Hi there,

Delaney here, with co-founder Alexis and audience editor Charli.

Death has loomed large in my life as of late. I lost my parents three years and two ICU rooms apart. Both were in their 60s and thought they’d be sticking around for a while, so neither had a finished will, much less an advance directive that could have provided relief and guidance in their final hours. The ordeals have left me juggling two probate courts, more funeral-home swag than any self-respecting Millennial should have, and the bones-deep unending ache of grief.

According to a recent pre-pandemic study, roughly a third of Americans have lost a family member or close friend in the past three years, and a fifth have lost a pet. Some 1.1 million people (and counting) have died in the U.S. from COVID-19, and each of those deaths has left about nine people grieving.

This growing reality, like so many aspects of death culture, is underexplored. Only 110 media and communications workers cover the country’s deathcare industry, which generates more than $20 billion a year, and no national newsroom is devoted to this universal experience.

So we’re building one.

Launching September 21 — the death of summer and dawn of the year’s darkest days — GraveSite will be the publication of record on death in the U.S., housing rigorous journalism and transformative storytelling across five key dimensions:

Life: Service-focused reporting on planning and anticipating death, dying, grieving, handling the logistics of death, and supporting a grieving person, plus personal narratives from deathcare workers and everyday people
Power: In-depth narrative, investigative, and data-driven reporting on death politics and policy, movement and justice work, and corporate greed and overreach in death work and adjacent fields
Futures: News, deep-dive analyses, explainers, and probes into research and advances in dealing with death and grief (e.g., in the death tech and longevity spaces), as well as evolution in death attitudes, practices, and roles
Belief: Perspectives, news, and features on religious and spiritual beliefs, philosophies, traditions, and practices surrounding death and grief
Culture: Perspectives, analyses, reviews, and commentary on death’s interplay with film, TV, music, sports, gaming, fashion, celebrity, the internet, and pop culture

Looking back, GraveSite has been a long time coming.

When my dad died at the end of 2022 — suddenly from a brain bleed — I realized how opaque death logistics are, and how shoddy our societal scaffolding is for people in mourning. So I made death my reporting beat. When my mom followed suit last December — from a fast-acting infection contracted during her second bout with cancer — I said, “fuck it, I’m going all in,” bought the GraveSite.Media domain, and asked Alexis to join me.

Alexis and I met making indie media, and aside from feeling an immediate kinship to her as a fellow fast-talking Jersey girl turned Brooklyn transplant, I was struck by her thoughtful and unflinching approach to brutal subjects, like the booming active shooter preparedness industry and prison industrial complex. Plus, her video and audio reporting chops — sharpened through a film MFA at the New School and executive podcasting stint at Bloomberg — are a welcomed complement to my purview. We scooped up Charli in our hunt for an audience editor — from more than 100 impressive applicants — and have been awestruck by her multi-hyphenate talents as a media worker-turned academic-turned editorial leader at large. Plus she brings a welcomed East-Tennessee ease to it all.

Aside from filling a conspicuous reporting hole, GraveSite is fiercely personal: a way to honor my parents’ legacies. I hope to build a digital home as meticulously as my dad built real-world houses and impart knowledge like my mom did to hundreds of students over her decades of public school service.

It’s why I’m hyper-committed to ensuring GraveSite belongs to us mortals, not the legacy-media monolith or a private-equity hit team. We’ll pursue multiple income streams to ensure we can grow, repay our self-funding, and compensate our contributors and team members fairly, but the most important one will be reader memberships, which we’d like to make up at least 40% of our total revenue by the end of our first full year and more than half by the end of year two.

With that goal in mind, and ahead of our September 21 launch, we’re inviting you to become a GraveSite GroundBreaker. Aside from supporting indie media [insert well-trodden yet impassioned talking points on how this makes you a Very Good and Noble Person], you’ll get a founding-member badge, early access to our first stories penned by some very impressive thinkers, and 20% off your first year of membership ($79/year instead of $99).

Click here to join us as a GroundBreaker, or here to sign up to our email and newsletter list for free. Either way, you’ll also get an exclusive guide on how to get your affairs in order.

Here’s to digging deep,

Delaney Rebernik (GraveSite founder and editor-in-chief), with Alexis Haut (co-founder and executive producer) and Charli K. Elder (audience editor)