About Sydney Today

Sydney Today

Sydney Today is a Chinese-language digital news outlet serving Chinese Australians, operated by the Sydney-based Media Today Group (今日传媒), which also maintains offices in Melbourne and Brisbane. Founded in 2010, it grew from a Sina Weibo account created to give Chinese students in Sydney practical information into a multi-platform operation spanning a website at sydneytoday.com, a WeChat subscription account and its own news app. Academic and policy research consistently identifies it as Australia's biggest digital Chinese-language news outlet: University of Technology Sydney (UTS) research recorded about 620,000 WeChat subscribers by February 2020 and around 100,000 daily active users, roughly 60 per cent of them via the app, while the Lowy Institute's 2021 report Translating Tension estimated the parent group's circulation at 600,000. Sydney Today's model is aggregation-led: content analysis by UTS scholar Wanning Sun found that 57 per cent of its stories are compilations and only 5 per cent original reporting, with 91 per cent of its Australia-focused compilations drawn from English-language Australian media and government sources. It is catalogued here under China with Beijing as a nominal location because it belongs to the rollout's overseas-Chinese media category; its actual base and audience are in Sydney, Australia.

Origins on Sina Weibo in 2010

Sydney Today began in 2010, when founders Stan Chen and Roc Zhang registered the "SydneyToday" account on Sina Weibo, the Chinese microblogging platform. Their initial purpose was modest and practical: to provide information to the large population of Chinese students in Sydney — the everyday guidance on housing, transport, study and city life that newcomers needed and that neither Australian mainstream media nor media in China supplied in Chinese. The timing was fortunate. The early 2010s saw rapid growth both in Chinese migration and student numbers in Australia and in the smartphone-centred media habits of younger Chinese readers. From the Weibo beginning, the operation expanded in step with its audience's platforms: a dedicated website, a subscription account on Tencent's WeChat as that app became the default information channel for Chinese speakers in Australia, and eventually its own news app, which by 2020 accounted for the majority of its daily usage. The Lowy Institute's Translating Tension report dates the parent, Media Today, to 2010 and attributes its founding to Chen Ming, with an estimated circulation of 600,000 — figures that reflect how completely a student-information account had become a general news business within a decade.

Media Today Group and geographic reach

The outlet's operator, Media Today Group (今日传媒), is based in Sydney and maintains offices in Melbourne and Brisbane, matching the geography of Australia's largest Chinese communities. Although the brand retains "Sydney" in its name, its content operation serves Chinese Australians nationally, covering federal politics, immigration policy, property, education and consumer news alongside city-level service information. The group is a commercial, advertising-financed business: UTS research on Chinese digital media in Australia noted as early as 2016 that outlets of this kind are "mostly financed through advertising revenue," and Sydney Today's scale — hundreds of thousands of subscribers in a national Chinese-ancestry population that the 2016 census counted at about 1.2 million, of whom roughly 510,000 were born in China and 597,000 spoke Mandarin at home — made it an unavoidable channel for businesses and, increasingly, political campaigns seeking to reach Chinese-Australian voters. Its position at the centre of that advertising and attention market is the commercial foundation on which its news operation rests.

Platforms: website, WeChat and app

Sydney Today's distribution is a case study in platform migration within diaspora media. Its WeChat subscription account became its flagship channel during the 2010s: UTS figures put subscribers at 370,000 in 2016 — 85 per cent of them based in Australia — rising to about 620,000 by February 2020. WeChat's all-in-one design, combining messaging, social feeds and payment functions, made its Official Accounts the natural newsstand for Mandarin-speaking readers, and researchers identified Sydney Today, ABC Media and We Sydney as the three most prominent WeChat news providers in Australia, each estimated to have more than 100,000 subscribers. At the same time, Sydney Today hedged its platform dependence by building its own app, and the February 2020 UTS figures — about 100,000 daily active users, around 60 per cent via the app — show that strategy working. The website at sydneytoday.com anchors the operation independently of any single social platform. This multi-channel structure matters for understanding the outlet: decisions about what travels on WeChat, where accounts registered in China face content controls, can differ from what the app and website carry, a distinction researchers examining the sector have repeatedly stressed.

