Sophie Hanson has a message for journos and PRs hoping to work with Junkee or Punkee – stop sending pitches that could have gone to anyone.

“Please look at our social feeds and our site to see the types of things we’re covering across Junkee and Punkee,” pleaded Hanson, who has been Head of Editorial at Junkee Media since December last year. “I cannot tell you how many completely irrelevant press releases I get. Some of them not even addressing me by name.”

After half a decade working in the US, Hanson now oversees two youth media mastheads with related but distinct identities.

Junkee remains focused on thoughtful pop culture coverage across film, music, TV and video games. Meanwhile, Punkee has moved away from its reality-TV associations and towards fashion, beauty, lifestyle, mental health and self-care.

Hanson advises journos and PRs to understand which masthead they are pitching, explain how the story will work on social media, and provide a compelling angle.

“We are a social-first publication, so all of our stories do need to have the social element,” Hanson said. “They need to have how it’s going to be packaged across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, even.”

Junkee was already well established when Hanson started her current role.

“What we’re good at is thoughtful pop culture coverage, whether that be film, music, TV, video games,” she said.

Punkee is at a different point in its evolution. Hanson describes it as being in a “brand rebuilding” and “audience retraining” phase.

“Punkee hasn’t covered reality TV for a while, but we’re still finding that we come up against, ‘Oh, is Punkee still covering Married at First Sight?’”

By audience retraining, Hanson means, “Writing stories and creating videos for the audience we want, not the audience we have.”

Hanson said Punkee is now coming at fashion, beauty and lifestyle from an “elevated but still very grounded space”. But she emphasises that does not mean fast-fashion roundups, affiliate links or generic product plugs.

Hanson says Junkee looks outward, while Punkee looks inward.

“The way I like to think about them is that Junkee is… how our audience perceive and understand the world. Whereas Punkee is how we perceive and understand ourselves.”
With tech increasingly central to young people’s lives, that’s a beat Hanson is interested in exploring more.

“Tech a little bit we are getting into, but we’re by no means experts,” she said. “I think the way we would cover tech, again, [is] coming from that personal perspective.”

Hanson regards nurturing young talent as the most rewarding part of her job and welcomes pitches from freelancers. But she expects freelance contributors to bring something fresh to the table. 

“Pop culture, we pretty much have handled in-house, unless it’s something extraordinary or with a unique perspective that we cannot offer from one of our writers,” she said. “The priorities for freelancers are news and current affairs, social justice, those sorts of angles, because they are the kind of areas we don’t have covered in-house.”

Underpinning Hanson’s editorial approach is a scepticism about the media industry’s obsession with “content”.

“Ultimately, we are storytellers. That’s what we are,” she said. “We tell stories. We employ journalistic practices to our storytelling. And I think that’s what all audiences want.”

She cited former Esquire editor-in-chief David Granger’s criticism of ‘content’, saying it treats anything that fills a space as having equal value.

“We’ve devalued storytelling by taking that quantity over quality approach.”

Hanson said she is already seeing fatigue with the short-form clip economy and does not believe young audiences are allergic to longer-form content.

“My team… want to write long-form stories, they want to produce long-form stories.”

Hanson believes evocative storytelling is the key to long-term survival for media of all kinds.
“If you are to survive in this business, and I mean really survive in the media business, you have to stick to that – writing and producing stories that make people feel something,” she said. “Not cheapening it with just a volume approach. That’s not going to work.”

Hanson said the struggles of other youth media brands, such as Vice and BuzzFeed, offered cautionary lessons. Vice pursued “very aggressive global expansion”, accrued debt and was hit by falling digital ad spend, while BuzzFeed’s problems tied back to “that quantity over quality approach” and “putting all your eggs in one basket” by relying heavily on Google.
“I think the reason Junkee and Punkee have survived is because they’ve continued to evolve,” Hanson said. “I would still very much say a bit of a start-up scrappy attitude is the key to survival. We are small enough so that if we notice a trend in media and how people are consuming these stories, we can adapt pretty quickly.”

Hanson points out that while social media is useful for discovery, it is not a magic bullet for audience loyalty.

“Social media has been wonderful for discovery, but we’re constantly examining and thinking about what is it that makes our audiences come back to our mastheads?” she said.

Hanson suspects that the next big media trend – in the midst of a loneliness epidemic – may be publications attempting to foster deeper connections with their audiences.

“With our target demo, I think taking Junkee and Punkee out in the wild and connecting with our readers in a community context will be really important going forward.”