VoxFeminae.net, a pioneering digital native media outlet based in Zagreb, Croatia, stands as an iconic fixture in the Croatian non-profit media landscape. Its nearly two decades of operations make it not only a veteran in the Croatian context, but also among the oldest digital natives in the Project Oasis directory. With its gender-based thematic focus and approach, VoxFeminae.net (known as Vox) has successfully educated and elevated generations of readers and writers while cultivating a dedicated community of supporters who consider it their go-to media platform.
Gabrijela Ivanov, the visionary founder of Vox and its former longtime editor-in-chief, is a graduate of computer science and an early adopter of everything related to internet culture. After working at a software company, she decided that she would “never work for someone else again, only with someone”, as her biography on Vox states. That’s where VoxFeminae.net’s journey began.
Three female friends established the non-profit association K-zona in 2005 with zero investment money and the aim of establishing an independent media space created by women. The next year, with a small grant from the Croatian Office for Gender Equality, they started publishing Cunterview NET (a precursor to Vox), a website that initially featured “a bunch of links and small texts regarding feminism and culture.”
Further funding depended on an unlikely factor: “We renamed Cunterview NET to VoxFeminae.net because we couldn’t obtain significant public funding with that name, and because Cunterview NET was inaccessible on faculty computers at that time, as it included one of the filtered and censored words,” Gabrijela says.
Vox received its first grant of approximately €20,000 per year through the public funding mechanism for non-profits, which allowed for the professionalization of the newsroom, but also changed the dynamics within the initial team. Hard core idealists, as Gabrijela puts it, were almost offended by the project funding and left, while people who needed to pay rent stayed.
Vox tapped into those already publishing on the internet, such as like-minded bloggers, but also attracted professionals – established Croatian and regional (ex-Yugoslavia) critics, journalists, and artists who saw it as a unique space for writing about gender and culture from a feminist and queer perspective, frequently addressing taboo subjects. It also provided space and education for new generations of writers. It ran open calls and workshops for volunteers each year, and had yearly cohorts of students who volunteered after these workshops. Some of them would become paid contributors and editors: “We survived because some of those students stayed for three or five years, and some of them have been with us for more than 10 years.”
There has been a lot of talk in the media industry lately about the pivot to events; this was something that Vox embraced from the start. As Gabrijela explains: “We had the VoxFeminae Festival and VoxFeminae.net media, in parallel. The people who worked on the media outlet, our audience, and our community were not necessarily there just for the media itself; they were there because they wanted to meet like-minded people and were interested in feminism, queerness, art, and human rights in general. So if there was not enough funding for the media, we would organize festivals and other projects related to these subjects.”
One of Vox’s strategies for financial sustainability included a “Fierce Women” card game based on a popular section of the website. They ran a successful crowdfunding campaign backed by 700 people from 40 countries and succeeded to establish a company, registered as a social enterprise, that would develop and distribute the game. While “Fierce Women” was a clear success and won an award for social innovation, it fell short as a revenue stream for the website.
At the same time, startup experts were telling Vox team to stop being idealistic and work sales and marketing hard. For Vox, this has meant some soul-searching: “It is fair to say at this point that it is not in our DNA to be so competitive and do whatever it takes to sell a product or pull in readers with intrusive ads that twirl, pop, and obstruct content.”
Due to the instability of public funding and Croatia’s status as a small language and media market, many nonprofits in Croatia are constantly on the brink of survival. Despite challenges, the ethics of solidarity and care have remained core components of Vox’s mission throughout all these years. On this path, they continue to evolve, opening up new avenues of collaboration with a clear vision ahead: “We will focus more on organizational development, community engagement and support in areas such as mental health, economic empowerment, cultural exposure, media literacy, and art appreciation for women, queer individuals, trans people, and nonbinary adults in Croatia.”
Check out additional examples from the regions of my colleagues Sanne and Elena, who oversee Northern and Southern Europe’s Oasis research, respectively: Pikara Magazine from Basque Country covers culture and society from a feminist perspective with critical and transgressive journalism while primarily being funded by its readers. Ruskeat Tytöt Media is the first Finnish cultural media outlet focused on including and representing the perspectives of racialised minorities and people with underrepresented genders in the Finnish media industry.