Prosocial Innovative Digital Storytelling in Australian Journalism as a Form of Connective Action

The final speaker in this ANZCA 2023 session is Caryn Coatney, whose focus is on the data journalism of the ABC’s Digital Story Innovation team. Data journalism has evolved considerably over the past years, with the initial focus on data visualisation giving way to a broader role that in some news organisations also includes the maximising of news content engagement metrics through clickbait. Elsewhere, there is a greater focus on prosocial roles for data journalism, and a shift beyond data journalism in a narrow sense and towards more innovative digital storytelling.

Such digital storytelling made a significant difference for instance in the case of the #MeToo movement, where it included data investigations and visualisations as well as innovative reporting. Similarly, in Australia the ABC’s Digital Story Innovation team have innovatively covered the mishandling of sexual harassment complaints by Australian police. In 2021, this won the international Sigma Award for its reporting.

Such investigative journalism can become a form of networked action that creates social change. The ABC team began with a deep investigation of police responses to sexual assaults, which exposed a secret police culture that often failed to respond adequately to reports of assaults; their public stance towards these issues took the side of victims, and their initial reporting and social media activity pressured authorities into revealing more information about the hidden extent of sexual assault cases in Australia.

This also highlighted the voices of survivors and brought the problem home to audiences by providing localised, searchable data on sexual assault cases; some of these were also re-enacted in the Rough Justice series. Police in some Australian jurisdictions eventually and reluctantly agreed to release their own data on sexual assaults; ABC journalists reported critically on these releases and examined the results forensically, too.

This might be seen as following a logic of connective action: journalists willingly discarded their disinterested stance and instead produced inclusive writing, first-person narratives, and news revelations of a social justice movement, which in turn elicited more scoops and pressured police into releasing further data.