Dear Readers,

Here at The Hourglass we receive some interesting letters. Recently, we received 3 emails asking why veganism was being ‘excluded’ from the newspaper (these were the words of one writer). Had they sent in articles on veganism that had been excluded? No. I replied that I have been vegan since 2003. This caused a sudden change of tone. The idea of us having an ‘agenda’ to exclude content on veganism was now clearly not true.

It’s understandable that this paranoia about content exists, because of the way that the mainstream media works, and how propaganda-heavy it has become. Readers, we are working very hard to emulate a better style of news reporting than that. We are not trying to push forward our own agendas – however important veganism might be to me, I refuse to become like the media moguls we criticise so heavily by slipping my views into every other article (as many newspapers did with, for example, Brexit).

Equally, we can only use the content we get sent in because we cannot pay all of our writers, which means that commissioning specific topics isn’t possible. When we launched, we used the strapline ‘Be the media; Lead the media’. If you want to see a topic covered, please send us a pitch. We also accept articles from readers with no writing experience and will help you to shape your words into something you’re happy with – although this
means more work for us, we don’t mind, as we want to ensure that all
voices are heard.

For those of you who contact us to complain, we hope that you are also emailing mainstream newspapers for their lack of reporting of the climate and ecological crisis, for Party-political bias (which you will never find in The Hourglass), for printing outright lies, and so on.

A tribute

On 6 February James ‘Iggy’ Fox died unexpectedly while abroad, at the age of 25. He had given up a career in science to join the cause for climate activism.

The article Iggy wrote for issue 3 of The Hourglass, titled This is Why I Rebel, went viral a week after Iggy died, when the mainstream media made the link to his earlier years as a child actor.

We held a tribute to Iggy on 13 February in London, and a dance video Iggy had made was projected onto Westminster Abbey for all of London to see; thanks again to the small team who helped me to pull this off last minute. A beautiful video of the tribute was made (video link below).

In this small space, we simply cannot cover how much of a loss Iggy was for the world, but we do dedicate this issue to him. RIP Iggy. You are missed by main.

Watch the video of the tribute

Read Iggy’s Hourglass article