News Club Interview: Mandi Wicks

Who is Mandi Wicks?

Mandi Wicks is the Director of News at SBS - a role she’s held for nearly 6 years. Before that, she was heading up SBS’s Audio and Language Content. And before that, she was a journalist.

I wanted to chat with Mandi because SBS holds an important and unique place in our media landscape. Its role, according to its charter, is all about serving multicultural and multilingual communities with the aim to inform, educate and entertain all Australians. To do this, SBS offer 6 free-to-air TV channels, publishes audio content in over 60 languages, has its own streaming platform SBS On Demand. It’s also got a growing social media presence. And, like the ABC, it’s largely funded by taxpayers.

Something that stood out to me in the latest Digital News Report from the University of Canberra was that SBS is now the most trusted news brand in the country across both public and commercial media.

But we also know that, more broadly, trust in news publishers and journalism is declining. Traditional media is losing audiences. So I wanted to know - how is SBS thinking about that challenge and what are they doing differently?

You can listen to the conversation here, tune in on YouTube - and hit subscribe while you’re at it - or scroll down for an edited transcript.

Searching high and low for childcare

If you know what we’re talking about when we say “childcare desert”, you might be one of the 25% of Aussies who are living in parts of the country where it’s impossible to secure a place… If you want to know where the major parties stand on that issue, The Parenthood’s Early Learning Scorecard sheds some light. It’s also the focus of episode 2 of At What Cost? - a podcast by The Parenthood exploring our childcare crisis and offering up solutions. You can listen here.

Interview Highlights

Highlight 1: On the brand trust gap between traditional and social media

Mandi Wicks: Audiences still do trust a lot of the linear broadcasters. But when you go a bit deeper and say, ‘But do you trust the same brands on social media platforms?’ They say ‘we trust them less’, which is interesting. It's the same brand.

Kate Watson: Because of where they are carried?

Mandi Wicks: I think Australians are particularly aware that misinformation and disinformation are a problem. So, how do you trust what you are reading [on social media platforms]… AI bots are very much serving up content… I just feel that Australians generally lack trust because of the environment in which they're consuming it.

Highlight 2: On explaining public broadcasting to new Aussies

Mandi Wicks: When I managed the language services, I would often meet with communities that were not particularly happy with the content we might've been providing because it gave both perspectives.

And particularly smaller, often refugee communities, where they've left a country to escape political persecution or whatever it might have been… So, they come here, and then they assume, perhaps, that the media will give a certain perspective and the one that maybe they want to hear.

So we do spend time having to explain to them what public broadcasting is here. Yes, we are owned by taxpayers and, therefore, funded by the government. But it's in our Act that we are editorially independent, and we will give both perspectives, but we will be accurate.

And it is fascinating when you have those conversations, and we survey them over time, how trust in those services starts to build. Because they understand what our purpose is, and they may not be happy with the perspectives we're giving, but they understand why we're doing what we are doing and why that's important for democracy.

Highlight 3: On how SBS are using AI in their news content

Mandi Wicks: It is on the production side of news. So, we wouldn't ever use AI in the creation of editorial. And even when we use AI, we'll always have human oversight.

What I mean by that is, when you've done a long interview (like this), using AI to create a transcription of that interview can save you a lot of time - when you consider, back in the '90s, you probably would have sat there for hours, typing it out, going mad.

For us at SBS, translating from languages into English or English into another language - again, with that checking - saves a lot of time. It used to be word-for-word.

It allows us then to focus precious resources on more original journalism, but also, increasingly, we know there's more time needed for fact-checking and verification. So, you know, what you take away here, you need to invest there in order to maintain that editorial standard.

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