by e-mail. The staff ranges from graduate students to people with professorships.
Sterne described mainstream journalism as an arena where “expediency, chronic understaffing, dependency on PR hacks as ‘official sources,’ obsession with news cycles and concern with profit motive consistently undermine the real social purpose of news media, which is to foster critical thought and democratic debate.”
“Journalism students should look to Bad Subjects … as [a] serious alternative to the over-professionalized world of mainstream journalism,” Sterne said.
According to the site, Bad Subjects gets about 1.4 million hits per month and has more than 120,000 readers worldwide, as the free print magazine and site are translated into English, Spanish and French.
About Briana Monahan
