‘How it was named’ is a series where I explore the creation of brand names that have caught my interest. This edition features Francesca Donner of The Persistent

 

1] Tell us about The Persistent; what do you do?

 

The Persistent is a women-led media company, launched in 2024, that puts women at the center of the story. I’m the founder, CEO and editor-in-chief; our offering includes a twice-weekly newsletter, events, conversation and community.

 

As a journalist and editor at Wall Street Journal and The New York Times (among others), I have seen firsthand how women’s stories are marginalized, sidelined, overlooked, slightly erased, stereotyped. And it’s not just stories — it’s voices too.

 

The goal, working in mainstream news, is to have as large an audience as possible for your product. But if the audience comes to the product, looks at it and says, “well, that’s fine, but I don’t see myself represented here,” then you’re not really doing a thorough job. You’re excluding readers because they don’t feel seen or heard or valued. They might say, “I don’t see myself represented so what on earth does this have to do with me and how is it relevant to my life?”

 

And so that was a starting place for thinking about The Persistent.

 

2] And why do you do it?

 

Well, if we don’t make a deliberate effort to cover women, women are much less likely to be covered.

 

When we start looking really critically at whose voices get heard, whose stories get told, and start collecting data around that, then you start seeing exactly how lopsided things are. You end up with things like men being quoted as experts about 75% of the time, men centered as the hero of the story, or certain types of stories going to certain types of sections of the newspaper. For example, if you have two business stories, one about a man and the other about a woman, the man’s ends up in the ‘serious’ Business section while the woman’s ends up in the ‘cute’ Style section — it’s incredibly frustrating. But this happens over and over and over again, and it’s only the tip of the iceberg — and if you’re a woman of color, a disabled woman, an older woman, a neurodivergent woman, LGBTQ… you name it, it’s worse.

 

Things changed a bit in 2016, with #MeToo, with Trump being elected into the presidential office for the first time and suddenly women-centric stories were being discussed on a national stage. There was another thing: People felt more comfortable with the idea of identity in ways that, in prior decades, they maybe had shrugged it off not wanting to be boxed in or labeled. Now people were labeling themselves and very actively defining who they were.

 

This made for a far more interesting backdrop for launching The Persistent, because what you had was a new landscape, a new way of thinking about yourself and a real appetite and audience for stories that placed elements of identity at the center.

 

3] What values inform your ‘why’?

 

I didn’t come at this perhaps in the way that a lot of people might start their own company; I didn’t have dreams of becoming an entrepreneur and certainly not a media tycoon!

 

I came to it as an editor who saw that a lot of newsrooms weren’t getting it right. I don’t know why women’s stories are not deemed worthy of the front page. So I set out trying to show that women’s stories have value, interest and merit and that they’re something that everyone will be interested in. Women are dealing with all sorts of issues and the most frustrating part of it all is it’s not just women dealing with it, all of us are. These are *everyone* issues.

 

I had a lot of the answers in place by the time I got started because I had already been telling these stories, I was already seeing that there was an audience that was writing to me frequently and saying, “oh, my God, this story was so important, but nobody else is telling it” or “I feel seen in ways that I haven’t felt before” … “thank you for making this, thank you for shining a spotlight on this issue.” We were talking about really difficult sort of topics around bodies and pregnancy and erasure and marginalisation and voice and things like that.

 

In launching The Persistent, I was trying to take people to places that maybe most newsrooms weren’t comfortable going or didn’t feel was important. There was always a feeling around women’s stories that, “we’ll get to it when we get to it”, “we’ll get to that when the crisis calms down”… but there’s *always* a crisis.

 

And so the values of The Persistent are my personal journalistic values which are: I think that women are important. I think women’s stories don’t get told terribly well. I think when they do get told, they get told in certain types of stereotyped ways. I think that we can do better.

 

4] How did you end up with the name The Persistent? (did you work with an agency, undertake trademark searches and registration, indicative costs…)

 

So the name of our LLC is Front Page Media, but the name of the product is The Persistent and you will notice those are different names because securing a URL (I have since learned!) is hard! We started out with Front Page Media because I liked the idea that if newspapers weren’t going to put women on the front page, we would.

 

But when we went to register frontpage dot com, it was a no go (I wanted a dot-com as opposed to a dot-co or a dot-AI, because I felt that it lent a bit of gravity to the brand.)

 

And that’s when the real naming began. We had, I don’t know, 150 different names we were batting around. ‘We’ here, is me and Josie Cox, a founding editor of The Persistent.

