Girls with Insurance
From Underground Library
 to date, GwI has no logo. | |
| Associate Editors | P. H. Madore Dawn Corrigan Tommy Dean Jon Thrower |
|---|---|
| Former editors | Anonymous |
| Staff writers | Andy Riverbed (02/2010-present) Mather Schneider (09/2009-present) |
| Categories | Literary/Comedy/Non-Fiction/Old School |
| Frequency | Irregularly Often |
| Circulation | <500 |
| Publisher | Dawn Corrigan |
| First issue | 2003 |
| Company | disproductions |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Website | http://www.girlswithinsurance.com |
| ISSN | forthcoming |
Girls with Insurance is one of the oldest known magazines on the internet. This might be an overstatement.
However and nonetheless, it had two short-lived runs before it folded near the end of 2005. Both of these runs are well-documented at archive.org.
Around the beginning of May, 2009, P. H. Madore thought of GwI for the first time in years. He typed in the address and found that it was some sort of insurance website. He contacted the domain owner and purchased the rights to the domain for an undisclosed and outrageous sum. He then put up a quick Joomla! installation and forgot about the place for a couple months until Dawn Corrigan contacted him, at which point he kickstarted things.
The mid-2009 versions of the website were quite ugly, as Madore happened to be deployed to Iraq at that time. However upon returning to the United States in late 2009, he vowed to make the site at least a little pretty by the end of 2010. In Feburary 2010 the site was overhauled and got the look it has at time of writing: slightly understated but nonetheless functionally competent.
Presently the magazine runs on a somewhat rare (possibly unique) model of associate editorship. Editors operate mostly independent of each other with writers submitting directly to each of them. At some point in the Fall of 2009, Tommy Dean came on board. In February, 2010, Jon Thrower applied and was accepted. The growing list of Associates will hopefully also stimulate a growing pool of content.
The magazine's mission is largely undefined. Its "About" page states in vague terms that it is
a magazine focusing on humor, silliness, stilted declarations, sly foxes, fiction, poetry, pop culture, and everything which causes orgasms the world over.
This, of course, means almost nothing in terms of concrete direction. But given its editorial leanings, it also makes perfect sense.
Columns
Presently, GwI has two columnists -- Andy Riverbed and Mather Schneider. The interesting thing about these individuals is that they also happen to be continually at war with each other, feuding over the tiniest disagreements. Somehow their mutual editor, P. H. Madore, has convinced them to both write independently and competently, despite or because of each other, and so GwI has a certain amount of guaranteed, fresh, native content each month. Schneider's Drought Resistant Strain often draws the ire and comments of editors the web over, and Riverbed entertains even the most intellectually dead of readers.
The W Paradox
Very few magazines are dumb or bold enough to have a lower-case word in their title. It seems trivial and pointless. The new editors of GwI have stuck with it because it's one of the few matters of tradition which they have to cling to, and that whole 2003 thing has to be worth something.
