Poking holes with Mother Tongue magazine
Melissa Goldstein and Natalia Rachlin are the founders and editors of Mother Tongue magazine, which presents a distinctly grown-up picture of motherhood. During the lockdowns of 2020 they suddenly found themselves stuck at home, trying to balance work with looking after young children, “stretched and frustrated, like women across the world”.
But whereas most people dealt with that time by hunkering down, instead they started asking questions about the sort of media that was being presented to them. Where were the magazines that spoke to them as mothers?
“The early connection was, let’s poke holes in all the things that exist or have existed historically in this space,” says Natalia. “Why do they look a certain way and speak a certain way that just doesn’t connect to us personally? And surely we can’t be the only ones.”
The first issue of Mother Tongue magazine came out in 2021 and we delivered their second issue to Stack subscribers as our April 2022 magazine. The ninth issue is landing in shops now, and in this conversation Melissa and Natalia speak about the ideas that drive the magazine as the 10th issue approaches.
To an extent it’s ideological, and they talk about, “this scary moment in the media landscape”, and the pride they take in being able to publish something that represents their view of the world. But it’s also a business decision – they’ve had advertising in the magazine since the second issue, and they describe their process of selling pages and collaborating with like-minded brands to create a healthy and sustainable publication.
It’s an inspiring story and I loved speaking with them, so I hope you’ll enjoy listening to the episode, or of course watching via the video below. We have hundreds more conversations with independent publishers in our podcast archive, please take a look there to hear more. And of course if you follow us on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts, we’ll be able. to keep on delivering our episodes to you as soon as they’re ready.