 

And then The Persistent came up. I had wanted a name with ‘the’ in front of it. Maybe it feels old-fashioned or possibly too on the nose, but what I like about the ‘the’ is that it anchors it, and it makes it feel very ‘there.’ The Atlantic. The New Yorker. The Wall Street Journal. The New York Times. There’s also a period at the end of The Persistent in our logo, which I quite like as well. It makes it feel like it’s not going anywhere, it doesn’t feel like it’s going to fly off!

 

The Persistent was mostly spellable, just memorable enough, and the dot-com was available, and so that was the moment.

 

5] What did you almost call it before deciding on ‘The Persistent’?

 

Josie and I had long lists of options: names from women in history, names in other languages, names from women’s fashion, names from newsroom lexicon. We jammed together words to make new names. We had contenders based on historic dates and places. Animal names, language names… The Blyline was one contender (a mashup of byline and Nellie Bly). The Crinoline (or The Crin) was another contender; not entirely sure what we were thinking with that one. We liked The Centerfold for a while, as we loved the idea of taking that back, but it was too complicated in practice. We had Sphynxes and Cassandras and Nells. We had The Sett, Badger, The Museroom, Typesett … oh it went on and on!

 

I didn’t really want names that felt either overly politicized or overly gendered in such a way that it might make certain readers feel uncomfortable or like they didn’t belong.

 

I nearly forgot one other thing… Her Story and Her Voice were two names I considered and I remember doing a little test with GoDaddy wondering what it would cost to do HerVoice.com; on a whim I decided to see what HisVoice.com and HisStory.com might cost — it was over double the female version! It was so funny, like, yeah, this is exactly the problem, illustrated — for one third of the price, you can get her story or her voice or whatever it was and for three times that amount, you can get the male version.

 

6] How important is a business name according to you?

 

It’s very important… I was thinking, if I go and stand on a stage, I want to be able to say a name that has gravitas, that has staying power, that’s memorable, that doesn’t feel embarrassing, that’s not going to make me blush. A name that I can say over and over and over again and be proud of that it’s strong.

 

Having said that, there are lots of products with really bizarre names that elicit a “wait, what was that?” response. And there is always a certain point, if a company, business, brand or whatever does well, where the product outruns the name. You just get comfortable with whatever it is, like, “oh, that’s just what it’s called”, but you don’t really think about the name because you are thinking about the product itself. The product itself can be so strong that it supercedes the name, to the point that even a bad name becomes actually quite good… or at least OK.

 

7] What one thing do you wish people were aware of about your area of expertise/industry? 

 

Journalism is really expensive.

 

Sure, everyone should have access to quality journalism, that’s the right thing to do. But the reality is that it is so costly to produce. At the same time most of us are habituated to not paying for journalism. Especially nowadays, because we have access to so many tools, there is a feeling that anyone can write or produce content—that it takes one second to swing it into a template and press send, but that is absolutely not the truth. Our work is not AI produced and it doesn’t take 10 seconds.

 

Our stories at The Persistent are thought pieces but it’s even more profound with big pieces or investigations that, say, The New York Times or FT might be doing; pieces that require multiple interviews, traveling to certain places, getting people to trust you, getting even to a level where you can even begin to ask the first question of what the story might be, which is just the foundation. And doing all of this kind of work without any guarantee at the end that there would even be a story — one you can fact check, cross check, hold up and publish.

 

A piece that might take one of our readers four minutes to read could be hours — if not weeks or even months — in the making. The amount of care and effort that goes into every word on that page is astounding — there’s reporting, interviews, research, fact-checking… the piece is assigned, then it comes in, and it’s shredded, taken apart, rewritten, back to the editor, back to the writer. It gets put back together and sent to the editor again. Then we get a second pair of eyes on it. Then we’re working with an illustrator or photographer. All of this is hard work, and I think people don’t realize it.

 

People consume really fast. There’s so much out there that’s *rubbish* that the idea that “this is really worth something” is just lost on people. We pay for everything else… coffee, heating, housing, clothing, food, dinners out … yet journalism is this holdout where people hesitate to pay. It’s consumed and discarded as if it has no value, and that is such a shame.

 

My message is — pay for what matters, pay for what you want to see exist in this world. Because if you don’t, it will go away.

 

8] Question for funsies! Fill in the blank: Whatever you do, don’t _____ 

 

Don’t… avoid the hard conversation.

 

Always have the hard conversation face-to-face — even when there’s bad news, even when it’s not what they want to hear. That conversation in the short term may be uncomfortable, but it is better for everyone in the long run. It’s so awful when people avoid and run away. Grow up.