News Corp venture to bring Asian-Australian focus

News Corp Australia is looking to launch a news and lifestyle website targeted at millions of Asian-Australians.

News Corp Australia is looking to launch a news and lifestyle website called Yanomi early next year, targeted at millions of Asian-Australians.

Yanomi will feature original content, mostly on beauty, travel, food, relationships, identity and personal experiences, plus stories from the media group’s vast operations.

News is hoping to fill a void in the Asian-Australian community, particularly among younger mem­bers who feel misrepresented in mainstream media. It is one of the nation’s largest and fastest growing communities, consisting of 3.6 million people and forecast to rise to 4.8 million in a decade.

News already publishes digital editions of The Australian and Vogue Australia in Mandarin, although Yanomi will be in English.

The handful of Chinese Australian newspapers, including Epoch Times, Australian Chinese Daily and Daily Chinese Herald, largely focus on news from China and attracts an older readership.

Yanomi is the winner of News’s second annual business ideas program, News Bolt, which received 150 ideas from more than 100 staff. After a lengthy process over many months, Yanomi was chosen by News executives, led by executive chairman Michael Miller.

“The big benefit of News Bolt is that it provides an avenue for everyone at News Corp to express their creativity every day,” Mr Miller said.

“We are seeing a pipeline of highly innovative business ideas that are helping underwrite News Corp Australia’s long-term future.”

The idea of Yanomi came from the personal experience of Chinese-Australian News employee Jacklyn Szetu. She worked on the project with colleagues Michael Geedrick and Christie Molloy.

“A lot of people just don’t feel like mainstream media connects with them on a personal, cultural level, and they don’t feel represented by mainstream media,” Ms Szetu said.

During the research phase, people said they “didn’t feel like they could see themselves in stories or that their stories weren’t being told”, a problem the website would address, the 24 year-old said.

“We want to tell personal experiences that resonate with this particular community group.

“The target audience that we want to address would be the younger Australian audience.

“A lot of the time they are firstborn generation so we have that connection to our culture but at the same time we’re very much Australian. That duality kind of paints your experience quite specifically although it’s shared across our community.”

Richard Skimin, managing director of mergers, acquisitions & strategy at News, said Yanomi won because it showed it could solve a customer’s problem, validated through market research.

The research consisted of responses to advertising on social media and speaking to people on the street, with about 750 people so far registering on Yanomi’s test website.

More research and work would be carried out over the next few months, with the website set to be launched in the first quarter of 2020, Mr Skimin said.

Ms Szetu said the website’s name Yanomi stemmed from the word beautiful in Japanese and sounded like ‘‘you know me”.