About
Mainline is an independent, women-led media and cultural organization founded in Atlanta in 2019. What began as a local magazine has grown into a broader home for journalism, music, education, events, and creative production.
Our editorial work covers news, politics, activism, culture, and music in Atlanta and across the South. Mainline was created to help restore the spirit of the alternative press: locally rooted, community-supported journalism that challenges entrenched power, rejects false neutrality, and takes working-class and marginalized people seriously as sources, audiences, and participants in the media.
Our approach is informed by the history of abolitionist, labor, and movement media. We believe journalism can document what is happening while also helping people understand the systems shaping their lives. Our archive includes reporting, essays, interviews, podcasts, cultural criticism, community resources, and media produced in collaboration with organizers, artists, writers, photographers, and other independent workers.
Mainline has since expanded beyond the traditional magazine model. Our work also includes Mainline Music Fest, Mainline Records, live events, podcasts, films and video projects, media education, and other collaborations connecting journalism with Atlanta’s independent creative community.
Mainline is sustained by its members and community. That support helps fund our writers, artists, reporting, events, educational work, and continued growth without separating the work from the people it is meant to serve.
Mainline Records
Mainline Records is our independent record label and music platform, growing out of years spent covering, documenting, and producing events within Atlanta’s music community.
Our vision is to collaborate with artists to develop and release new music, invest in the time and resources they need to experiment, and create compilations that tell stories about the people and communities behind the songs. Our first release, Mainline Mix 1, brought together existing songs by Atlanta artists in a compilation capturing the community organizing, systemic repression, and grief surrounding the Stop Cop City movement.
All Mainline Records releases are available on Bandcamp.
Members of the Mainline Records Club on Patreon receive new music along with behind-the-scenes access to label projects, works in progress, and the process of building the label.
Join the Mainline Records Club on Patreon
Follow @mainlinerecords_ on Instagram for releases, artist news, and the more playful side of Atlanta music. For demos and music-related press materials, email mainlinerecords@pm.me.
Mainline Media Lab
The Mainline Media Lab is our education and training program for journalists, organizers, artists, and community members who want practical tools for telling stories and building independent media. Grounded in abolitionist and movement-media traditions, the Lab offers workshops, recorded trainings, and collaborative learning on reporting, media strategy, narrative power, communications ethics, pitching, interviewing, and working with sources.
The goal is to make media skills more accessible while strengthening the relationship between the people documenting movements and the communities doing the work.
Media Lab workshops, recordings, resources, and registration information are available through Mainline’s Patreon on a sliding-scale membership system, allowing participants to select the Media Lab tier they can afford.
Join the Mainline Media Lab on Patreon
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As of August 2026, this website is preserved as an archive and is no longer regularly updated. New articles, newsletters, podcasts, announcements, and member content are published through Patreon.
Follow or become a Mainline member on Patreon
For current events, Mainline Music Fest updates, and announcements, follow @mainlinepresents on Instagram. For releases, artist news, and the more playful side of Atlanta music, follow @mainlinerecords_.
INDIGENOUS LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Land acknowledgment
Mainline was founded in so-called Atlanta on the ancestral homelands of the Muscogee (Creek) people, who lived, worked, produced knowledge, and cared for this land long before the city existed. In the 19th century, the Muscogee were forced to relinquish their lands in Georgia and were later subjected to forced removal. We also recognize the dispossession and removal of Cherokee people and other Indigenous nations throughout Georgia and the Southeast.
These nations and their people are not confined to the past. The Muscogee Nation remains a living, sovereign nation headquartered in Okmulgee, Oklahoma, with citizens and communities throughout the United States.
Although Mainline began in Atlanta, our work now reaches across the homelands of many distinct Indigenous peoples. We offer this acknowledgment as an expression of continued responsibility; not as a substitute for learning from, crediting, and materially supporting Indigenous people and communities, or for unlearning the colonial beliefs and systems that enabled their forced removal and genocide.
Learn more directly from the Muscogee Nation.
