We sat down to cake shortly after the go-live button was pressed on Women’s Agenda a year ago. A beautiful dessert was ordered in and we cracked open a couple of bottles of champagne; French if my memory serves me correctly.
There is nothing quite so wonderful as seeing your idea become reality. I will be eternally grateful to Eric Beecher and Private Media for launching this baby, and to editor Angela Priestley, producer Jordi Roth, senior designer Jemma McMahon, and the operations and developments teams back of house, for the perfect execution.
There are many ways to launch a new idea and my experience of taking it to an established publisher is just one of them. The upside to this approach is the access to resources you wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford for many years if you went it alone.
On Wednesday I was a Future Funding panelist at the Walkley Foundations Storyology conference in Sydney. Sitting next to me on the lounge were Mumbrella’s Tim Burrowes, Steve Gan of Malaysiakini and Noah Rosenberg of Narrative.ly. Our moderator was James Kirby from The Eureka Report. While the main focus of our discussion was on the different methods that publishers are using to fund the media they produce, there seemed to be keen interest from the audience in what it costs to launch an idea in the first place.
Everyone’s experience was different. Noah raised US$54,000 using Kickstarter to get his idea for a site devoted to long-form, local, human-interest journalism off the ground. Tim traded equity for skills in his efforts to get his media and marketing trade site launched. Steven estimates that it cost him about $100,000 of his own money to launch a site that essentially questions everything about the government of the day. It was tough to find backing for a politically dangerous venture like this one. And James was part of a group of investors from the big end of town who thought The Eureka Report was worth investing in.
For the launch of Women’s Agenda there was really no better way to achieve the desired result than launching under the umbrella of the Private Media portfolio, alongside the likes of Crikey and SmartCompany. It was important to present professionally from the outset to an audience of businesswomen who would demand nothing less. That would have been harder to achieve had I constructed this idea from my garage, fingers crossed. At Private Media I could appoint a talented team, with an experienced editor at the helm. We have sales and marketing teams, product teams, web developers, an entire bank of corporate services and other editorial teams to offer us support and guidance.
Its been an amazing year for Women’s Agenda and one that wouldn’t have been half as successful had Angela Priestley not been the launch editor. Angela lives, breathes and believes in everything that Women’s Agenda agitates for. I knew it the moment I met her. As she heads off on maternity leave today, passing the baton temporarily to the talented Georgie Dent, a former lawyer and business journalist, we will celebrate the start of the next phase of her life as a career-mother juggler (probably with cake). We wish her well and look forward to her return.