How its news is made: compilation and translation

The most precise account of Sydney Today's editorial method comes from Wanning Sun's content research at UTS. Analysing the outlet's output, Sun found that 57 per cent of its news stories are compilations and only about 5 per cent are original reporting. Of its Australia-focused compilations, 91 per cent are drawn from English-language Australian media and government sources — that is, the outlet's core journalistic labour is selecting, translating and repackaging Australian news for Chinese-reading audiences, supplemented by material from PRC media and by user-generated content. UTS's summary of the sector describes the same model: these outlets "do not always generate news content, but instead translate news and current affairs from a wide range of English-language media outlets in Australia on the one hand, and from PRC media on the other, while providing links to the original stories." For its audience, that translation function is the product: readers who cannot comfortably follow Australian news in English receive the day's significant stories — crime, weather, policy changes, property and education news, community events — in Chinese, quickly and in a familiar app environment. The model also defines the outlet's vulnerabilities: its journalism is only as strong as its selection and translation choices, which outside researchers have scrutinised closely.

Role in Australian public life and elections

Because of its reach, Sydney Today has become a factor in Australian politics. Australian politicians of both major parties opened WeChat accounts to reach Chinese-Australian voters — Prime Minister Scott Morrison in early 2019, Opposition Leader Bill Shorten earlier, and Chris Bowen, the first federal politician to use WeChat Live — and outlets such as Sydney Today are the arena in which that outreach is reported and judged. A 2025 UTS account of a campaign controversy involving Liberal senator Jane Hume's "Chinese spies" remark on the Sunrise programme showed the mechanism in action: within hours a clip circulated on WeChat, and Sydney Today, described as "the widely read Chinese-language digital outlet," published an article reporting "unanimous condemnation of Hume, without a single comment defending her" — a piece of community-sentiment reporting that itself became part of the political story. Researchers have likewise documented Sydney Today stories shaping contests, including coverage of a "popularity contest" on WeChat between Labor and Liberal candidates in the seat of Reid. For candidates of Chinese heritage, the platform ecosystem Sydney Today anchors is a primary campaign medium.

Scrutiny: influence, omission and the WeChat question

Sydney Today's prominence has drawn sustained academic and policy scrutiny of Chinese-language media in Australia. A joint UTS–University of Melbourne style research programme comparing WeChat news channels with SBS Mandarin found that the WeChat channels studied, Sydney Today among the three examined, published no articles on Chinese politics and foreign affairs from March 2017 through the end of the collection period, and that of the 37 earlier articles on such topics, 32 closely resembled reports from China's domestic news agencies. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute's 2020 research on CCP influence in Australian Chinese-language media reported that Sydney Today, which has Australia's most popular WeChat news account, published translated articles about an ASIO and federal police raid connected to a foreign-interference investigation but omitted parts of the original Sydney Morning Herald and ABC reporting that explained why Australia had enacted foreign-interference laws and that described United Front links of a staffer involved. Researchers attribute such patterns substantially to platform structure: WeChat encourages accounts to register in China, where they are subject to censorship and information control, and limits internationally registered accounts to four posts a month. Sydney Today thus sits at the centre of a genuine analytical puzzle — how much of its editorial pattern reflects its owners' choices, and how much reflects the constraints of the Tencent platform on which its largest channel depends.

Audience and significance

By the measures available, Sydney Today is the largest single Chinese-language digital news brand in Australia: roughly 620,000 WeChat subscribers by 2020 against a Chinese-ancestry population of about 1.2 million counted in 2016, 100,000 daily active users, and a Lowy Institute circulation estimate of 600,000 for its parent group. Its audience spans international students — its founding constituency — recent migrants, and established Chinese-Australian families, concentrated in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. For this audience it performs the classic diaspora-media functions at digital scale: practical settlement information, translated local news, community notices and a Chinese-language window on Australian public life. Its compilations make Australian institutions legible to readers whom English-language media underserve, which is why Wanning Sun and other scholars treat such outlets as important civic infrastructure as well as commercial media — and why their editorial patterns attract the attention of election strategists, regulators and foreign-influence researchers alike.

Position among overseas-Chinese media

Within this directory's China rollout, Sydney Today is included under the overseas-Chinese precedent applied to outlets such as Wenxuecity, Creaders and Skykiwi: Chinese-language platforms whose editorial subject is substantially China-connected communities abroad, catalogued with Beijing as a nominal location while their real bases are stated plainly. In Sydney Today's case the record is unambiguous — founded in Sydney in 2010, operated by Media Today Group from Sydney with Melbourne and Brisbane offices, publishing in Chinese for Australians. Its fifteen-year trajectory from a student Weibo account to Australia's most-studied diaspora news platform makes it one of the best-documented examples anywhere of how WeChat-era media reorganised information life in a Chinese diaspora community, and a standard reference point in the scholarly literature produced by UTS's Australia-China Relations Institute, the Lowy Institute and others. Readers seeking its current output can find it at sydneytoday.com and through its WeChat account and app.