Go Read DED LED

A while ago, I answered a Twitter query for news writers for a site I had long respected. I know this because almost all of my replies, all of my pitches and stories sent to CMS were still threaded in that initial email.

Two years ago, that ended for me. I didn’t realize for the first bit that I wasn’t alone, I thought only I had been let go and for months it made it incredibly difficult to write because I knew that I had done something terribly wrong to deserve firing, but wasn’t exactly sure what it was.

This isn’t a eulogy for Kill Screen, mostly because I doubt I would be the person to write such a thing and also because how can something actually be lost when the heart of it, the writers who crafted remarkable work and who I respect so terribly much, still exists. They can be found in almost every publication, including this one, crafting the kinds of pieces that excite and confound. In recent memory, their work is still a vibrant part of the ecosystem surrounding media writing today, in a book featuring the photographs of Gareth Damian Martin, in a story about BTS from Josh Calixto, in the podcast and works of Reid McCarter and Astrid Budgor at Bullet Points and, honestly, so much more. These voices are not lost.

This isn’t a eulogy, but rather a celebration of the people who made Kill Screen what it was. DED LED preserves a body of work from what Gareth rightly describes as “era that felt cut short.” Finely crafted, it features the work of 49 writers from the final four years of Kill Screen’s editorial direction, independently gathered and free to the public. These pieces are still available on the Kill Screen site, but this collection gives people the opportunity to read these pieces alongside the supplementary commentary provided by the original authors.

You won’t find my writing alongside those 49 peers. I didn’t have a piece while I was working at Kill Screen that I felt proud enough to include. But the people I worked with there I am exceedingly proud to know and their writing deserves to be cherished and engaged with. Within DED LED , you will find the works of several Unwinnable writers including but not limited to Davis Cox, Astrid Budgor, David Shimomura, Levi Rubeck, Khee Hoon Chan, and Gavin Craig.

Kill Screen is dead. Long live its writers.