How Shepherdess magazine bucked print’s decline

Tracey Perkins, 38, has kept all 21 editions of Shepherdess, a stylised magazine about country life primarily for rural women. Perkins lives on a dairy farm in Canterbury.

“I keep them because they are just beautiful magazines. They are not the kind of magazine you throw out, that’s for sure.”

“I know neighbours that share them across stations. One will get them and they catch up and pass on the magazine and they share the stories and natter about them. It's quite a cool connector as well.”

Related stories:

She was also approached by the magazine to share her story of reconnecting to her Māori whakapapa and culture. Like other stories in Shepherdess, it was beautifully photographed and highlighted the hardships and pleasures of rural life.

Shepherdess is a quarterly print magazine with a circulation of 18,000 and a strong online presence that includes social media. It has created a six-part television series for Sky. The magazine also connects women in real life; its first “Shepherdess Muster” event in 2024 drew almost 300 women who camped together for the weekend, listening to speakers such as sex therapist Jo Robertson.

Shepherdess is defying the odds in a world where traditional print media has been majorly disrupted by readers - and precious advertisers - migrating from hard copies to the online world. It has found a sweet spot where readers, often on remote beef and sheep stations or dairy farms crave the connectedness that comes from holding a physical magazine that tells their stories.

“It’s not like your regular magazine that you compare yourself to. You feel like you align with Shepherdess,” says 30-year-old Heather Thompson, a part-time shepherd who lives on a sheep and beef farm about an hour west of Timaru.

“I guess for me it is like a treat. It is like you are treating yourself to something physical that you can enjoy.”

Like other readers, Thompson treasures the magazine for its whimsical photos of rural life that balance both grit and beauty. The magazine also has a knack for showcasing small rural brands that are often the entrepreneurship of farm wives, including Thompson. Her business, Rural Rascals, makes kid-sized wool brooms so kids can help out in the shearing shed.

Kristy McGregor, 32, is the magazine’s founder and editor-in-chief. She launched Shepherdess (then called GraziherNZ) in January 2019 as an Instagram account from the kitchen table of her beef and sheep farm about 90 minutes north of Wellington. It quickly became a blog and in March 2020 the first magazine hit stores and mailboxes. The name Shepherdess came from a call out to the original Instagram followers.

McGregor is an Australian who met her New Zealand dairy farmer partner when she was working at a remote cattle station in Queensland 200km from the closest town of 30 people. When he returned to New Zealand to take over the family farm, she came too.

McGregor says she found the farming life here far more isolating despite the closer proximity.

“I started to talk to other women over here and realised that actually what I was feeling, it wasn’t just me. There were other women who were feeling incredibly isolated.

“When you share stories, it connects people with others and it can make you feel a little less alone.”

Now, Shepherdess has 14 part-time staff all around the country and a stable of 10 freelance photographers plus writers who are on regular rotation.

“They're all embedded in their own communities and know what is going on in their patches so we commission them to go out and take, shoot stories.”

Stories in the fifth anniversary edition include the cover story of Catherine Mullooly, a mother and women's shearing champion, the regular wedding section (a fan favourite) and a feature on the community restoration project of Miller’s Flat Bakehouse Museum in Central Otago. There is a story on Featherston, a small town just north of Wellington known as “Booktown” for its seven bookstores.

Yolene Bassett, 47, doesn’t live rurally yet she regularly buys Shepherdess. She lives in Lower Hutt, not far from Featherston.

“I had no idea that that was a book town and that prompted my mum and I to head over last week.”

Bassett’s parents moved over from Holland and she has no recent farming connection either there or in New Zealand. She finds Shepherdess to be a piece of rural escapism for a city person.

“I love these stories. The articles about the small town or communities, the artisans that come out of those places, the rural farmers, all that sort of, sort of thing.”

Country life and culture are becoming increasingly popular with city folk helping the success of content and publications like Shepherdess, according to Philippa Cameron, the high country station cook behind the Instagram account What’s For Smoko.

“There's a lot more people listening to country [music], which means a lot more people are starting to enjoy country fashion, which then puts into the algorithm a lot more country accounts, and I think it's all sort of feeding each other at the moment too, which is awesome.”