It’s easy to dunk on political commentators yelling from the sidelines, but what happens when one steps into the ring? Enter Hannah Ferguson, founder and CEO of Cheek Media, who’s built a progressive pocket of the internet that doesn’t just throw the news at you — it breaks it down for young women who’ve been told politics isn’t their lane.
With her podcast Big Small Talk now on LiSTNR and a Senate run brewing, she’s living proof new media can punch up without punching itself out. I sat down with Hannah for Insider Trading to get the real tea on her chaotic days, media’s mess, and that under-16 social media ban.
How long have you been in your current role, and how would you describe what you actually do to someone who’s never seen your work?
It’s actually just gone five years since Cheek started, which is massive, but it’s been less than three years since it’s been my full-time job.
The way I’d describe what I do day-to-day is, I would say I am a progressive political commentator that offers commentary on the news, doesn’t break the news, but really tries to provide a progressive angle that challenges a lot of the legacy right-wing media in this country, and tries to articulate opinions that are for young women to debate and discuss in healthier ways.
What does a ‘normal’ workday look like for you, if that even exists?
My ideal day would be kind of doing some prep work with [my podcast co-host] Sarah[-Jane Adams] on the kind of podcast we’re going to be doing in the following week, creating content for Cheek Media, doing a couple of calls with external stakeholders like a charity or an org that we want to work on an op-ed with, working with a commercial partner that’s quite values-aligned.
I do a lot of different work, and I’m stepping currently more from that content creation role into more of a founder role as Cheek and Big Small Talk expand. So, every day is pretty different honestly, which I love too.
That’s a lot to fit in! What time do you usually wake up? How long do these days actually last?
Honestly, I am not an early riser. I like sleep as long as I can. I usually have an alarm set for 7am and I drag myself out of bed at 7.20am.
I spend the minimal amount of time getting ready because I am lazy. And then I usually get to the office around 8:00am. And then I leave the office at about 5:30pm.
My partner and I both work pretty late, but we’ll usually try to come home to have dinner together and then work on the couch and just send a few emails and get a few things done while we watch some TV. But honestly, I’ve tried to pull back on how hard I’m working this year because burnout is real and it’s happened for a few years in a row now.
What’s your sort of background show that you’re watching while you’re working?
Right now it’s Stranger Things. But also I have watched Outlander like three times. There’s a lot of shows I’ve never watched and will never touch. I’m someone who repeats and reverts to old material. I’m really bad for starting a new show.
No, I’m exactly the same. My therapist said it’s because I’m an anxious diva and I like to know what’s happening.
Exactly! I’m trying to let go of things in life, but that’s my area of control, you know?
What’s your favourite part about what you do?
Honestly, I think for me, every time I speak to someone in person and they say that the work that Cheek does has given them the ability to articulate their own political opinions, or feel genuinely like they understand what’s going on.
I think people want to see me as like influential, and I think that’s such a privilege to be perceived that way. But honestly, between the podcast and Cheek, what is so impactful is that people who may have never cared or thought that they could be invited to the table, now think, ‘Oh, I’m making an informed vote, not just like my parents’.
And ultimately, I don’t want people to agree with me. I want people to feel empowered to know where they stand. And I think that’s like always the biggest privilege of what I do and the thing that makes me most excited.
When you were starting out in your career, was this kind of where you saw yourself ending up? What was your dream job at the beginning?
I think like when I was 10 years old I was like, ‘I want to be the Prime Minister’. I just loved politics, right? But when I was actually in like Year 11 and 12 and then going to uni to do law, I genuinely wanted to be a barrister or a judge.
Coming from a regional town background, and a conservative regional town background, when I went to law school, I remember looking around thinking, these are all private school students with parents who are in Canberra or who are barristers, and they are going to make the rules of society that dictate what happens to the most vulnerable people who they’ll never understand the lived experience of.
I don’t think that I understand it either. I come from a privileged background in a different way: I’m a white woman in Australian society. But I was very much concerned with the fact that it was a very narrow scope of worldview that was in these law classrooms. I was very much like, I want to work in a community legal centre and I want to go out and do like a lot of pro bono work and work my way up through different avenues of the law, not a corporate structure. And then I wanted to become a judge or a barrister that worked in a different way.
But ultimately, once I was past my second year of law school, I was like, ‘I really can’t do this at all. I am not capable of being in this system whatsoever’. And that drew me to go, ‘Well, maybe I’ll make an Instagram account and start talking about politics?’ And that seems like a ridiculous jump, but it’s really… it’s impossible to say to an 18-year-old me, ‘You’re going to have an Instagram account that’s going to become like a new form of media.’ Like, that’s crazy to imagine. So I never could have picked it, but I’m so glad. It’s the best job I could ever have.
What do you think kind of led you to that way of thinking so young – going into those lecture halls with that sense that more voices were needed?
I come from a household where when I was, you know, 10 years old, my parents were saying things like, ‘Pauline Hanson says what everyone’s thinking’. I wasn’t that politically informed at 10 — that would be strange — but I remember watching mainstream television every morning and hearing what she had to say and thinking, ‘That’s hateful’. I could identify that at a really young age. I knew that that was still a divisive view and it didn’t sit right.
