Jan Fran
The teacher said, ‘Let’s go round the room and everyone can tell us what they watched last night,’” Jan Fran told the Shameless podcast, recalling a moment from her school days. While her classmates mentioned popular sitcoms and soap operas, Fran had a very different answer. “‘The news.’ I think the class just went completely silent. Even my friend, who was sitting next to me, turned and mouthed ‘the news? You watched the news?’”
Now an accomplished journalist, media commentator and broadcaster, it was this sense of curiosity and engagement with social issues from a young age that set the foundation for Fran to pursue a passion for journalism and storytelling.
“I was also aware of how powerful the media is,” Fran tells WellBeing. “How powerful it is in shaping stories, and shaping perceptions of people, and how wrong it can be, especially when you grow up in a community where the media representation of you does not match your lived experience within that community at all. I was very conscious of these things, and it kind of felt like [journalism] was the direction that I was always going to head.”
Fran has filmed documentaries around the world and created her own award-winning online opinion and analysis series to help engage young people in current affairs. She’s also co-host of the ABC’s Question Everything and is known for her work on SBS’s The Feed and Channel 10’s The Project.
But alongside her journalistic accomplishments, Fran is an advocate for giving a voice to those who feel unheard. She’s an ambassador for Plan International, an organisation that aims to advance equality for girls around the world, an ambassador for the Whitlam Institute’s What Matters? writing competition to help young people share their opinions on what’s important to them, and has used her platform and influence to be an advocate for issues that affect women, girls and minority groups.
The power of media
Born in a village in northern Lebanon, Fran and her family moved to Australia when she was four years old, settling in Bankstown in western Sydney, an area with one of the city’s highest Arabic populations.
Her father had a big influence on Fran as a child by nurturing a sense of curiosity and by always questioning things. “He was always very intellectually rigorous,” says Fran. “He’s an incredibly intelligent man. He’s a very widely read man. He was always very sceptical of power and the kind of the havoc that it can wreak on people.”
While growing up in Sydney, Fran was disappointed and, at times, angry at how the media portrayed Lebanese Australians and others in the local Middle Eastern community.
“We had really a barrage of negative perceptions in and around the community that just was not matching up to my experiences of the community that I was in,” says Fran. “I grew up in the late 90s and early 2000s, those were my formative coming-of-age years in the western suburbs. At the time, there was a lot of tension between institutions like the police, the media and the Lebanese community.
“There was a lot of negative reporting around Lebanese people. There was a series of gang rapes that happened in the year 2000, that spurred on reporting that suggested that, you know, all Lebanese men were racist misogynists and that Lebanese people couldn’t assimilate. Then, of course, September 11 happened, and they’re suddenly [viewed as] terrorists. Then the Cronulla riots [racially motivated riots that occurred in Sydney in 2005] happened a few years later. And suddenly you were somebody that was ruining Australian society and couldn’t assimilate.”
Giving girls a voice
But it was this sense of frustration at how the media was misrepresenting communities, and often making her feel as though she didn’t have a voice to speak up about it as a young woman, that inspired Fran to want to give a platform to others, particularly to women and girls.
“Part of the kind of work that I want to do, and the causes that are close to my heart, really revolve around girls. And when I say girls, I mean teenagers and young women,” says Fran.
Part of this work is through her role as an ambassador for Plan International, an independent development and humanitarian organisation that strives to advance children’s rights and equality for girls. Just some of the ways they do this are by working with partners to provide education programs to children affected by humanitarian crises, teaching women about sexual and reproductive health and influencing governments and the United Nations (UN) agenda on children’s rights issues, with a particular focus on girls and young women.
“One of the things that Plan does — among the work that they do in various countries around the world in terms of alleviating poverty and [advancing] girls’ education — is that they really strive to give girls a voice,” explains Fran.
“Growing up … I felt as though my voice was sort of taken, or that I was spoken over, or spoken for, or I didn’t have a platform, and felt very disempowered by that. So a charity that works with girls, and having a remit of giving voices back to girls, was really important to me, and was something that attracted me to Plan from the beginning.”
One of the things that Fran thinks need to happen is to give young girls a platform to speak up. “I think that they should be taken more seriously in matters that specifically pertain to them,” explains Fran, who says she’s undecided about her thoughts on whether the voting age should be lowered to 16 or not. “But I think it’s a very interesting idea, because, 16-year-olds, they drive, they can participate in the economy, they work, they pay tax. Why shouldn’t they get the right to vote and really have a voice in who represents them and the changes they want to see made?”
What matters?
Another way that Fran has been helping to give a voice to young people is through her role as an ambassador for the annual What Matters? writing competition, which is run by The Whitlam Institute, a research and policy Think Tank within Western Sydney University.
The 2024 competition was the program’s 20th anniversary year. More than 5000 students in years five to 12 from 1251 schools across Australia entered the competition, each writing a 600-word piece of fiction, non-fiction, poetry or prose, expressing their views on things that are important to them. Topics ranged from friendship, homelessness, democracy, artificial intelligence and Palestine.
