The Believer had found itself “in strange territory,” as one of its co-founders put it on Tuesday. After nearly two decades of existence, the distinguished literary magazine has been sold to the owner of a sex toy collective, imaginatively titled The Sex Toy Collective, according to current and former Believer staffers. Earlier on Tuesday, after a former Believer employee had raised the alarm about a suspiciously SEO-heavy article that had appeared on the magazine’s website, the Collective stepped forward to assert ownership. “Our goal is to bring back the magazine,” the company wrote on Twitter, “but since it was losing tens of thousands a month we need to get it making money using SEO then use that to bring back all the original writers.” Former Believer editor Kristen Radtke explained in a thread that The Believer’s former publisher, McSweeney’s, had put in a bid to take the magazine home to San Francisco, but that it been “ignored.” In an Instagram post captioned, “Not a joke,” Ed Park, a Believer co-founder, explained that The Believer team had not been informed of the sale. “We are currently exploring all our options,” Park wrote.
