The future is uncertain

Especially after this week. But nothing lasts forever.

Let’s rewind a few years.

I first launched Prohibitchin’ in 2018 as a column in West Coaster Magazine, a San Diego-based craft beer publication that came out every month and covered the latest in local beer news. Every month, I interviewed a different woman working in San Diego’s craft beer scene. It was a simpler time.

After West Coaster folded in 2020, I wasn’t sure what to do with the series. People seemed to like it, and I knew there was a need to continue promoting underrepresented voices in beverage alcohol.

But by then, the lenses of featuring only women, only in San Diego, and only working in beer felt too limiting. Other outlets were starting to strategically expand their coverage and implement diversity, equity, and inclusion as part of their features (finally!) and I didn’t want to lose the momentum I’d already built. Overdue conversations centered around DEI were taking off, and the laundry list of earth-shattering events in 2020—the pandemic, George Floyd’s murder, craft beer’s reckoning sparked by Brienne Allan, to name just a few—meant that even though we had to stay apart, humans needed to feel close to one another by any means necessary. Plus, this little thing called Substack was starting to gain momentum, and I thought, why not move it there and expand coverage accordingly? In November 2020, I did.

Since then, Prohibitchin’ remained a constant, part of my professional identity and what I felt was part of my personal responsibility. The interviews, along with the Diverse Beer Writers Initiative, were ways I felt I could share my expertise and experience with others to uplift voices that had not yet been heard and—perhaps idealistically—change the narrative in beer and beyond.

I feel like it worked, for a while. But over time, things have changed. DEI initiatives are getting slashed across the country, from academia to private business. Promises of change are quietly fading into distant memory. People—mostly women and non-binary folks, some even featured on these pages—have faced burnout, changed careers, or just moved on to different things. People kept reading Prohibitchin’, but over the past four years, fewer people have engaged, or even really seemed to care. I’ve felt like I was shouting into the void, or perhaps just preaching to the choir.

That’s not a plea for pity. Just a statement of fact, as well as what seems to be an inevitability in even the most well-meaning media outlets, which continue to close right and left. And it’s not just media—the state of the country doesn’t feel promising for anyone who’s not a rich white guy. I haven’t lost hope completely, but looking ahead, it’s hard to feel optimistic.

In the interest of total transparency, Prohibitchin’ hasn’t made financial sense for me for a long time. I left my full-time career in content marketing in 2016 to go freelance, specifically because 1) I knew my husband and I wanted to have a child and 2) I was fully aware of the cost of childcare and wanted to balance my time between both the primary caregiver and still remain in the content creation world. It works for us, and I’m lucky. I’m grateful. But parenting a toddler is different than parenting an elementary school-age kid, and I’ve found myself weighing what time and energy I have and how best to spend it. It’s not the same calculation it used to be. Something has to change.

I’m incredibly grateful to the sponsors Prohibitchin’ had over the years—Liz Bauer from Hopsbauer, Rev Nat from Rev Nat’s Hard Cider, and Chicago-based Stout Collective—but when that financial safety net slowly went away (for totally understandable reasons!), I felt I had no choice but to turn on voluntary paid subscriptions. I never wanted to make people pay for the work, but I also wanted to value myself and my time.

That push-and-pull of community responsibility against self-worth and finite time to work and parent and be an individual and partner and friend has eaten at me. To those who did volunteer for paid subscriptions, I see you and thank you. As of this week, all payments are paused. Interestingly enough, I turned them off on Monday… premonition? Not really. Just correlation in timing.

It’s (weirdly?) validating that I am far from the only one outwardly reexamining their role in media this week. Maybe I just subscribe to a higher-than-average number of newsletters, but virtually all of them have either expressed exhaustion or also paused efforts to reconfigure from within in the past few days. I see you all too and send you love and solidarity. We’re all figuring out how best to serve our circles, and it’s okay if this isn’t it. Redirection is a necessary part of long-term service.

All of this is to say nothing lasts forever, and I feel as though this particular initiative has run its natural course. I’m not sure what the future of Prohibitchin’ is. It’s too good of a name to let die, but I don’t yet have a vision of what it could be, or even should be. I’m truly so thankful for what this has been, and cautiously hopeful for what it might become.

For now, I’m focusing my energy on my family and my community. I’m going to keep highlighting diverse voices, but through methods like prioritizing different sources in all my work, and offering myself once again to be a sounding board, resource, or simply a friend to those who need one.

There are quite a few of you in this wonderful Prohibitchin’ space, and I’d love to hear from you—you can always email me at beth.demmon.ivey@gmail.com. In the meantime, take care of yourself. Take care of each other. See you again ✌️