Women in Culture - Interview: Faustine Kopiejwski - ChEEk magazine
For our new theme ‘Women in Culture’ we have chosen to highlight female talent throughout the month. Today we shall introduce you to Faustine Kopiejwski, co-fonder of ChEEk magazine the female pure-player of the Y generation, who accepted to answer our questions.
1/ Why have you chosen to create a women’s magazine? And how did it come about?
Faustine: I met my partners Myriam Levain and Julia Tissier when I worked for Be magazine, a women’s magazine part of Lagardère group. They worked for the ‘Society’ tab and I worked for the ‘Culture’ tab. We had a different background - Le Parisien, Libération for them, music industry and Magic magazine for me. We discovered the women’s magazine universe at Be. For all of us this experience was pleasant but kind of frustrating. We liked working for the feminine culture, thinking about specific feminine issues. But we were quite upset because in a world where Fashion and Beauty columns are at the core of all things - because magazines earn money from it (via advertisers) - we felt like the fifth wheel. The editorial line didn’t really reflect our personalities and we thought that it should include other thirty-year-old women who were not only interested in clothes or nail art, but wanted a more committed magazine, that focuses on social and cultural issues.
2/ How are you working and building your editorial line?
Faustine: We try to look at topical issues, using polemic news. For instance, the idea behind the tab ‘Society’ is to use an event, decrypt it, explain the event in the context of our era and the place of women in this moment of time. We have both a feminine and an intergenerational point of view. For the ‘Culture’ column we work subjectively, we promote new artists who have something strong to claim. We try to avoid ‘le suivisme’ (following the crowd).
3/ What kind of problems have you faced?
Faustine: Until now we only have a few problems. The editorial line was very clear since the beginning and our readers quickly understood it. Our community and our flux are growing in an organic, coherent and qualitative way. Finally the most difficult thing is to be perfectly polyvalent, we have to manage a lot of things: content, editing, community management, prospection, article writing, business, communication, accounting… Even if it is very exciting! Now the main difficulty is to find a way to develop Cheek faster. We really believe in it but we work with little means. We started fundraising a few months ago and some interesting ways are coming together. So we really hope that Cheek will continue growing.
4/ What do you think about Women in Culture?
Faustine: It is a broad question so I will speak about the area I know the most: pop culture and especially music and cinema. For the pop music side, very powerful women trust the top charts - I’m talking about Beyoncé, Rihanna, Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga and all the trendy pop stars. They take a huge place in this market and make a lot of noise about it, which is fantastic. But it is not the real aspect of the problem. Apart from these independent women - truly empires by themselves - men rule the root of all posts, from direction posts to technical ones. It’s like our society where the big bosses are most of the time male dominated and a lot of jobs are associated with men. For the cinema side, it is the same thing, even worse actually: female directors don't hit the charts like pop stars do. And in 2016 we still have to fight for more women in festivals like in Angouleme, which had to face a huge debate. We have to fight to prove that women know how to handle softwares or equipment to play electronic music. We have to fight against the idea that women are not ‘good in technology’. We have to look for female rappers against the norm… Stereotypes remain and we need more examples of successful women in each domain to inspire the next generation and to have female models to watch and to follow.
Check out ChEEk’s website: http://cheekmagazine.fr/