Vice attitude with NYT rigour: The Eastern Standard Times targets diaspora audience

The stories that appear on EST are different to what people might expect on multicultural broadcaster SBS. For example, last week the website run a mini-documentary on Kee Moo, a queer group from Northern Thailand who talk about their identity and journey. A mini-documentary from early August was with Chinese-Australian sculptor NC Qin, who turns fragile glass into weapons and armour. The site is currently promoting an episode on the billion dollar hair industry and its exploitation of Asian women.

“A really important pillar for me was that stories were told by the people who would live them,” Hannam says.

“I go to them and say what story do you want to tell? And then we fund it. We help a little bit with story structure and with editing, and then we help release it.

I feel like that’s part of our responsibility to make sure that people feel like their stories in these countries – where typically there isn’t a large media industry for humanity-based stories – has legs to kind of be seen.”

The publication isn’t making a lot of money, but it plans to do so in the same way as Vice’s production arm, Virtue: through partnerships with brands. “People are really interested in partnering with us to speak to the diaspora community in the US in Australia,” she says.

In the 2021 census, the number of responses categorised within Asian ancestral groups as a proportion of the total population amounted to approximately 17.4 per cent. A 2019 study from Media Diversity Australia found that only 6 per cent of presenters, commentators and reporters come from an Indigenous or non-white background.

Hannam is ambitious for the publication and what it could do to change that. She hopes to one day integrate the work of her team, a group of women working all over the world, into mainstream media.

“I’ve had conversations with SBS. But I don’t want to become a special interest company,” she says. “I feel like we need to actually start infiltrating Channel Seven’s, the Channel Nine’s of the world. I don’t think it serves us to keep being like ‘if you like exotic content,’ [come to us].”

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