“It’s a similar reason to why I got involved with Plan, to really encourage young people whose voices are not often heard, to take part in what I think are democracy-building exercises,” explains Fran. “To say to them, ‘This is your country as well, and you have a right to be heard and for you to determine, or for you to at least have a say, in how this country should be run and how you should be represented.’”
Fran is so committed to the initiative and passionate about giving more girls an opportunity to be heard that, next year, she plans to encourage more young women of colour from public schools in western Sydney to enter the prize. She says that it’s channels like this which provide the kind of platform that she never had access to. “I just think about my time growing up in western Sydney, and the platforms that I didn’t have,” says Fran. “I would like to provide them for those [girls] today.”
The competition winner’s school library receives a curated selection of books focused on active citizenship, civics and democracy from the Museum of Australian Democracy, as well as winning a trophy and cash prize. Additional sponsored prizes include access to writing classes and author visits. One entry is also awarded a trip to Canberra to spend the day at Parliament House shadowing political speechwriters and journalists in the Press Gallery.
The Frant
Fran has always recognised journalism as a powerful tool to drive change, but also saw it as a platform to get important stories in front of people who might not engage with traditional media such as television or newspapers.
One of the ways she has reached young people — who are more used to getting information online in short, sharp Tik-Tok-style soundbites — has been through her online opinion and analysis series, The Frant.
Fran is the creator, writer and presenter of the series. In these short videos, Fran gives commentary on social issues such as Australia’s climate policy and gender inequality, told with her trademark wit and humour. The videos live online, mostly being viewed on social media, and are typically only a few minutes long. It’s a format that has proven popular as they have collectively reached more than 20 million views since beginning in 2018.
A popular episode of The Frant is an explainer on what the gender pay gap really is. It’s a topic that needs more conversations. According to Plan International, more than a third of all Australians (37 per cent) still do not believe there is a gender pay gap, although Aussie women still take home an annual salary on average $25,596 lower than their male counterparts.
The episode was so well received that, alongside two other episodes of The Frant, it resulted in Fran receiving the 2019 Walkley Award for Best Commentary, Analysis, Opinion & Critique. The accompanying episodes were on the myth of getting jobs based on “merit”, and on biased media reporting after the Christchurch massacre. The latter was viewed five million times on social media, according to The Walkley Foundation.
Fran also understands the power of social media more broadly to affect change – and she isn’t afraid to engage with her followers. In March 2024, Fran posted a video to encourage people to donate to Plan International’s urgent appeal to help get food and necessities to people in need of aid in Gaza. According to Plan International Australia, Fran’s post alone resulted in them receiving more than $49,000 in donations.
Saying “no” to new fashion
Working in the media often comes with the obligation of looking a certain way on camera. But unlike a lot of her colleagues in a front-facing television role, Fran has sworn off buying new clothes since 2019, and her advocating for this has inspired others to do so.
It’s a decision that helps not just her pocket but the environment too. According to Berlin-based thinktank Hot or Cool Institute, Australians buy more cheap fashion than any other wealthy nation and need to reduce their clothing consumption by 74 per cent to combat global heating.
With the exception of a few basic items like stockings, Fran has not purchased a new item of clothing in five years, instead sourcing her clothes through op-shops, vintage stores and Facebook Marketplace.
“The catalyst was the fact that I was hosting a nightly show on SBS and I was just expected to wear something new every night,” says Fran. After accumulating so many clothes for the show, Fran and the show’s stylist started to question why they were buying so many new items, especially as they were tailored to Fran’s size and the “look” of the show, making it unlikely they would ever be reused. “No other presenter really is going to wear them … They’re just going to end up either gathering dust here or being thrown out or not used at all.”
Together, Fran and the show’s SBS team pledged to go without buying new clothes for a year. While Fran left SBS mid-year, she has continued to say no to buying new clothes ever since. Followers have reached out on social media to tell Fran how seeing her journey inspired them to try the slow-fashion life too. “Usually, every time I do a post, or every time I post about a really good retail place that only does slow fashion, people will jump into my DMs and say, ‘Hey, I’m trying to not buy anything new for a month!’” says Fran. “I’m always super chuffed.”
With all her efforts to advocate and give a voice to those who are traditionally unheard — women and girls, the environment, young people, or minority groups — hearing about the impact she’s had on others is a reminder of why she does what she does.
Fran was once approached in the street by a Syrian man who recognised her from her online videos. Recounting the moment on the Wilosophy podcast, Fran said that the man told her that he’d arrived in Australia only two years prior and that he loved her videos as they helped him better learn and understand what Australia is about.
“I felt really honoured by that,” Fran told Wilosophy, pleased that her videos had helped someone understand Australian society on a deeper level. “I centre minority audiences and women quite a lot, and so when they do come up to you and say, ‘I’ve learned a lot from your work’ or ‘thank you for your work’ or ‘I appreciate your work’, it just puts into perspective the whole reason why I do what I do.”
