LGBTQ+ outlet LOOKOUT aims to expand throughout the Southwest, and beyond

Over the past four years, a newsletter that began as a protest by an Arizona reporter frustrated with his own paper’s coverage of LGBTQ+ issues has grown to become a respected statewide publication.

Now, it’s seeking to expand.

Following a feasibility study, the nonprofit LOOKOUT — whose tagline is “Fierce. Independent. Queer” — is working to move into Colorado and throughout the region. The outlet takes inspiration from ’90s street zines and the digital vanguard like Vice.

Beyond the Southwest, the Chicago-based Joyce Foundation has also supported a landscape study to gauge the need for such a publication in the Great Lakes region.

Currently based in Phoenix, the newsroom prints a quarterly magazine, produces about three separate newsletters each week to more than 14,000 subscribers, and publishes news, investigations, and accountability journalism on its website each week. The style marries the voice of an alt-weekly — “Join Our Drunken Live Blog of the Republican Governor’s Primary Debate” — with sharp and rigorous reporting.

The newsroom counts a full-time staff of four and a stable of freelancers, interns, and fellows. At this month’s Association of Alternative Newsmedia convention in Palm Springs, it picked up four awards, including one for excellence in journalism. The site doesn’t have a paywall. The organization hosts more than three dozen in-person community events across Arizona each year.

Recent stories include how the state liquor board debated queer culture for eight hours, how an heir to the U-Haul business tried to stop a gay leather bar from opening, and how Arizona’s leader of the Stonewall Democrats has a “history of incendiary conduct.”

“I’ve always been a bit of a rabble-rouser,” said LOOKOUT’s founding editor, Joseph Darius Jaafari, a tattooed 38-year-old Iranian journalist who has written for Rolling Stone, The Marshall Project, and others. “I like to poke, I like to prod, I like to be a bit of a jackass to The Man. That’s kind of, I think, why I went into this career in the first place.”

A grant from the American Journalism Project seeded the publication and the MacArthur Foundation supported its recent feasibility studies. But the founders worry that anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric from the White House has made it difficult to attract future or sustained funding.

“I do believe this is a pivotal moment, and philanthropy has the ability to step up and support organizations serving communities that are being targeted,” said Jake Hylton, LOOKOUT’s executive director.

The success and ambition of the local news operation is an example of a small, bootstrapped nonprofit newsroom building a community and relying on that community to help fuel its sustainability and reach new places.

“We cannot wait for philanthropy to fund us to do this,” Jaafari said about the site’s move into Colorado. “We’re going in there bare fucking bones.”

“People like us asking this everywhere”

The 2024 presidential election of Donald Trump galvanized Jaafari, a veteran journalist, and his partner, Hylton, who worked in real estate and housing advocacy. They thought about leaving Arizona, which they didn’t feel was a particularly safe place for queer and brown people.

“Very quickly, the conversation molded itself into ‘Oh, shit, there are people like us asking this everywhere. What can we do about that?’” Hylton said. “There are queer people everywhere, and the type of work we do doesn’t really exist this side of Ohio.”

Colorado is the first step as they seek to expand throughout the Southwest to include Utah, New Mexico, and Nevada. It’s also part of their own survival strategy as a news organization.

Colorado has a robust nonprofit news scene and a strong philanthropic journalism support network. The extent to which a new statewide outlet can break through and compete for funding will be a test for future growth elsewhere.

Last month, LOOKOUT’s founders hosted an invite-only event at a Denver bar for partners, funders, and local publishers. The gathering received support from the Knight Foundation and the digital marketing firm BlueLena.

Danika Worthington attended the party. As the membership manager for the nonprofit statewide Colorado Sun digital outlet, she has had an inside look at the state’s media scene while helping grow a startup through most of its eight years in business.

There is plenty to cover in Colorado’s queer space, both good and bad, she said, but she often feels that queer news is relegated to arts and culture. The Denver journalist, who has donated to LOOKOUT, said she’s excited for an outlet to take a serious approach to hard news in her state.

“I think it might even lead other publications to kind of step up their game,” she said, “or at least to partner with them.”

“Stories that wouldn’t have been told otherwise”

Jaafari had been working for the Gannett-owned Arizona Republic newspaper as an investigative reporter for about a year in 2022 when he said he approached his editors about covering the LGBTQ+ community more robustly.

After feeling rebuffed more than once, he started a monthly Substack newsletter.

“It was a protest, essentially,” he said. In more colorful terms, he described it as a “fuck you.”

The project grew but created friction at his day job. A $400,000 startup grant from the American Journalism Project allowed him to quit the Republic and work on his startup full time. He and Hylton built a website, produced consequential reporting, and launched a series of in-person events.

“I’m stealing everything I learned from my time at Vice and from little raggedy zines in the punk rock world,” Jaafari said. “I’m stealing every single brand and voice and guide, and everything from the old ’90s Christopher Street magazines and queer magazines … I’m stealing everything that is cool in our community and putting it into this.”

While the reporting is mission-driven, he doesn’t consider what he does as activist or movement journalism. “We don’t pull punches within our own community,” he said. “That, to me, is a defining factor of whether or not you’re advocacy.”

Earlier this year, reporter Tori Gantz exposed how two of Arizona’s most prominent LGBTQ+ advocacy groups were working on legislation that would allow pastors to discriminate against same-sex couples by not performing weddings. Jaafari reported a story that was critical of a popular Phoenix drag bar and how its actions were causing a rift in the community.

Jim Small, editor of the nonprofit Arizona Mirror digital news site, describes LOOKOUT as filling a needed gap in the state’s media ecosystem. Even when it reports on major stories that other outlets are also covering, he said, it takes a different approach and angles that provide valuable context and insight.

The Mirror re-publishes LOOKOUT’s work, but its newsroom has also partnered with it on joint reporting projects. That’s something the founders say they would like to do with outlets in Colorado and elsewhere as they move into other markets.

“The result has always been solid journalism, really unique stories, and doing the thing that I think we all want to do, which is telling stories that wouldn’t have been told otherwise,” Small said.

Partnerships, collaboration, and coordination

Last year, the consultant Fiona Morgan conducted a survey on LOOKOUT’s behalf and held focus groups that included LGBTQ+ people and allies living in western states. The goal was to better identify their needs and also to map what is currently available to them in terms of support.

She put a special emphasis on rural communities, she said.

Hylton said what the team learned from the feasibility studies is that growing throughout the region, and potentially beyond, will take partnerships and collaboration.

“We built this organization in Arizona on partnerships, we did it by listening, we did it by engaging with community first,” he said.

Next month, LOOKOUT plans to travel to a pride event in Pueblo, Colorado, a former major steel hub in the West about two hours south of Denver. Some who have been involved in local media there have complained about feeling neglected by the state’s broader local media support networks. Hylton said LOOKOUT is already in talks with the 5-year-old nonprofit Pueblo Star Journal about potential partnerships.

Expansions can be tricky. What looks good on a whiteboard and sells in a boardroom may crash against the reality on the ground. A potential partner or collaborator may view an emerging news organization as a competitor that could draw away scant resources.

Morgan, who has worked in the nonprofit and philanthropic news-and-information space for years, said she believes the folks behind LOOKOUT know what they’re doing and have a clear vision for where they fit in the media ecosystem.

“They are very sincere about wanting to support the mission by collaborating with the place-based newsrooms and LGBTQ organizations that currently exist, not replacing them,” she said. “I think what’s going to work is that they’re very strategic in how they planned this expansion, and I think they have been extremely thoughtful about it.”