What is Openly?
Around the world, LGBTQ+ rights are under attack. Estimates suggest queer people make up barely 10% of the world’s population, but their struggle for social acceptance and equal rights before the law has become a political battleground from the United States to Russia and Senegal.
Since 2001, more than 35 countries have legalised same-sex marriage. Many have changed their laws to legally recognise trans identities. But recently, these advances have been met been met with social backlash across nations and cultures, and sometimes the hard-won rights of LGBTQ+ people have been rolled back.
At the Thomson Reuters Foundation, we work to strengthen free, fair and informed societies. Such societies depend upon every person being able to fully participate – regardless of gender, race, sexual orientation, and gender identity. There is a strong need for a global, authoritative news and information platform on LGBTQ+ rights, one that sheds a light on under-reported stories from around the world, providing unbiased, impartial, trusted journalism that fits the news consumption habits of today’s digital users.
That’s where Openly, the Foundation’s LGBTQ+ news brand, comes in. We launched in 2018 and expanded our video coverage in 2021. Since then, we’ve built an engaged online community around our pioneering, award-winning social video journalism on platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Now we have taken this one step further with a global LGBTQ+ newsletter here on Substack. The goal? To offer an impartial, in-depth take into the biggest issues facing queer people today.
Why subscribe?
If you subscribe to our newsletter, we’ll send our original reporting, analysis and human stories directly to your inbox. We’re a small, non-profit newsroom, so you’ll hear from us very couple of weeks, with reporting you probably won’t have seen elsewhere. We want our journalism to reach you without being filtered by an algorithm - subscribing to the newsletter will make sure that happens, and that the news lands in your inbox as soon as we publish it.
And if you need a top-up in between newsletters, you’ll still be able to find our award-winning content on Instagram and TikTok. We also produce impactful, social-first video journalism on LGBTQ+ issues reported from the ground by our journalists and contributors from all over the world.
Thanks a lot for being part of our global community. Openly is a non-profit news brand. Our work is made possible thanks to the support of donors including the People’s Postcode Lottery and the Wellspring Philanthropic Fund – and we’re looking to grow.
This a critical moment for LGBTQ+ people around the world, as they face ever-restrictive laws, shrinking civic space, and a volatile online ecosystem. If you’re a corporate, philanthropic or institutional donor interested in funding impartial, independent journalism on LGBTQ+ issues, whether through impactful short-form videos, in-depth documentaries, a global LGBTQ+ newsletter (or perhaps something entirely new!), we’d love to hear from you.
Get in touch: openly@thomsonreuters.com
