Hear more about Out in STL on The 314 Podcast.
With the Riverfront Times no longer covering local news and KDHX no longer live broadcasting, it’s been a rough year for independent media in St. Louis—but one outlet is now in good hands. Chris Andoe, the longtime editor in chief of Out in STL, tells SLM he has purchased the eight-year-old magazine from owner Chris Keating. The price: $1.
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Says Andoe, “This is a community asset, and there was always a fear that maybe it could go away, and I think this is going to encourage people to invest more in it. I’m really, really happy about rebuilding our roster and getting this back where it should be.”
Keating agrees, saying Andoe is the right person to shepherd the publication to a new era. “I told him, whatever I could do to help, I would,” he says. “At the end of the day, this is his baby.”
Andoe is now recruiting a board of directors and hopes to get the publication back in print as well as beefing up its website. Originally launched by the Riverfront Times as a quarterly, Out in STL‘s print cadence had dropped in recent years, to the point that it published only one print issue in 2023 and one in 2024.
The 2024 issue, which hit the streets last June, proved especially complicated, Andoe recalls. The RFT staff had signed on to some of the writing, but in May, Keating sold the RFT to an undisclosed buyer who didn’t retain any of the staff. (Keating told SLM last fall that he regrets the sale.) Andoe still managed to complete the issue.
“That was one of my proudest achievements,” Andoe says. “In the middle of all of that turmoil and the collapse of RFT, we were still able to put out a print product.”
In full disclosure, I hired Andoe as the publication’s first editor in chief in 2017, just in time for its second issue (the first had been published with an interim editor). A writer for the Vital Voice for a decade and published author, he had his finger on the pulse of the area’s LGBTQ community and a vision for what the magazine should cover.
And he did it in his off hours. By necessity, he kept his day job in multi-family real estate; during his years working on Out in STL, he was paid on a freelance basis, as were the publication’s writers. He ran the magazine until 2019, then returned for a second stint as editor in chief from 2022 to the present. (He has also been a contributor to St. Louis Magazine.)
But after the 2024 print issue, Andoe says his arrangement with Keating shifted.
“Basically, I just kept working for free,” he says of the online stories he published. “I just worked to keep it alive. And after confirming with [Keating] that he had no plans to get rid of it, I just kept it going.”
Andoe says he reached out to Keating about a week ago to make sure he was on board for Out in STL taking on a “decidedly antagonistic role” towards the Trump administration. If not, he suggested, they could discuss spinning it off. Instead, Keating suggested they meet for a drink—and then offered to hand over the publication and its assets for $1.
“When Out launched, it was just all about fun pieces, and the climate is totally different now,” Andoe says. “We really need to be an authentic voice.”
As owner of Big Lou Holdings, Keating continues to own alt-weeklies in Louisville, Detroit, and Cincinnati. Locally, he continues to publish Sauce Magazine, which laid off a number of staffers last fall but has resumed monthly print issues.