And my parents, I love them so much for the fact that even though they held these conservative views, they really wanted to give anything I said the attention and conversation it deserved. So I think growing up in that household, no matter where my views sat, they wanted to have a conversation about it. And now my parents are people that voted Yes to the Voice referendum, voted independently at the last election and voted for the Labor Party.
It’s funny, I think now I exist in very progressive spaces where people expect a lot of perfection in all of our views and I agree, I want to always be pursuing better. But I also come from a household and a family where we need to have ten conversations to move everyone one step left at every point and have really hard conversations.
You’ve moved from commentary and media into wanting to run for the Senate. At what point did you go from ‘I want to influence politics’ to ‘I want to be in the room and on the ballot’?
There’s a frustration I have that a lot of people spend their lives — and I understand it — from the outside kind of just criticising constantly what’s happening on the inside. And I think that criticism is worthy and necessary. It’s what I do for my full-time job. But I also think there is a part of me that goes, I don’t just want to sit outside and yell about what’s happening inside. I want to try and disrupt and agitate by challenging that system.
It’s not about running to win necessarily. It’s about running to show people what a campaign looks like, and that people from outside the system can do it. It’s not embarrassing or weird or a losing battle — that [running is] a genuinely good thing that more Australians should aspire to do — more average Australians that aren’t just coming up through the ranks of like Young Labor and Young Liberals.
For me, it’s an opportunity to also showcase in a different way that there is a tension point between media and politics and they’re very closely interlinked.
If you weren’t doing your current job, what do you think you’d be doing instead?
I think if I were to leave now and do something completely different, I would love to go and work for a Human Rights Commission or a Human Rights organisation.
You’ve recently taken on staff and more contributors. How is that transition to letting go of the reins going?
It’s honestly hard — part of the reason it’s difficult is because for so long Cheek was seen as like quite synonymous with me and that felt weird. The whole time that felt weird because it’s not really a media company if it’s just me posting my opinions every day. Like that should just be a personal profile at that point, right?
I think it’s also important to know that when people were criticising me for that, I was going, ‘Completely agree’. I think that’s such fair and valid criticism that’s made in good faith too. I think that is such a necessary thing for me to reckon with. So it’s been a very purposeful change for me to take on external contributors.
People would ask last year why I wasn’t doing that. And the simple answer was, if I can’t pay writers adequately for their work — especially if I’m paying writers who are from a diverse background who deserve above industry average as well for sharing their perspectives — then I’m not going to just take it for free.
I won’t lie, I think I’ve shared in that criticism in the past — but I also think it’s not exclusive to new media and can be a real source of growth. Do you think it’s possible to detach yourself from the work with the amount of access people have to journalists and creators?
No, I don’t. I wish I could say something otherwise, but I absolutely don’t believe that.
I think there are privileges and curses to that. Like sometimes my editor Kalila [Welch] will put out the best piece of work that gets so much traction. Her name is clearly on the piece as the author and the comments will be like, ‘Amazing work Hannah’, because people don’t even think that there’s other people producing for Cheek.
For years when I was by myself, people would message being like, ‘Hey can I come into the office and meet the team?’ And I’d be like, ‘The team is me with a Canva account in my studio apartment.’
So there’s the element of people thinking there’s ten people, and then there’s people thinking it’s only me no matter what you do and what you communicate.
I will be attributed with every success and with every failure of the business and that is a responsibility I don’t take lightly. But no matter what, people are attached to me and that has been the reason this business has been successful. But it also creates a really tough scenario where my likeability is a direct reflection of if Cheek is successful, too.
Which is really stressful given like I will make decisions in my personal life for myself that will, you know, upset people or people will be disappointed by. Me running for politics might be it. If I choose to have children, when I choose to make decisions in my life, people feel very attached and that’s a really hard thing to decide what to keep private and what to go public with.
Criticism obviously happens to brands at some point, but for you it’s tied so much to your face and your name. What have you learned from those moments where your audience has turned on you or really disagreed with you?
I think it depends on the scenario. Ultimately for me, any time there is a major moment of backlash or criticism, I have to actually leave the internet and go: ‘If I’m changing my mind on this, am I changing my mind because I recognise that this criticism is constructive, important, and I am shifting with the lesson that’s being actually communicated to me, that my audience is asking me to be better? Or am I changing my mind because I am scared of losing the audience but I actually stand by what I’ve said?’
For example, last year when I got a lot of backlash to making a video about Kamala Harris. I literally went away for five days and went: ‘Yeah, I understand why I made the video that I did, but I think that I now understand that the criticism meant it was a really harmful video to many people and I should have considered at least how I said it a bit better’.
But then this year, you know, we had a lot of criticism on the podcast actually based on a segment we ran on influencers in Afghanistan and I actually stand by what we did in that segment. So I think that there’s like points of differentiation that are important to actually go away and sit with yourself and go like, ‘Why am I changing my mind? And what voice am I listening to here?’ Because it needs to be for the right reasons.
Is there an opinion that genuinely cost you followers that you would still post again tomorrow?
