Online Men's Journal Emphasizes Content Volume
The Good Men Project claims to offer “The conversation no one else is having.” An online outlet, they draw on a pool of over six thousand contributors—men, women, and nonbinary—for posts on topics ranging from Sex & Relationships to the Environment. New posts appear daily. Some go viral across social media.
When asked to review The Good Men Project, I said yes immediately. Though I hadn’t read it before, I’d heard of it at a conference. My activist partner, who works with community groups to advance women’s equality in the face of gender-based violence, had heard of it too. We both regularly engage in discussions about contemporary masculinity, especially as parents to a one-year-old boy.
Before reading, my wife and I talked through what we would hope to see or not see in an outlet dedicated to “good men.” I also asked several other writers what their concerns might be. The consensus was that such an outlet would do well to have a baseline awareness of and respect for how people have been thinking and feeling their way through related issues over the past few decades, as well as something more than superficial decrees for the present. Then, I sat down to consider The Good Men Project’s history, as well as at least three posts from each of its eighteen topic categories.
Tom Matlack, a venture capitalist, started The Good Men Project in 2009 with a book, a film, and a nonprofit foundation. None of these reached a substantial audience. But Lisa Hickey, an advertising executive, convinced Matlack that the concept might work as an online outlet.
With Hickey as Publisher and CEO, Matlack personally invested and helped raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for the launch of the website. Between May 2010 and April 2013, he also served as the website’s public face and wrote over five hundred posts. Some were generic, like “A Manly List of Summer Fun.” Others caused a lot of controversy, such as “Being a Dude is a Good Thing.”
In 2013, Matlack stepped away amidst growing public criticism of his personal views on women and internal arguments over the editorial direction of the site. Theodore Ross covered the details in an extensive piece for Buzzfeed that same year. At that time, Matlack planned to stop writing for The Good Men Project, but retained his financial stake. He has since written only a handful of posts: one in 2014, two in 2015, and two so far in 2018.
Hickey still runs The Good Men Project, along with a few executive editors. She also writes posts and shares transcripts of weekly telephone calls. (The website is monetized in a variety of ways in addition to advertising, including paid membership tiers, one of which includes telephone access to the Publisher.)
During my reading for this review, I came across an excellent post by Hickey in the Ethics & Values category: “What We Saw: How the Russian Trolls and Bots Tried to Break Our Democracy.” In this post, written in response to the indictment of thirteen Russian nationals by a US federal grand jury on February 16th of this year, Hickey explains how Facebook trolls and Twitter bots worked in tandem to deliver highly targeted marketing campaigns during the 2016 US Presidential Election. The post doesn’t directly touch on how this is a concern for good men, but I found Hickey’s analysis and explanation compelling. It gave me hope that the seemingly amorphous problems of “fake news” might actually have communications structures we can identify and address.
I also read several other compelling posts on The Good Men Project. In the Social Justice category, entertainment executive Ken Goldstein offers an emotional letter to American teenagers about how gun violence is “Your War to End.” And religious professor Derek Penwell writes honestly and critically about the myth of a level playing field in “Should I Feel Guilty About My White Privilege?”
The Poetry category had quality submissions from emerging and established poets. Kirk Schlueter's lines about Illinois in “Personal Geography” evoke complicated feelings for his home state. And Len Lawson sketches a powerful image of his father in “When I Fly Too Close to the Sun I Don’t Smell Melting Wax.”
However, in post after post across a range of categories, a lack of editorial guidance made reading The Good Men Project a slog. Despite Hickey’s obvious insight into how information moves on the internet, the editors do not appear to have taken much interest in vetting writers or material.
The A & E category serves as one example. Jay Snook, a self-described “simple man living in Sacramento,” has almost eight hundred posts since February of 2014. Some of Snook’s posts are full interviews or reviews. But most of them have a boilerplate format. First comes a short paragraph that essentially says, “I really like X.” Then comes a plot summary of a book or a movie copied and pasted from another outlet, such as the book or movie’s own website. And to wrap up, another short paragraph along the lines of, “People looking for a good X will want to check this one out.”
The Politics category serves as another example. 30DB, a “free opinion search engine,” has just under five hundred posts since August of 2017 (Nonprofits and corporations can also contribute to The Good Men Project). All of 30DB’s posts are single paragraph news clips republished from their own site.
A lot of other outlets and writers have this same practice. They use The Good Men Project to republish content from their own websites, often in what amounts to an advertisement for a product or service, such as a self-published book or life coaching.
My experience of The Good Men Project didn’t match the “glimpse of what enlightened masculinity might look like in the 21st Century,” which is a phrase they use in their branding. I did find a few pieces that suggested thoughtful, passionate, craft-aware writers. But with so much duplicate and promotional content, The Good Men Project reads in the aggregate more like the digital equivalent of a packet of old fashioned junk mail.
