How honest feminism is reshaping news one startup at a time
Across the Asia-Pacific, new media like Magdalene in Indonesia, SheThePeople.TV in India and Villainesse in New Zealand are speaking the language of popular feminism to shape conversations around gender, putting women out front as a constituency that matters. In this first of two parts on Asia’s feminist news media, Laxmi Murthy and Jacqui Park talk to some founders to see what drives them.
There’s a gap between traditional “lifestyle” takes in traditional media on one side and often dense academic feminism on the other. Now, around the Asia-Pacific, journalists are charging through that gap, building popular feminist news sites that centre women, telling stories by and about women by putting connectivity, accessibility and networking at the core.
Take Indonesia’s Magdalene: “We don’t want to create echo chambers, but want to popularise feminism,” says Devi Asmarani, editor-in-chief of Indonesia’s only digital women-centered publication. Or look at India, where SheThePeople.TV founder Shaili Chopra decided to show that women in India are a universe, not a digital category tab. Or in New Zealand, where Lizzie Marvelly wanted to create a safe platform for young women (particularly from marginalised groups) to talk about the issues that matter to them.
Even now, the “feminist” tag can make some (particularly corporates) uncomfortable. But it’s honesty works strategically with its target of (usually young) urban women. Perhaps surprisingly, it also draws millenial men.
The founders of these emerging feminist models usually bring writing and production skills from a journalist or writing background, although often frustrated with the constraints of old media. This frustration is channeled to fill the gap with innovative media offerings.
Magdalene’s founders, Devi Asmarani and Hera Diani were colleagues at the Jakarta Post. In 2013, when they set out to “offer fresh perspectives beyond typical gender and cultural confines’’ through their bi-lingual website, neither had a background in business or fund-raising.
Driven by the urge to focus on women-centered stories that were not about lifestyle, fashion and beauty, or full of dense academic feminist writing, they set up Magdalene to “support diversity and empower minds”.
In India, it was the tab “women” on websites that got business journalist Shaili Chopra’s goat — and thinking about the potential audience for a digital women-focussed network.
“The centerpiece in media for me today is: Who is your community? What does your community stand for and how does your community benefit? In my case, I started out with passion,” she says.
Annoyed at women being treated as a single category type in digital platforms, she decided to show that women in India are a universe, with multiple interests and do different things. The women’s channel aims to create a space for women to give voice to their experiences in daily life, for everything from periods to politics, with a feminist slant.
Getting started
The Asia-Pacific’s feminist start-ups usually rely as much on the money as the passion of their founders. They rely on friends, corporate contacts, grants — and personal investment.
Devi and Hera initially invested their own money and time, sallying forth after they had built up a bank of stories, written by their friends and colleagues. They put back all the revenue to paying interns and illustrators, working overtime at their own freelance careers to be able to finance Magdalene.
They are cautious about advertising, refusing to accept sponsorships from tobacco companies or cosmetic companies that manufacture ‘whitening’ creams. Advertising remains sporadic but their business unit, Working Room, that provides paid services — communication, writing, producing videos — has been a steady source of support.
For Magdalene, it was only in 2019 that a small grant came in to rent an office and pay salaries to allow them to scale up to a level of being “investable”. Another donor grant ‘Investing in Women’ allowed them to create a program called ‘Women Lead’ to showcase their capacity and ability. Other avenues to partner with potential sponsors who align with their goals of women’s rights are gradually opening up.
SheThePeople.TV got off the block in 2015 with an investment from Anand Mahindra, one of India’s industrialists vocal about feminist issues.
When Shaili quit television at the peak of her broadcast career, what she did next mattered: “When you have to do something really noisy and big that can be transformational for women you have to do it this way. There are 1.4 billion people in India — 720 million women, three times the size of the US, eight times the size of Japan. How can ‘We the people of India’ [in the Preamble to the Constitution of India] be successful if you don’t include ‘she the people’.” The name was born.
“I wanted advertisers and CEOs to look at women as a market. To advertise for women because it had a financial upside,” she says. “Enough self-pity, enough lip service about doing this or that in the name of gender equality.”
Though SheThePeople.TV is deliberately positioned as “for profit”, it’s not just about the money. Advertisers too are scrutinised. When popular fairness cream brand Fair and Lovely changed its name to Glow and Lovely, Shaili still refused to accept their advertising. “At the end of the day, what is the company ultimately going to do for women? Will women become financially independent? So we’ll work with banks or mutual funds,” she says. To supplement advertising, they generate programmatic revenue, or domain sharing, ticketed events and sale of merchandise and are also working on creating a paywall for some of their content.
The pandemic has affected SheThePeople’s live events such as the annual Women Writers Festival, in smaller cities, and the Digital Women’s Awards for entrepreneurs which also went online. The main aim is to connect with women, build a space for conversations and also create communities. And women are, Shaili says, embracing the digital formats just as much. Many even as willing to pay to enter these specific events at SheThePeople.TV
In Auckland, Lizzy Marvelly leveraged her reputation as a performer and writer for New Zealand’s media to bootstrap Villainesse as a website for young women. “I had a real interest in young women and in media, having been on the other side of the media for so long, being written about and talked about,” she says. “That gave me real insights into how young women were treated by media — how they were belittled, patronised, told what to buy.
“Having grown up in that environment and being part of the tabloid media I had some real concerns about the media landscape particularly relating to young women.
Already vocal on social media, Marvelly recognised a need for a platform for young women. “I just decided that the problems I saw in media weren’t going to solve themselves, so that drove me to create a platform where young women’s voices were being heard.”
With the fearlessness of a 25-year-old woman, in 2015, Marvelly invested her own money, found writers and grew from there. Over time, Villainesse shifted from a model of free contributions to have a group of regular paid contributors.
She won support from government agencies for “Real Talk” series on issues like drugs and sex and received funding through the country’s New Zealand OnAir program.
The big takeaway? The magic key for the emerging feminist start-up ecosystem is to be fiercely protective of core values while ensuring you have the business smarts on the team and are everaging networks to create a sustainable business model.
Laxmi Murthy is a journalist and writer based in Bangalore.
Jacqui Park works on network strategy and innovation for IPI and is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Media Transition at the University of Technology, Sydney.
Together they write The Story.
You can read the second part of this series on feminist media in Asia here.