There’s only been one day ever where Cheek has gone backwards in following. That was strangely when Queen Elizabeth II died. I think we posted something to the effect of: ‘Totally understand that people are mourning this, but we can also understand and acknowledge that a lot of people in this world who have like suffered under colonialism like would not be mourning this’. And we lost like a thousand followers that day.
I’d post that again.
I think if you would reconsider posting something purely from the perspective of not losing followers, that’s the wrong reason.
Looking at Australian media right now, what do you think is most broken about how power and politics are covered?
I think that actually one of the most frustrating things for me right now is the way that New Media is being demonised by Legacy Media. One of the reasons I’m so frustrated by that is because when we look at New Media and the rise of political podcasters and the Prime Minister’s strategy around the podcasting world, I kind of go: There is a spectrum of quality in New Media just as there is in Legacy Media.
I think the basketting of all young women in media as influencers is problematic.
I think the basketting of all podcasters talking about politics as political podcasters or softball interviews is problematic.
We’re not really seeing the ABC commentate on whether the Daily Mail is quality or not in the way that we’re seeing them commentate on all of New Media as one basketted low-quality style of media.
I think it’s problematic in that we need to turn our attention to the fact that I agree with guidelines being brought in for New Media, but those same guidelines should apply to Legacy Media. Legacy Media is finding itself in a more irrelevant position, they’re on the attack rather than learning and kind of meeting in the middle.
I think there’s actually a genuine opportunity for us all to improve.
There’s been a lot of anxiety about creators doing paid political content. Where do you personally draw the line between advocacy, commentary and advertising on your own platforms?
I mean one of my biggest frustrations during the election was seeing people who were occupying a kind of New Media space doing paid advertising for political parties and organisations.
I did have a political organisation come to me and offer me a significant sponsorship that I turned down because I knew that this is a major risk.
When it came to the budget lockup, I had been offered to be covered for that by Labor and I said no. Because I knew I needed to pay my own way and I knew in order to maintain my integrity and trust with my audience that you need to turn these things down no matter the cost, no matter the loss financially to the business.
Every time I saw someone in New Media taking money from a political org or party, I was like: ‘You are ruining this for so many of us.’
Cheek is a blur between advocacy and opinion and commentary. I am obviously running an anti-Coalition campaign. I am not telling you how to vote or order your ballot because I don’t live in your electorate. But really it’s about saying, I know I am partisan, I am subjective in my views and I’m always going to be transparent on how I formed my view and when I’ve changed my mind. Media literacy in this country does concern me.
I do find it scary sometimes when I have a follower message me saying, ‘You’re my number one news source.’ Big Small Talk and Cheek really… what we are doing is saying to people: this is like listening to two friends examine the facts and then debate each other a lot of the time in healthy ways. That is kind of the entry way to a broader media ecosystem. This is like the front door.
Let’s talk about the under-16 social media ban. It’s often framed as protecting kids — do you see that as genuine concern, moral panic, or a distraction from regulating platforms properly?
I find this tough. I think I’ve changed my mind a few times on the social media ban. Initially I was like, ‘Yes, this is good’, right? And then I kind of was like, ‘Well no’.
As a young person who was on the internet in year 8 and 9, I understand the damage it did to me. But then we look at the way the government implemented it. And immediately I go: rushed consultation process. It’s definitely Albanese’s big ticket item, first in the world, this is his legacy, right? And he wanted that rushed through and he didn’t really want to have consultation processes with the necessary experts and stakeholders. It’s a distraction from a bigger opportunity that he had to implement a digital duty of care.
I think that it’s still a net positive, but I do think it’s a distraction from a bigger opportunity to genuinely regulate these platforms for all people, rather than to kind of put the focus on prohibition for under-16s.
Okay, let’s do some quick fire questions. What’s the most unhinged thing you’ve seen at work that we can legally publish that’s happened this year?
Some of the coverage about me this year across Charlie Kirk, the budget lockup. Some of that has been absolutely unhinged and proved just how out of touch media is in Australia.
Do you have an unofficial work uniform?
I am a jeans, sneakers, t-shirt girl most days of the week. White t-shirt. I have these tall jeans — I’m 6’2″ — so I have these tall jeans and then I have my big foot sneakers.
I walk quite a bit to work and I get really sweaty so I have to have the freedom.
What was the biggest learning curve for you so far in this career?
Do not read every comment.
Who do you admire in your industry?
I am going to say Crystal Andrews. I think that every time I read one of her columns, one of her pieces in Zee Feed, I think she always has the angle that no one’s covered. It’s really impressive to me.
When you think about ‘success’ ten years from now, is the endgame a bigger media company, a seat in Parliament, or something that doesn’t fit either box yet?
I want Cheek to not require me. Having people come up and say, ‘I feel like I was empowered to vote the way I wanted to,’ that’s the thing. That’s success to me.
Describe your inbox in three words.
Full. Varied. Funny.
How do you sign off your emails?
H.
Lead image: Supplied / Hannah Ferguson Instagram/ @katesyourmate
The post Insider Trading: Hannah Ferguson On Cheek, Chaos And Why She’s Running For Senate appeared first on PEDESTRIAN.TV .
