Port Moresby, 2012, and the magazine that the year needed

I was working for a small local publishing house then and the titles I edited went to readers somewhere else entirely. That is a strange job to hold and I held it for a while. I got good at building an issue for an audience I would never meet in the street, and then I went home to a rack full of other countries.

So, I knew the kind of magazine I wanted to read. By 2012, I also knew I was the one who would have to make it.

If you were buying magazines here then, you know the shelf. New Idea. The gossip weeklies. New Age Woman, the lift-out that came monthly with the Post-Courier, which at least came from here. A Pasifika woman standing in front of that shelf was buying aspiration made in another country, for another climate, for another body.

I could see the gap from the shop floor. That is the part I want to be honest about, because a gap you can see from the shop floor is a reader's observation. Turning it into a business is a separate job. I learned that in public.

I launched Stella in August 2012, at Vision City, in front of a room of people who already knew me. The next morning, I was on the line to Heather Jarvis at ABC Radio Australia. I defended starting a magazine for Pasifika women at a time when other publications were folding. I remember that interview clearly. I also remember thinking the hard part had just finished.

Ceridwen Spark interviewed my readers for the Australian Journal of Anthropology, and they put it better than I did. One woman told her that most of the magazines she grew up seeing were of women from other countries, white models and products, so she never saw PNG women’s beauty celebrated. Another said Stella's covers helped, because the women on them actually looked like her.

A third said she loved a piece Stella ran on hairstyles, because her daughter could see it and know that her natural hair is beautiful. I have carried that sentence around for more than a decade. I rate it above every circulation figure I ever reported.

Here is what I learned a magazine is, financially. It has two customers and only one of them buys the magazine. The reader pays a cover price, and that price covers a slice of what the printer charges. The rest arrives from advertisers, and an advertiser buys an audience you can prove you have.

So, the founder pays for the proof, and in 2012 that founder was me. In my first year I printed 2,000 copies an issue, six issues, and I sourced the ads for all six myself. The advertising covered what it covered and I paid the shortfall. I wanted something physical to put in front of the next media buyer, and every issue after that wanted money before it made any.

My proof did take a shape eventually. By 2015, Stella carried twice the pages, came out quarterly, and the print run had doubled to 4,000 copies. My media kit described the Stella reader as female 77 per cent of the time, aged 18 to 44, core age 28, career-oriented and ambitious, and Spark quoted that kit in her paper.

My Facebook page carried over 31,000 people. I gave those figures to Tess Newton Cain in an interview for Devpolicy Blog the previous September, and about a quarter of the people reading us were men. Those numbers took me two and a bit years to earn, and I spent those years paying for the privilege of earning them. By 2017, these numbers had more than doubled to 76,000.

Here is what I had wrong, and it took me years to say it this plainly. I costed the gap in readers, and I stopped counting there. I assumed my audience and my market were the same object, because they sit beside each other and they look alike from the shop floor. They pay on completely different terms.

My audience arrived first, free, in numbers that felt like success. My market arrived later, on invoice, at thirty days or sixty or ninety. It arrived after somebody had funded the thing the audience turned up for. In my publishing house that somebody was me.

I paid that bill in printing. Other people pay it in flour.

Picture Naomi, who bakes and sells buns at a market table in Madang. She reckoned the crews coming off the wharf at eleven would buy lunch closer to the gate, and the only way to find out was to feed them. She spent K280 on a cooler, flour and oil, and that K280 was her daughter's school uniform money for the new year sitting in a tin. The crews came. She had the K280 back inside three weeks and kept selling, and for those three weeks the school uniform rode on whether she had read the wharf right.

Writing this, I went looking for what a Papua New Guinean starting a magazine in 2026 could read first. ABC International Development and the Media Development Initiative published a nationally representative audience brief this July, across four regions and twenty-two provinces. It maps how people here get information.

Radio reaches furthest. Television clusters in the towns and among people in work. Digital runs younger, more urban and more educated and it arrives on a phone. I would have paid good money for that data on digital reach in 2012. I worked from the shop floor and my own reading habits, while a founder today can start from a national picture.

What I'm still looking for is a cheap way to find out whether the demand is real. Every founder I know has bought that answer out of their own pocket, in stock or printing or fuel or a cooler, and most of us got it after the money had gone. If you found a way to test yours first, write to me, because I would like to publish how you did it.

Anyone who has built something out of a gap they could see knows the loneliness of the first year, when everybody wants the thing and you are paying for it. I loved that year. I would do it again. I counted readers from the first issue, and I would count signed advertising beside them.

Stella held up its end of the bargain. It put PNG women on covers in a country that had been importing its idea of who to celebrate, and it kept doing that for five years. The business underneath it ran on my patience and my savings, and I found out exactly how much of both I had.

Best

Amanda

P.S. What’s your view on today’s newsletter? Did I miss something out that you’d like to share? Write to me, [email protected]. I may not get back to you, but I will try to read what you send in.

Wild Money is general information only, drawn from my own experience and research. It isn't financial advice, and nothing in it is a recommendation to buy, sell, hold or manage money in any particular way. What worked for me won't necessarily suit you. Please seek advice from a licensed financial adviser before making decisions about your own money.