Welcome to Beta Magazine
Hi, hello, how are you? Welcome to Beta Magazine!
We are a climbing, outdoors and adventure magazine focused on the female experience but inclusive of all. People from all walks of life, backgrounds and identities are well and truly welcome at Beta Magazine. Our contributors share their thoughts and ideas with kindness and sensitivity and our magazine is released twice a year.
My name is Emily Ankers and I am the Co-Founder and Editor of Beta Magazine. I set up the magazine in 2020 alongside Annie Martin (Bouldering DabRats) and Catherine Evans (our in-house graphic designer) as a direct response to my research findings that women who climb were tending to not engage with rock climbing magazines and media (Ankers, 2020). The aim is to host a platform for people to share their stories, experiences, conversations and issues. Whether that be through articles, poetry, journal entries, illustrations, doodles, photographs, collages. You name it, it’s welcome in Beta Magazine.
Since we started more fantastic volunteers have joined the team. Our core team is now made up by myself, Immy Sykes, Deputy Editor and Natalie Moore, Designer and Discord Community Manager. Of course like any volunteer led project, we all do everything in between too!
Over the past two years we’ve got to know our readers a little bit better, and we’re not just about creating ‘the product’ of the magazine. We are a community platform. In summer 2022, Natalie Moore set up a Beta Magazine Club Discord channel for anybody who wants a safe and moderated forum to chat with like-minded people. Our Discord has categories such as climbing, cycling, running, watersports, it has categories for collaborators, instructors, advice, spotlight for small businesses, creative and more. The idea is that you find your relevant category and that is the location for you to chat about whatever it is that you want to! That might be asking for training ideas and advice, podcast recommendations, instructor recommendations, people share their experiences or something they’re proud of. We even have a four-legged-friends category, crag dogs are important to us too!
We’ve also had merch runs a couple of times since we began and International Women’s Day online events. We’ve done Instagram livestream interviews, takeovers and a couple of giveaways. So far, Beta Magazine has always been online, but we are thinking about how we might be able to move to print - which would be a very exciting step for us! We also want to move to host more in person events to facilitate people meeting and finding friends to climb with.
We’d really like to use the funds that we raise to create a pot of money which can be used to provide access for people to climbing and other adventurous opportunities. We’re still trying to figure out exactly what this might look like, but ideas include funding spaces on leadership training courses and qualifications, introductory courses, gear grants and learning opportunities. A major thing for us is being able to pay our contributors - which we’re still working towards. This is why we charge for Beta Magazine. We believe that those who are able to afford it should be contributing towards creating opportunities for those less able to afford them.
To support us, you can either download and read Beta Magazine via Etsy. If you wanted to pledge some more sustained support, we have a Patreon platform where you can pledge as little as £1.45 per month or as much as £5 per month. When you pledge via Patreon you automatically gain access to Issues of Beta Magazine (and it works out cheaper than just buying Issues outright), and this will include any future print editions too. You also get a number of other benefits! Supporting us financially helps us to cover our running costs, and build Beta Magazine into the community platform and facilitator that we want it to be.
I hope that you enjoy reading Beta Magazine, that it gets you thinking, you learn something new or it sparks an idea. We hope to see more of you, welcome to the Beta Magazine Club!
Emily Ankers (she/her)
Co-Founder and Editor
Issue No. 8 of Beta Magazine Cover by Ellen Williams (@artymelon)