{"id":11519,"date":"2016-04-12T06:41:01","date_gmt":"2016-04-12T12:41:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=11519"},"modified":"2016-04-12T08:11:22","modified_gmt":"2016-04-12T14:11:22","slug":"kat-hobza-revives-cheeky-sistah-moves-it-online","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2016\/04\/kat-hobza-revives-cheeky-sistah-moves-it-online\/","title":{"rendered":"Kat Hobza revives cheeky ‘Sistah,’ moves it online"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Kat\"<\/a>

Kat Hobza, publisher of the original Sistah, a print publication in Billings, and now of the online Sistah Diaries.<\/p><\/div>\n

Kat Hobza\u2014and her very funny \u201cSistah\u201d\u2014is back.<\/p>\n

A lot of people in Billings will remember the original Sistah, a tabloid newspaper published every two weeks between 2003 and 2008. It was a cheeky, profane, in-your-face-funny publication aimed at women but appreciated by men of good sense as well.<\/p>\n

Hobza, now living in Missoula, recently launched Sistah Diaries<\/a>, an online version of her publication, the tagline for which is: \u201cSistah Diaries will not make you skinnier, or prettier, or a better mom, or a better wife, or a better employee. It\u2019s about finding humor in chaos.\u201d<\/p>\n

In an email interview, here\u2019s how Hobza described coming up with the idea for the original Sistah:<\/p>\n

\u201cOne day when I had writer\u2019s block, I started flipping through a Maxim that my then-husband had left on the counter. It was full of beer reviews, video games, women in schoolgirl skirts and stories about dudes who ate tarantulas.<\/p>\n

\u201cMindlessly, I shifted to a Good Housekeeping that sat right next to it. There I found 823 ways to make a chicken breast and 219 ways to clean a tub. Like a bolt of lightning, it struck me. Men\u2019s publications were all about entertainment and what made them happy\u2014women\u2019s were mostly about obligation. I saw a huge opportunity to provide women with entertaining, guilt-free, obligation-free content.\u201d<\/p>\n

And she did, issue after issue for five years. Hobza wrote a lot of Sistah herself, but she also built up a stable of writers who got into the groove of their editor\u2019s let-it-all-hang-out humor and fearless commentary.<\/p>\n

You get a pretty good idea of Sistah Diaries\u2019 attitude and outlook just by glancing at the categories on its navigation bar: \u201cI Shaved My Legs for This?,\u201d \u201cFlop Culture,\u201d \u201cGet Out,\u201d \u201cI Do,\u201d \u201cI Don\u2019t,\u201d Stretch Marks\u201d and \u201cSinterest.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s how Hobza began a recent collection of musings on Easter: \u201cBefore anyone gets their Easter bloomers in a knot, I\u2019m pro-Jesus. He\u2019s my favorite guy in the Bible \u2026 all that forgiveness and love-all-people business. We could use a few more folks like that in the world. That said, I\u2019m not a terribly religious person, and Easter has always made me scratch my head a little. Here\u2019s why\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>And here she is in a primer on golf terminology, \u201cas defined by a princess golfer\u201d:<\/p>\n

\u201cShaft<\/strong> : Let me clue you in on a little secret. There is more innuendo in golf than you can shake a shaft at, and it\u2019s really at least half the fun. The shaft is the long part of the golf club. Do your best when you\u2019re golfing to not laugh out loud when the guy you\u2019re with starts yammering about how his shaft is too stiff or has too much flex in it.\u201d<\/p>\n

After ceasing publication of the original Sistah, Hobza said, \u201cI went through a divorce and didn\u2019t have anything funny to say for a while.\u201d But then she moved to Missoula four years ago and \u201cfound my funny again.\u201d<\/p>\n

Besides taking Sistah online, she is running a consulting firm for web and social media content and is a part-time \u201cbeer wench\u201d at a Missoula brewery. \u201cI love everything Missoula has to offer in the way of fly-fishing, golf, hiking, playing in the river bottom and of course, beer,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

When she was getting ready to publish Sistah, Hobza said, she ran around Billings with \u201cthis half-assed mock-up\u201d and managed to find a lot of businesses willing to advertise, people who believed in what she was doing.<\/p>\n

She wants to find financial support for Sistah Diaries, too, but she is considering sponsorships as opposed to ads, \u201csimply because I want to focus my energy on the voice and content of Sistah Diaries. Right now, when I\u2019m not generating or formatting content, I spend most of my time shamelessly asking my friends to have their friends like Sistah Diaries to help grow my audience. It helps that Sistah already had an audience, and those readers are migrating to Sistah Diaries, but I still have my work cut out for me.”<\/p>\n

Hobza is also fortunate in having what she calls some \u201cincredibly funny, bright folks\u201d who are willing to provide content. They include a lawyer in Louisiana, a linguist-teacher in Los Angeles, a mother of twins in Portland, an engineer in San Francisco and several local contributors.<\/p>\n

\u201cRight now they write for free, which I hate,\u201d Hobza said. \u201cI\u2019ve been a professional writer for 15 years, and stopped writing for free a long time ago\u2014so it bugs me that I have to ask others to do that.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut these awesome folks are in it for the fun, and hopefully I get Sistah Diaries to a place sooner rather than later where I can compensate my contributors.\u201d<\/p>\n

Details<\/strong>: You can also check out Sistah Diaries on Facebook<\/a> (\u201clikes\u201d most welcome) and Twitter<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kat Hobza\u2014and her very funny \u201cSistah\u201d\u2014is back. A lot of people in Billings will remember the original Sistah, a tabloid newspaper published every two weeks between 2003 and 2008. It was a cheeky, profane, in-your-face-funny publication aimed at women but appreciated by men of good sense as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11520,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[4179,4175,4178,4176,4177],"class_list":["post-11519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","tag-good-housekeeping","tag-kat-hobza","tag-maxim","tag-sistah","tag-sistah-diaries","prominence-category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11519"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11519\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}