PinkNews, the self-styled “world’s largest and most influential LGBTQ+ led media brand”, is axing its reporters and moving towards a “reporter-free newsroom”. That it had any to begin with may come as a surprise. This is, after all, the online outlet that promoted child drag acts and published pieces pondering such questions as “Why is incest wrong between same-sex siblings?” In short, it makes Sunday Sport look like The Atlantic.

Founded in 2005 by Benjamin Cohen, PinkNews emerged at a moment of rare cultural consensus. The rights of LGB people, as we were then known, were at their zenith, with broad public support and cross-party backing. From the outset, it enjoyed establishment endorsement. In 2005, a sitting Prime Minister, Tony Blair, penned a piece for the site celebrating a “new age of equality”.

The site cashed in on the pink pound, positioning itself as both a news outlet and a commercial gateway to a newly respectable demographic. It would be a full decade before Stonewall attached the T to the LGB, and 14 years before LGB Alliance was founded in response, seeking to reassert the right to be same-sex attracted.

For much of the 2010s, PinkNews was courted by politicians. If Stonewall was the policy body for homo- and bisexual people, then PinkNews was treated as their voice. But a side effect of progress is that celebs coming out as gay stop being interesting. So PinkNews did what any outlet in the attention economy must: it found a new conflict. Over time, it slid away from homosexuality and towards “queer” politics and outrage.

The consequences were editorial as much as ideological. The site developed an obsessive focus on a small number of dissenting figures, publishing hundreds of articles attacking celebrities deemed to be “transphobic”. JK Rowling, Graham Linehan and the LGB Alliance were the reliably clickable subjects for the two-minute hate. In that sense, PinkNews was not an aberration, but a pioneer of engagement farming. It became the drooling, lipsticked mouthpiece of extremist trans activists.

Over recent years the magazine has been forced to apologize after making false claims, including an allegation that the barrister Joanna Cherry was under investigation for homophobia. Feminist campaigning journalist Julie Bindel sued PinkNews for libel over an article that implied serious misconduct. The case was settled with an apology, the article was withdrawn, and PinkNews accepted the allegations would have been “wholly untrue” if understood to refer to her.

The change in political temperature has hit the magazine’s balance sheet. By the end of 2023, cash had collapsed to just £97,600, down from £2.83 million the previous year. The outlet’s net worth fell from £3.09 million to £1.55 million, a drop of nearly 50% in 12 months. In leaked audio from an internal meeting in 2023, later circulated online, senior figures suggested that coverage of trans issues was harming efforts to attract advertisers and sponsors.

While accounts published since have shown a slight uptick, it’s fair to say 2024 was not a good year for founder Ben Cohen and his husband, Anthony James. A BBC exposé that year described a culture of heavy drinking and alleged inappropriate behavior by the couple. The pair dismissed the claims as “false, inconsistent and malicious”.

PinkNews was born at a moment when the case for gay rights had been largely won. In chasing the “queer” future, it appears to have lost both its audience and its advertisers. Like it or loathe it, the magazine has always been pioneering, exploring the mine-filled land between journalism and technology, and between reporting and ideology. Yet the path it has cleared is one others would be wise to avoid.

---

Josephine Bartosch is assistant editor at The Critic and co-author of Pornocracy.

jo_bartosch

---