Q&A with Evi Mariani, co-founder of Project Multatuli

Highlights from our Instagram Live with Evi Mariani, co-founder of Project Multatuli. 

Project Multatuli, based in Indonesia, is an independent journalism collective that exists as a public service by telling underreported stories centred around marginalised communities and holding power to account. We spoke to Evi Mariani, who co-founded the platform to ask about her career, what the secret to a sustainable business model in media is and what the future for Project Multatuli looks like.

Q: Could you tell me a little bit about your background?

A: I’m the co-founder and executive director of project Multatuli. In 2021, I established Project Multatuli and before that, I’d been working at what you call legacy media. The biggest long standing English daily in Indonesia, called The Jakarta Post. So it was quite a very, very drastic change from the Post to Project Multatuli. But so far it has been a very exciting journey. 

Q: Why did you decide to start Project Multatuli and make the leap from legacy media to non-profit journalism?

A: The motivation at that time was not anything grand. For example, it’s not that I was totally unhappy with what I had been doing at The Post. At the beginning, it was more the pandemic, and then The Post proposed a change in management and in 2020, they had to lay off 66% of the workforce, including the newsroom. I was not on the chopping block. But I decided I was in a position to do something and to make something with some colleagues.

Along with three journalists at the time, who also all worked at more established media, and I’m the only woman, by the way, we decided to do something, to make something. I resigned in early 2021 and we built Project Multatuli, and then another co-founder came along later as the chief editor. I became the Executive Director. But after doing the project for a while, it became clearer that we can do plenty that’s different from the practices of journalism. I had been practising for 20 years. Project Multatuli truly is more niche. 

The “serving underreported” part is very important because then we realise that we can disrupt the dominant practice of the media industry in Indonesia, which is very, very centralised in Jakarta. A lot of journalists live in Jakarta, interview people in Jakarta, interview middle aged men, politicians, business people, experts in Jakarta. And also male centric, most newsrooms in Indonesia are led by men. We’ve tried to be intersectional. Indigenous people are very unheard in the media. The urban poor, for example, are also very marginalised in the media industry.

So the first months into Project Multatuli, I realised we could do so many things differently in journalism and that’s because because of a very different business model. 

Q:  What are some of the other challenges you’ve encountered at Project M?

A: As you’re probably also familiar with, I think all media outlets, face this kind of problem. One of them is trust. Also, journalists nowadays, don’t compete with other journalists. We compete with influencers, we compete with content creators. Sometimes people like distancing themselves from news because of news fatigue. So that’s one of the big challenges. But sustainability of course, where the money comes from, has always been a big issue. Digital attacks, physical attacks, especially for our contributors in the regions outside Jakarta who are more vulnerable to them and also legal lawsuits. So all kinds of challenges, but if I have to pick one maybe how to get more of an audience to read our investigative writing and in depth stories. 

Q: What is the one thing that makes Project Multatuli different from any other news organisation?

A: First, the business model first. We veer away from the commercial business model. We don’t rely on advertising. We tap into audience revenue, but because we serve the underreported, it’s sort of counterintuitive if we put up a paywall. So what we did was launch our membership. We’re the first member focused media outlet in Indonesia. There are other media outlets that run membership. But the one that focuses the operation on membership, on our members, we can still claim and may even be the only one so far. That’s what makes us different.

Q:  What has some of the impact of Project Multatuli’s work been like on the communities that it’s been serving?

A: Gig workers in online shopping. It made an impact that the ministry of work held an audience with representatives of the motorcycle drivers. The police also responded to our stories. There’s another series that we’re quite proud of, which is called Underprivileged Gen Z, in which we talk about young people who are are poor, queer, have disabilities, but especially those who are economically underprivileged. When the commercial media industry talks about young people, they usually see them as consumers. No one talks about the economical, financial constraints, and stress this world puts on younger people. We started the conversation.

Q: What’s next?

A: We want to increase our audience revenue to cover 30% of the expenses because donors cannot last forever. And audience revenue, or money from the public is the most liberating kind of funds we can receive because it allows us to look at topics that are pushed to the sidelines by donors. 

Q: How can one word media storytellers and fellows contribute to the project? Do you accept freelance pitches? What does that look like?

A: Storytellers, just pitch your story at projectmultatuli.org. We do bilingual, but we mainly do Indonesian stories.  So for international storytellers, you can cooperate with us to translate the story to Indonesian. We’ve done that kind of cooperation twice. We’re very open, but we have only three editors so we cannot really do all the pitches. We publish 100 or 130 stories a year so we do slow journalism.

Watch the full session on Instagram.