Hannah Ferguson really, really hated studying law at university. And that had nothing to do with the course material, but rather the culture she was suddenly surrounded by.
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“There were a lot of elite, private-school-educated students being funnelled into this degree,” Ferguson says. “They were the people who could afford full-time study and live at home, or had people supporting them through university. I struggled because I wasn’t from that background, and I thought, ‘These are the people who will make decisions about our society, yet they come from a very specific view of the world’.”
But she stuck it out and, along the way, learned to criticise systems and power structures. Ferguson became versed in legal and political language, and realised that while she may not want to pursue law as a career, she could still make a career of her studies. Enter Cheek Media.
The ideation for Cheek Media came to Ferguson in 2019 when she began volunteering at a feminist not-for-profit called the One Woman Project under then-manager Kristin Perissinotto.
The pair developed and published two editions of a bi-annual magazine, RARA, and began discussing and dissecting the gap in the market for progressive media, focusing on feminist and political issues. A year later, the pair launched Cheek Media to do exactly that, becoming a social media-first hub for digestible commentary on Australian news. (Perissinotto stepped away from the business in 2022, and Ferguson became the sole owner and chief executive officer).
“It started out in the lead-up to the last federal election, so it became very politically driven, which is where a lot of our following came from in the early days,” Ferguson says, adding the team racked up 10,000 followers in the week before the election.
“It was also the time when Brittany Higgins had come forward, and Grace Tame became Australian of the Year. Australia was having its ‘Me Too’ moment, and we’d come into this field saying, ‘We are sick of these publications talking about us but not listening to us’. And so, Cheek was founded on, ‘How can we do things differently? How can we have different conversations?’.”
That ethos resonated with many Australians, evidenced by Cheek’s now-135,000-strong social media following (consisting of mostly young women). Ferguson leveraged her following and brand to launch a news and culture podcast called Big Small Talk in 2023 alongside Sarah-Jane Adams. With 23,500 Instagram followers, Big Small Talk is a 45-minute podcast that covers the news cycle – from low to high-brow. In January, it surpassed 500,000 downloads and is consistently ranked in the top three for news in the country.
But 2023 was a big year for Ferguson for another reason: the CEO launched her debut book, Bite Back. She’s got another coming out in November. Now, she’s focused on her expansion strategy, which includes diversifying off-platform.
“Big Small Talk is already a secondary revenue stream and business model for expansion, and we’re planning two additional podcasts. Beyond that, Substack is a huge platform for me – I have 10,000 subscribers and 2,000 of those are paid for. TikTok is also growing rapidly, allowing me to reach an international audience.”
Live shows are also on the agenda, with the first happening later this year.
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