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Reda Gaudiamo: Behind glossy magazines
Reda Gaudiamo grew up reading magazines
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R
eda Gaudiamo grew up reading magazines. Even before she started school, Reda’s mother bought her the classic children’s magazine Si Kuncung. In the second grade, she read the first edition of Kawanku. In the fourth grade, she started reading Gadis.
JP/Prodita Sabarini
Today, the 47-year-old runs magazines as the publisher of Kompas Gramedia’s Women and Lifestyle Magazine Division. Reda began as a junior reporter for the Femina group’s teen magazine Gadis. After a few years in advertising, she became the deputy chief editor of the women’s magazine Cosmopolitan Indonesia. Now, handling seven magazines for Kompas Gramedia, she has become a respected competitor for the two Indonesian publishing giants she once worked for.
She recently won the publishing license for InStyle magazine, which she said other publishers had had their eyes on. The magazine’s first Indonesian edition is scheduled to hit the stands July 27.
“Gramedia needed to win it. Right now there are no good magazines to buy. Vogue and Glamour are not selling their licenses. Elle has been taken. Marie Claire has been taken,” she said.
If Gramedia was to enter an already-full magazine market, it would need a big brand, she said. What’s left was InStyle, a monthly women’s fashion magazine published by Time Inc. in the United States.
The reform era that has brought more media freedom and globalization to Indonesia has also filled the country with Indonesian versions of foreign lifestyle magazines. Despite the many magazines available at newsstands, Reda believes that the market has room for new brands with the growing middle class in Indonesia.
Despite growing up wanting to be a doctor — a dream that she dropped after realizing that she was not good in science — it might have seemed that her childhood had prepared her for publishing.
Her mother, Reda said, was a magazine lover. “She bought any kind of magazine, Selekta, Jaya, Mutiara….” Reda said. Her father, who worked at the French Embassy, brought home foreign magazines such as Elle, Marie Claire and Le Point, magazines whose pages she would read adoringly even though she did not understand the words printed on them.
In a 24-year career, she has changed jobs 13 times, shuttling between magazines and advertising agencies. She said her work history followed emotional impulses and a thirst for new challenges. She said she quit her job in Gadis because she did not share the vision of her managing editor. “You know at that age, you’re young and you feel that things should be done differently,” she said. “I had my own idea of what a teen magazine should be like,” she said.
She had a stint as a copy editor for cosmetic producer Avon Indonesia and at other teenage magazines before venturing into the advertising world. While working at an advertising agency, she contributed to Cosmopolitan Indonesia.
While she was collecting a check at the magazine’s office, she was told to apply for a permanent position at Cosmopolitan. Dian Soedarjo, Cosmopolitan’s editor-in-chief, eventually sent her CV to the magazine’s publisher, Hearst Magazines, in New York. “She asked me if I was up for becoming the deputy chief editor of Cosmopolitan. I said yes,” she said. “Only later did I start to panic,” she said, laughing.
Running the first women’s magazine in Indonesia that openly talked about sex, Reda said it was a tough to survive resistance and criticism from the country’s religious society. She received formal letters of complaint and threatening text messages that said the magazine was making Indonesian women wild and crazy about sex.
Reda herself is conservative in her views and frames sex in the context of marriage. “I make it clear that all the articles on sex have to have the word husband in the first paragraph,” she said.
It gives her ammunition to answer complaints. Cosmopolitan’s sensitive take on the country’s social norms, helps it to survive criticism and manages to win market share and advertising, she said.
Reda said that when Cosmopolitan first arrived in Indonesia, many middle-aged married women viewed sex as an obligation and not as something fun. “There was a mind-set that because they’re mothers and they’re middle-aged that they’re not supposed to be interested in sex.” Cosmopolitan has made Indonesian women more open to explore their sexuality, she said.
Reda is also a short-story writer and a singer. She has published a collection of short stories and some might know her better as the singer who popularized the poetry of Sapardi Djoko Damono. She has recorded songs based on Sapardi’s poetry as well as the poems of Acep Zamzam Noor, AGS Arya Dwipayana and Emha Ainun Nadjib. With Ari Malibu, her performing partner since herdays at the University of Indonesia, she released the album Becoming Dew.
“I’m glad that I had the experience of singing Pak Sapardi’s poems. If I hadn’t done this, I wouldn’t be exposed to the beauty of poetry,” she said.
She said that she kept singing so that her daughter Soca Sobhita would be able to appreciate poetry and the emotion that it brings.
