Hi. We’re Pop Heist.

Pop culture media is a hellscape. Sites are overrun with intrusive ads, or they’re SEO farms, or they pay writers at near-criminal rates. Some of them pollute the internet with AI-generated garbage, upon which other AI-generated sites create their own garbage. Google now deprioritizes useful search results by reconstituting this Internet slurry into its own AI-generated responses, forcing the aforementioned SEO farms to stray further and further from meaning.

All of this results in a pink slime of content. Writing by-product. And outlets with real writing — ones that pay their writers anything resembling reasonable rates or offer a living wage — are shuttered one after the next.

Pop Heist hopes to balm this wound, because we believe pop culture is a treasure. Writing with thought, humor, and heart — writing that pays writers what they deserve — should never be locked in a vault of reinforced SEO.

So we’re breaking it out.

We choose authenticity over algorithms, quirks over clicks. We value transparency and equity. We’re independent and reader-funded. Everything we create is made by passionate collaborators for eager accomplices, and we’re proud to be part of the emerging class of worker-owned media outlets.

We’re here for news as much as we are olds and weirds. Breaking news might appear alongside near-forgotten tidbits of cultural history. Wonders of the silver screen might appear alongside direct-to-DVD knock-offs. We want to allow great writers to explore the things they’re passionate about, and we believe culture of any brow — high, low, or sideways, if that’s a thing — should be approached with respect.

We’re pulling a heist, because everyone deserves a cut of the culture.