Representation matters: a shared vision of belonging in entertainment
How our Aotearoa New Zealand-based startup, Narrative Muse, is working to build connections between under-served audiences and the screen and publishing sectors.
Stories matter. Who we are and how we feel about ourselves is directly connected with the media around us. If we don’t see ourselves reflected, do we matter?
I’m Brough Johnson and I want to introduce you to Narrative Muse, a vision born out of creating more representation and belonging in entertainment. We’re a purpose-led startup made in Aotearoa New Zealand.
We help people discover books, movies, and TV by or about intersectional women and gender-diverse folks. We do this through a growing community of curators who read books and watch movies and TV shows. Through their recommendations, we match people who use our platform with stories that reflect them.
In time, we aim to be the connection between local storytellers and their audiences as both a discoverability portal as well as an insights provider of what underrepresented audiences are seeking.
I want to take a moment to help those who are curious about us to understand more about who we are, what we do, and our plans for the future.
At the intersection — helping communities know they matter
My biggest motivation in co-creating Narrative Muse was the desire to support audiences from underrepresented communities to know that they’re important.
I’m a woman from the rainbow community. Finding stories where I see and read about myself as a central character are rare. And when I do find these stories, they feel like a gift. They feel like someone has reached out and said, “you’re important. Your love is important. Your identity is important.”
Helping other women and gender-diverse people have this life-changing experience is why I put one foot in front of the other to see Narrative Muse achieve its vision.
We describe our core audience as “those seeking stories by or about intersectional women and gender-diverse people.” The word ‘intersectional’ refers to the ways that gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and many other characteristics overlap and intersect with each other to create unique experiences of inequity and marginalisation.
There are so many layers to this — for people as individuals and on a societal level. In the context of storytelling and media, it’s overwhelmingly common for people at the intersection of marginalisation to struggle to find books, movies, and TV shows that reflect their lives. The intersection that Narrative Muse focuses on is the junction of gender and all the other social identities that make stories special and human.
The solution isn’t straightforward
While our vision is simple, the means to achieve it are much harder.
In order to connect underrepresented audiences with stories that reflect them, there must also be a full spectrum of book, movie, and TV content to meet their taste and identity. There is still a lack of stories to recommend to our audiences.
To be successful in our vision, we have to do two things: help audiences discover stories that reflect them and help support the creation of these stories.
Early musings — the beginning of our story
Narrative Muse began as a humble review site with writers talking about books and movies that they loved.
We are based in Aotearoa New Zealand and our community slowly became a global one. This happened organically, as our writers and curators suggested others join. Because of our global community, our reviews became global too.
The ability to offer geo-targeted recommendations was in our distant future — a massive job — so we needed a solution to connect people with books and movies that were available around the world. We settled on international providers such as Amazon, iTunes, Book Depository, and Netflix.
When we launched our review site, we appreciated that we hadn’t created anything particularly innovative to help achieve our vision.
The aim was to help readers and watchers find content based on their taste, identity, and how they wanted to feel. We also wanted to make sure they weren’t subjected to content that they didn’t want to read or watch such as homophobia, racism, harm to children, or violence. Creating a recommendation tool that could do this, where Goodreads, Netflix, and others don’t, became our next challenge.
The depth of that challenge became clearer when we realised that the data we needed to create this tool isn’t available. Not only is it not available to us, it’s not publicly available to those who produce and distribute content such as literary and screen sector professionals either.
The challenge and the opportunity — what makes stories speak to us
We now had to find a way to collect in-depth information that can’t easily be found about each book, movie, and TV show in order to match them with our audiences.
The penny dropped when we realised that if we could identify the key qualities in stories that are needed to provide great recommendations on our platform, we’d also know what content our diverse audiences desired most. If we knew that, we could support the screen and publishing sector to know this too and help drive supply.
So, we expanded our focus to leveraging technology to understand what diverse audiences are seeking.
Value for Aotearoa industry through insights
We know that when stories are produced and made available to underserved watchers and readers, these audiences show up in force. And this brings revenue to the local creative sector.
Examples include the first Māori transgender drama series, Rūrangi, a women-driven Pacific comedy series, SIS, and the published collection of whakataukī and personal reflections by Hinemoa Elder, Aroha.
The audience demand for Rūrangi was so great that it performed incredibly well locally, and was also sold to Hulu in the US this year. SIS was released on Comedy Central to New Zealand and Australian audiences and was green-lit for a second season within months. Aroha has been on the bestseller charts month after month.
Through data insights, we’re seeking to help drive the creation of this kind of content that goes beyond the mainstream. We’d like to do this in partnership with storytellers to identify how the use of insights could support audience growth.
Funding the Narrative Muse vision
Finding backers for our ambition has taken a huge effort. We required funding from those who saw the potential in our future vision and sought to enable us to build the structures we need to support that vision.
Those who have backed us are people who have the shared mission to generate social equity through innovation and the arts. They include Callaghan Innovation, Manatū Taonga Ministry for Culture and Heritage, Te Pae ki te Rangi, AngelHQ, ArcAngels, Flying Kiwi Angels, Theresa Gattung, Elizabeth Aitken, Robert Morgan, and Te Taurapa Tūhono New Zealand Trade and Enterprise.
Like many, we participated in a process to apply for Te Tahua Āki Auahatanga Innovation Fund. As a company that combines arts and innovation, our application was successful and we received a grant from Manatū Taonga Ministry for Culture and Heritage.
This grant, along with our co-funding, means that we will be able to focus our efforts in Aotearoa and under-served communities here for the benefit of both local audiences and industry.
Looking ahead — what happens next
There’s a huge opportunity to truly know what our audiences are craving and to more deeply understand how we can improve equity on screens and bookshelves.
With recent funding, Narrative Muse is seeding its vision. Our top three strategies are Growing Partnership, Growing User Engagement, and Growing Content.
Growing Partnership is the way we aim to address inequities in the industry. It relies on Growing User Engagement with our user base, importantly in the communities of Aotearoa who we aim to serve. We can’t do this without Growing Content that is representative of those communities.
For Growing Partnership, we will work with local communities. These include local audiences and content producers, focusing on Māori, Pasifika, Asian, and Rainbow women, and gender-diverse communities. It’s important for us to work collaboratively to understand each community’s needs in order to connect audiences with the screen and publishing industries. This partnership will be the foundation of the audience insights that could prove so valuable to our local publishing and screen industries, and ultimately the audiences themselves, as more stories will reflect them.
For Growing User Engagement, we’re working hard to improve the user experience of our platform for local audiences. We are also looking at growing our engagement with global audiences to help connect Aotearoa content with the world.
For Growing Content, we’ll seek out Aotearoa-based stories to significantly increase the number of local books, movies, and TV on our audience platform. We’ll direct local audiences to local content distributors, sellers, and platforms. Equally, we look forward to helping local storytellers expand their visibility to the world.
It takes the collective work of many to create a world that we all want to see. We’re excited to take on the mission of building and strengthening connections between Aotearoa under-served audiences and content producers for mutually beneficial and positive outcomes.
Our Narrative Muse team and I are looking forward to working with our local communities, and screen and publishing sectors to build the understanding of diverse audience needs and preferences, and supporting the sector to thrive.
Representation matters; our stories matter. I invite you to reach out if you would like to learn more or join us in this work. hello@narrativemuse.co.
ABOUT BROUGH JOHNSON
I’m a co-founder of Narrative Muse along with Teresa Bass. We live and work in Aotearoa New Zealand, along with most of our small team and many of our contributors. Our community of collective hands, hearts, and minds work together with the vision of representation and belonging in entertainment.
