Queen of digital Mia Freedman shows her soft side

The coming year is looming as a time of reassessment and change for the pioneering digital media executive.

Mia Freedman admits she can be challenging.

The latest news out of the MamaMia digital empire is that in middle age, Mia is finally mellowing.

The worldwide social media hurricane that the women’s website’s founder Mia Freedman brought on herself last year by writing frankly about US feminist Roxane Gay’s weight (some called it fat-shaming) has brought reassessment and change for the pioneering digital media executive.

For example, capital letters in staff missives (which Freedman, 46, peppers employees with via text) are out. “I have learnt not to use caps, I have learnt that that can upset people,” Freedman tells the Behind the Media podcast (available on the The Australian’s website at the end of this story and on podcast apps).

“I do like an emoji, but I have learnt exclamation marks and caps can really unsettle people.”

Stories from admirers and detractors alike about Freedman’s demanding management style are legion. And it’s hard to reconcile the engaging woman in her podcasting studio with her reputation as one of the most polarising figures in the industry.

“I imagine you must be quite demanding to work for,” I venture cautiously.

“I don’t know — would you ask this of a guy?” Freedman muses in an expert dodge.

I knew it! You are playing the women card, I say.

“Yeah, I have got my laminated women card in my wallet,” she jokes. But she allows the question.

“Let’s say I can be challenging. And I can be challenging because I move very fast and I can sometimes have a short concentration span. If I had my way we would launch another podcast every week. We would launch five websites, we would do a hundred different things. But it’s not possible for everyone to execute on that.”

She recounts how a producer told her during an exit interview of the stress many staff encounter. “She said: ‘It’s so stressful I even get stressed if I am going into the shower and there is a text from Mia. We can’t all live on Mia time.’

“That hit me like a thunderclap,” Freedman recounts. “Oh my God, I didn’t realise that was the effect I had on people.”

Now she is very clear with new starters — expect a text at any time.

“That doesn’t mean I expect you to answer it,” she says.

Freedman is a fascinating media figure because she created a successful female media site MamaMia.com.au from her kitchen table, beating mainstream media companies in the process, and seems to still have an uncanny knack for knowing what women want and how to serve it up to them.

The MamaMia network, with its mix of news and views aimed at women, is a digital success with 80 staff, and reigned supreme as the No 1 women’s site until last June, with more than one million unique visitors a month, before slumping alarmingly in November to 481,000.

“What women want changes; they don’t want the same thing every day or even every hour. You have to pivot and be agile enough to get there just before they do.”

Lisa Wilkinson was her mentor and first boss, hiring Freedman after she hung around Cleo magazine after a work experience stint, aged 19. At 24 Freedman was appointed editor of Cosmopolitan, and Wilkinson remains one of her closest friends.

“Lisa has a huge following and love among women and I think that took Nine by surprise,” she says of Wilkinson’s abrupt departure from Today last year in a contract dispute.

“It was a real moment when she left Nine and it resonated with women. They felt that she had been shabbily treated and they didn’t feel happy about that.”

Freedman had her own unhappy time as a Nine executive a decade ago and was herself dismissed from her News Corp Sunday papers column and a stint as a panellist on Today.

“When I lost my column at News Corp it was a huge blow. I was quite devastated at the time.”

She says she was “explicitly” told when she was let go by News and Nine that the growing success of her website was part of the reason. “Why would you give a competitor a free plug — I get it.”

MamaMia was born on the kitchen table, literally, Freedman says, just after her bruising 2007 departure from Nine, “in a hail of pretty humiliating publicity”. “The phone didn’t ring and the phone hasn’t rung, so I had no choice but to start MamaMia.”

Now her husband Jason ­Lavigne is chief executive, she is creative officer, and their eldest son Luca has joined the site.

Has Freedman recovered from her 2017 annus horribilis? “Yes I have,” she replies confidently.

In the middle of last year Freedman recorded a podcast with noted US feminist Roxane Gay, author of the memoir Hunger. Freedman wrote a companion piece that went into excruciating detail about the extra measures the website undertook to make Gay comfortable in its studio, which Gay labelled “cruel and humiliating”. The blowback was sustained and vicious and Freedman was accused, among many other things, of not affording Gay any dignity.

Freedman says the controversy was a “personally bruising time”.

“I have been in contact with Roxane since when the dust settled. Relations are fine. I have made the decision to not talk about it any more because I feel like it doesn’t serve anyone to bring it up again — but I will say that I was taken aback firstly by the intensity of it and secondly the volume and duration of it.”

Later she says: “It has made me very cautious. It has made me very nervous doing this interview. I don’t do panel shows. I am very cautious about print interviews. I left Twitter a long time ago. There are some very vocal people who are heavily invested in believing things about me and about MamaMia that aren’t true.”

Do her comebacks from setbacks point to resilience? She responds she is either a tough cookie or a goldfish, easily forgetting things and moving on. “I guess I am quite resilient but I think everybody is. You have to be. I am not going to sit around and cry for myself and say I have had a tough life. There have been shitty things that have happened. But in the scheme of things, man, I am fine.”

The controversy didn’t hit web traffic, Freedman says. “It was personally bruising but it didn’t have a business impact.” But since then MamaMia has curtailed US operations and abandoned plans for a capital raising, after bringing KPMG on board as advisers.

Rumours of a sale come and go. Freedman carefully says “we don’t have plans” to sell the business this year. Instead the strategy is to grow different revenue streams and boost its podcasting initiatives, while the strategy of monetising content via native advertising and branded content has given it “a bit of a buffer” against Facebook and Google taking 85 per cent of all digital ad revenue.

Freedman’s latest book, Work Strife Balance, was launched by Malcolm Turnbull and sold more than 20,000 copies. Books are a drain to write, but a safe place because people don’t “hate-read” a book as they do online columns, merely to attack. As for people hate-reading her, “You have just got to block them out.”

But why does Freedman put herself through all that? “I am passionate about making the world a better place for women and girls. That might sound hokey and that might sound disingenuous but that is truly what drives me.”