User:Tash/grad interviews

Interview 01: Devi Asmarani

Date: 16-10-2018 Format: Skype interview

Devi Asmarani is the editor in chief of Magdalene, one of the first progressive feminist online magazines in Indonesia. Devi's practice as a journalist is relevant to my research because she works in the alternative publishing sector, using online & social media platforms to reach her predominantly urban audience.

In their own words: "We channel the voices of feminists, pluralists and progressives, or just those who are not afraid to be different, regardless of their genders, colors, or sexual preferences. We aim to engage, not alienate."

---

N: Natasha Berting (me)
D: Devi Asmarani

N: Tell me a little bit about how Magdalene started.

D: We started in 2013. It was co-founded by me and a couple of journalist friends. We all came from a mainstream journalistic background, mainly news. I used to work for the Jakarta Post, for the Straits times, for many years – a total of fourteen years.

When I quit journalism, it was because I was tired – not of doing the news, but I was tired of the fact that it didn’t seem as if the things I was writing was making any impact. I was covering Indonesian news, so a lot of corruption cases, a lot of political stories. But nothing ever changed, it was just business as usual. So I quit.

A few years later my friend Hera and I, who was also a freelancing at the time, started talking about returning to journalism, but this time we wanted to do something different. So that’s how we pretty much started Magdalene. We decided that it should be a women-focused publication, and that it should be substantive. So we are not going to cover the things that the usual women-focused publications do. We are going to be issue-based, hard-hitting and progressive. And we are not going to be shy of issues that are considered taboo. So that’s how we started.

So when we first came out, in September 2013, people were pretty shocked by our content. We talked freely about things that are not covered in the usual, not just women’s publications, but mainstream publications. We covered LGBT issues. We covered issues like menstruation very frankly… sex, religion. You know, and [we talked about] all of the norms [in Indonesian society] that have been taken for granted but that have created a lot of restrictions for women, impacting women’s lives.

That’s where we started. It’s been five years now. We are very small, and everything’s been mainly self-funded. Since last year, we have had a little bit of income, but we survive mainly because we don’t have an office yet and are still working remotely. We have a small team. But we’re going to receive some grants and investments soon so hopefully we can keep growing.

N: Would you say that when you started, yours was one of the first publications of this kind in Indonesia?

D: Yes, I would definitely say so. I didn’t see any platform that was similar to ours until a few years after we came out. And even then, they didn’t really catch up. There was one or two that came out, and then disappeared. I think it’s partly because as alternative media organisations, we require – in one way or another – endurance, and journalistic capacity. And the platforms which came after us often didn’t have that journalistic background. And probably, just like us, they had their own day jobs to take care of. So it takes some sacrifice.

N: How has being online helped you when it comes to endurance? I see for example that Magdalene now has a podcast series. Can you talk a bit about that?

D: The reason we started that is a bit personal, because Hera and I love podcasts. We think it’s a different way of telling stories, a different way of getting your perspective out there. And it’s very personal in a way, because most people listen to podcasts alone in their car, or with their headphones… You don’t usually listen with others. So I think it’s very effective in getting your message across. And our podcasts are mostly interviews.

N: And how do you use social media?

D: Well social media is the main channel through which we distribute our content. Within the first year of our existence, we decided to hire someone to do social media exclusively. This showed that we really saw social media as an important tool to get our content out there; because people no longer go to a website on their own these days, they are always being pushed content through social media.

And also social media is a way to engage our readers. We can gauge their interest in us, through whether they share our content, and how they comment on it. So we can gauge our readers’ interests and passion in an issue through social media. Also, we can get to know them. Sometimes I see somebody who comments on our stories, and I’ll go click on their profile, just to see, who is this person? Why is this person saying this?

N: The immediacy of social media is definitely interesting. Have there also been challenges when it comes to using social media? How do you handle discussions that turn sour?

D: Yeah, of course, that happens. But it’s not so bad. We don’t have as many haters as we would think. Maybe that’s because we’re still quite small. I mean on Twitter we have something like 24.000 followers, and on Facebook not as many. We’ve been doing it very organically, we don’t spend money on ads or promotion. So a lot of the time we really rely on celebrity endorsement. Some actor or comedian will start following us and tweeting our posts and within days we’ll get thousands of new followers, from outside our traditional base of readers. So that’s very interesting.

In a sense, I think that this slow, organic growth is the reason why we don’t have so many haters yet. I think once we really get out there, once we have an investor and really expand, that’ll be a different story.

But you know what, I’m also very pleased that a lot of our content gets people to talk. It doesn’t always have to be positive, or praises. We get a lot of criticism on our stories on religion, for example. Surprisingly, one of our most negatively commented stories that have gone viral, is a story about Agnez Monica. She’s one of the most famous people in Indonesia, and she has this ambition to go international. And we did a critical story on her, basically looking at how she uses orientalism to do that. And there were a lot of people who hated that story, who said that we didn’t do her justice.

