Hey APW,
As most of you know, this week was APW’s Tenth Anniversary, which caused a lot of introspection, emotions, and a few small celebrations. It was nice, and it was also intense, thinking about the fact that I’ve been working on one project for a DECADE of my life. That’s more than one-fourth of my life, and that’s a really huge thing.
It’s also meant that it’s time to ponder new projects (don’t worry, APW isn’t going anywhere). But it’s time to tackle some new opportunities, and find some new mountains to climb. Doing that has also meant sorting through past plans and goals, holding them up to the light. And that means, it’s time for me to let some plans go, and make space for new plans.
Many of you know that in what feels like a galaxy far, far away, back when we thought we’d have the first female president, and things would be, well… different, we’d been planning to launch a lifestyle site as a sister site to APW, called The Compact. There were a million things that held us back from the expected launch date in 2017, including a really tough year in business, staff shake ups, and mostly… development issues. The Compact was always supposed to be a copy of the code of the newly relaunched APW, and that project took more time and money than we ever would have imagined, meaning that we didn’t even have a new site till January of 2018, and we’re frankly still working on getting it to where it needs to be. (Ten years of image optimization is so close that I can taste it, but we’re having one last plugin bug that’s been plaguing us for weeks.)
Anyway, suffice to say, it wasn’t till this spring when I’ve been able to look at The Compact as a project again and contemplate picking it back up. And meanwhile, so much has changed—the political landscape, the publishing landscape, the mechanics of publishing on the web. (That boring list includes things like Facebook Newsfeed changes, Instagram algorithm changes, Google’s mobile first indexing, and a lot of things that no non-digital-publisher wants to think about.) APW is doing just fine, but the idea of introducing a new web property, and trying to manage all of these headaches for that… is the opposite of a fun. But beyond that, in our current environment, we need women’s publications that wear their politics on their sleeve. And while I’m able to do that within the secret garden that is weddings, I’ve long been aware that I don’t have a thick enough skin to be in political publishing, nor do I want to develop a skin that thick. (Politics is my non-business passion, and I’d frankly like to keep it that way.)
So for all those reasons and more, for the time being, I realized it was officially time to say goodbye to the dream of The Compact as a web publication, and give that lovely idea the momentary funeral that it deserves.
R.I.P., The Compact, a dream of a web publication. 2016–2018.
That said, we have big new non-wedding ideas to come. Ideas that will end up living under the banner of The Compact. So The Compact will rise from the ashes, reborn as the beginnings of a new idea. (That will happen in just about two weeks; we’re hard at work behind the scenes over here. And if you have an idea about what the new idea is, DM me and keep that shit a secret, y’all. I see you, following the Internet breadcrumbs I’ve carefully left behind.)
I’m saving that phoenix for another day, however. Today, I wanted to let any of you that wanted to mourn the idea of a web publication that wasn’t, to give you a time and space to get out your tear emojis and ask me any questions that you might have. Because those comments will get lost here, I’ll be fielding them over at The Compact’s Instagram, where I’m making the very same announcement. I’ll see you over there.
Till that phoenix rises, here is to ten years of relentless Monday through Friday web publishing, and all the joy (and some pain) that it has brought me. Thank you all for being here. You’ve made the major work of my life up till now, possible.
XO,
Meg
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