Australian news in Mandarin and Arabic? It’s about to hit free-to-air TV thanks to SBS

It’s not every day a TV broadcaster gets to launch a fresh news program, and it’s even rarer it gets to launch two on the same night. But that’s precisely what will happen on Monday when SBS goes live with bulletins of primarily Australian news in Arabic and Mandarin, the nation’s most-spoken languages other than English.

What’s more, it will launch them on a brand-new dedicated channel, SBS WorldWatch – the network’s sixth linear television offering, alongside SBS, SBS Food, Viceland, World Movies and NITV.

“It’s a dream come true,” says Ali Bahnasawy, one of three presenters of the Arabic bulletin, which will air at 8pm, Monday to Friday.

“It’s very rare for a network to start a bulletin now – they’re difficult, complicated, resource-intensive. But it’s exciting to be able to talk to people through a medium they trust. They have some sort of connection with SBS, and it makes you feel a little more valued when you hear the news about the country in which you live, in your own language.”

It’s not just a question of getting a warm and fuzzy feeling, though. The notion of building connections with different ethnic communities by speaking to them in their own language is baked into the SBS charter, which identifies its principal function as providing “multilingual and multicultural broadcasting and digital media services that inform, educate and entertain all Australians and, in doing so, reflect Australia’s multicultural society”.

It’s a mission Mandi Wicks, the network’s director of news and current affairs, keeps front of mind. “SBS’s purpose is about building social cohesion in Australia,” she says. “It’s about giving those different language communities a voice, celebrating their cultures.”

Wicks has been in the job about 18 months, prior to which she headed up language services for about eight years. That meant overseeing more than 200 journalists producing content for radio, podcasts and online in more than 68 languages.

By and large, though, the work they produce has not found its way to television. But Wicks aims to foster much more platform-agnostic cross-pollination across the newsrooms, and hopes some items from the new services will eventually make their way to the World News bulletin, and vice versa.

Alongside the home-grown content from the language services teams, SBS also takes feeds from foreign news providers. Until now, they have been slotted into the schedule on the other channels, mostly on SBS and Viceland. As of Monday, the foreign-language feeds will move to WorldWatch. The English-language feeds, and the network’s flagship World News bulletin at 6.30pm, will stay on the main channel.

Five days a week, WorldWatch will carry the two new home-grown bulletins, primarily covering Australian news, in the 8pm (Arabic) and 8.30pm (Mandarin) slots. They use the same studio and set as World News (only the colour scheme changes thanks to the magic of LED strip lighting), and while there’s a comfortable 30-minute turnaround between the English and Arabic bulletins, the Mandarin crew have less than five minutes to bump in.

Funding for the new services has come from the additional $29 million over three years allocated by the federal government last May to extend SBS’s language services. But assembling two teams of reporter-producer-presenters – nine in each – from scratch was no mean feat.

On the Arabic side, it meant reaching out to professional journalists who might not have worked in the industry since landing in Australia as much as a decade ago. On the Mandarin side, the challenge was of a different sort.

“It was really hard to find people who understood our journalistic principles of fact-based, independently verifiable, impartial reporting because that’s just not the culture they’ve grown up with,” says Mary-Ruth Monsour, who has been seconded from her regular supervising producer role on World News to guide the launch of the new bulletins.

Rena Li, one of the three presenters of the Mandarin bulletin, had precisely zero experience of reading the news when she landed a role with SBS last year. The 30-year-old Beijing-raised journalist arrived in Australia in 2016 on a working holiday visa, “but I found a full-time job in Chinese community media so I’ve never been on holiday, only working”.

Li started with 15-minute bulletins on SBS On Demand, where the two new services have had a soft launch over the past couple of months, before stepping up to the full 30-minute read. The service matters, she believes, because “the Chinese community in Australia finds it difficult to find trustworthy information”.

She cites the example of students she met while working as an investigative journalist on the Chinese-language news site Sydney Today. “They had been defrauded but they told me they were afraid to report it to police because they feared they might get a bad reputation on their visa.”

Scouting talent wasn’t the only difficulty Wicks and her team have faced. “The exciting thing is you really are pioneering,” she says. “The challenging thing is that pretty much every touchpoint in producing news for television needs refinement or change.”

One key issue is that the text entry system doesn’t much like Mandarin or Arabic script, and it really can’t stand text running from right to left. That has, at times, played havoc with the autocue, one of the most essential elements of any TV newsroom.

“You can just lose the fonts out of the system,” she says. “Our TV side of the business had not previously had to deal with that.”

Despite the subtitles and Scandi-noir, it’s easy for English speakers to lose sight of the centrality of language in the ambitious project that was and still is the Special Broadcasting Service.

It started life in 1975 as two radio stations, 2EA in Sydney and 3EA in Melbourne, each licensed originally for just three months with the aim of informing ethnic communities about the federal government’s plans to introduce Medibank (the Whitlam-era precursor to Medicare). In 1978, it became SBS, and in 1980 the TV station was launched.

Back then, the dominant languages were Greek, Italian, Maltese and Polish. The mix today is much broader, the weighting very different and every five years the broadcaster undertakes a review to ensure it is adequately prioritising groups according to their numbers in the community and their needs. According to the 2016 census, Mandarin was the dominant tongue among the 5 million Australians who speak a language other than English at home, with Arabic second. Any changes from the most recent review, based on the 2021 census results, will begin to flow through next year.

Much of the impetus for the new bulletins came, says Wicks, from the pandemic, and the renewed sense that SBS had a key role to play in communicating vital health directives to its disparate audiences in ways they could easily understand.

“Within five days [of the pandemic being declared in March 2020], we realised we needed to set up a coronavirus portal,” she says. “Restrictions were sometimes changing twice a day, and we realised we needed to be that essential service, just like in 1975.”

But beyond the immediate health concerns, it’s the notion of a harmonious society composed of many disparate parts that guides SBS.

“It’s important that the bulletins also reflect other cultures and communities within their service,” says Wicks. “We ask that the Mandarin service cover Ramadan [and] the Arabic service cover Lunar New Year because that’s part of the remit of social cohesion.” She adds that multicultural communities “are really interested in First Nations stories – they want to understand the history, the issues, to have a point of view.”

Delivering on that mission starts at the beginning of each day, when the various news divisions meet to talk about what they’re covering. “The teams – World News, NITV, the Arab and Mandarin services – take things from each other, to build that understanding so that we’re a more coherent community,” says Wicks.

“We listen to each other, and understand where each other is coming from.”

Email the author at kquinn@theage.com.au, or follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on Twitter @karlkwin

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