And I think it shows that our negative commenters don’t just come from where we would assume they would (people from the right, maybe religious or conservative people). We also get criticism from the left, from the extreme left, or even from the LGBT community, as was in the case of Agnez Monica. Many of her fans came from the LGBT community. But I think this is great. I really don’t see this as an obstacle to our mission as an organisation.

N: Yeah, and from my research so far it definitely feels like the question is not whether social media itself is good or bad, it’s about what discussions are being had under the post.

D: Yeah. We had this thing recently, a Tweet-talk, where we invite people to ask questions about an issue. The first one was on sex toys, and it was quite a success, because there are not that many platforms in the Indonesian context who would cover this issue. And we had somebody who was very knowledgeable and insightful on this issue to talk about it. So we also use social media to really engage our audience. Bringing them issues that they would usually not be able to engage actively or interactively with.

N: Is there one issue that you think is most difficult to talk about right now?

D: I don’t think so… At Magdalene we are quite happy to talk about anything. The more controversial the better. What I do find hard, or something that personally, I’m becoming more restrictive of myself, and more reluctant to talk about, are issues that divide feminists. It’s within the movement itself that I see a lot of friction. And often these are based on some fundamental differences, which I think should not be a challenge to working together and bringing positive impact to society at large… but I think there’s still a lot of this stuff that is not being resolved withint the movement. And it’s kind of giving a bad name to the movement. People say things like that feminists are fighting amongst themselves. That’s not good.

So when we are covering issues like that, sometimes we need to think twice. One example is when we covered the badminton player Jojo at the Asian Games, the guy who took his shirt off during a game and got all the women in Indonesia all ‘hot and bothered’… [Magdalene challenged the way Indonesian media objectified Jojo, instead of focusing on his sporting achievements] So we had opinions from both sides on that case. And we like that, but of course, on social media there are people who just cannot see beyond a difference in opinion. And I don’t think that helps.

N: I agree. I think it’s really hard on these big platforms, you see that people are just passing each other by in the comment section, and sort of yelling into the void. They’re not actually talking to each other. That’s something that I wish I could change about social media. I wish there was a platform that was designed to do that better.

D: It’s tough. But yeah, maybe some day!

N: Maybe as a last question, could you talk a bit about the state of politics and censorship in general in Indonesia? How do you see the media landscape now? Do you see it opening up in the near future? Or is it something you worry about?

D: Well I entered journalism in 1996. So to me that was the heyday of journalism in Indonesia. It was a time that was very turbulent, but also very hopeful. It was a transformative period. And as a journalist I learnt a lot, and I saw how media and journalism can really impact society. And I can say this because I grew up under Soeharto, where the media was basically just doing what was dictated. And if they so much as strayed from what the government wanted them to be, it was the end for them. I saw many media organisations being banned by the Soeharto regime. So the end of the 90s, twenty years ago, it was such a wonderful time – it was the Reformation Era.

But I think slowly it has been going downhill in terms of freedom of the press, and freedom of expression. And it’s not so much because of government intervention, or an increasingly restrictive government, it’s more to do with identity politics and also with the creeping conservatism in the country. I have seen clearly that this society has become so much more conservative in the last ten years. This influence can be felt everywhere. In education, in bureaucracy, in politics of course (although here a lot of it is very opportunistic). But basically it’s everywhere, and you can see this in the way religion is being practiced, in the talk and the discourse on religion. And social and digital media contributes to this. On the one hand it really spreads information fast and indiscriminately, and on the other hand it really groups people and lets people exist within their own echo chambers.

I think all of this affects freedom of press a lot. What happens is, I think a lot of the time the media censor themselves – they’re engaging in self-censorship – in order to prevent being accused of things like insulting religion, or any other thing that people often use to attack others.

And I think these conservative values have also creeped into some of the media organisations. I’m not saying all, but some are getting there. I know for a fact that some news rooms, the leadership in the news rooms have adopted a more conservative stance, and it shows in the way they cover and frame the news.

But there’s also a commercial aspect to it. Nowadays there are hundreds of digital media organisations in Indonesia. And this doesn’t always bring better quality content. One of the reasons is that they are all owned by just a few media companies. I think most of them are owned by the same 13 media groups. So of course they are dictated; they don’t have a lot of freedoms in terms of the content. A lot of the owners are also politicians or political players. But they also have these high demands; they cannot really stray from this path that has been created by the likes of detik.com – this low quality content, that is assumed to be what the Indonesian readers want out of their digital media. So there are not that many publications who can step out of that, and say: ‘we don’t care about being the fastest or giving the most, but we care about giving the best’. I still see some like that, like Tirto ID, Katadata, and a few more. They’re out there creating content that is not necessarily always popular, but at least they are thoughtful.

So if you ask me how things are going [for Indonesian journalism], it’s not really that great at the moment. There’s the society aspect, the conservatism, there’s the political factor, and then there’s the commercial factor. I’m sure it’s gonna get better again, but I think right now, the Indonesian readers are not being served the best for their own good, basically.