ABC News' long-form journalism pays off on Twitter

As they face a changing market for journalistic content, Australian news organisations are increasingly being forced to experiment with new approaches to telling their stories. The Australian Twitter News Index (ATNIX) for July 2017 shows that some new formats for investigative reports can generate considerable audience engagement – but old-fashioned commentary and opinion pieces also still manage to attract an audience.

Most notably, on 10 July 2017 ABC News recorded a significant increase in the number of tweets sharing its articles. This was due entirely to political editor Chris Uhlmann’s strident criticism of the Trump administration (2,700 tweets that day), published from the sidelines of the G20 summit in Hamburg.

Given the strong and well-documented international response to Uhlmann’s comments, the article actually receives fewer tweets than we might expect. His comments were republished or excerpted in text and video by news outlets around the world, so Twitter users did not necessarily need to go searching for the original piece.

Still, over the course of the entire month the story was shared some 5,300 times on Twitter, making it the most widely shared ABC News article in July by a considerable margin. In keeping with a pattern established over past months, by contrast, the other major ABC News stories for the month retain a strong domestic focus.

A major report on the sexual abuse of women by evangelical Christians was shared 2,300 times; coverage of Elon Musk’s plans to build the world’s largest lithium ion battery in South Australia received 2,200 tweets. Another special report on leaked documents exposing human rights abuses by Australian special forces in Afghanistan was shared 2,100 times; and coverage of a new map of historic massacres of indigenous Australians since 1788 was shared in 1,500 tweets.

The presence of two special reports is especially noteworthy here. These reports are long-form and investigative, presented in a format distinct from ordinary ABC News articles. We’ve seen these appear from time to time, and the inclusion of two such dossiers in ABC News’ most shared articles during July clearly shows the strong public demand to this form of content.

In the midst of considerable staff cuts in the commercial media, the public broadcaster is now one of the last major news organisations in Australia that is still able to conduct complex investigative reporting on key public interest issues. The response on Twitter indicates that the national news audience is rewarding such efforts with its engagement.

The Sydney Morning Herald did not manage to attract quite as much attention this month. Its top story for July is an opinion piece decrying conservative media outlets’ sustained ad feminam attacks on Yassmin Abdel-Magied (1,700 tweets).

Other key articles include a report on UN claims that the Australian government reneged on a refugee resettlement agreement (1,500 tweets), on the failure of Philip Morris’s court case against plain tobacco packaging laws (1,400 tweets), and on federal MPs’ refusal to sign up to the “Fitzgerald Principles” for ethical conduct (1,300 tweets). Another opinion piece rounds out the top five: Ross Gittins’s criticism of the federal government’s new homeland security regime is shared in 1,200 tweets.

It’s striking that two of the top five SMH articles in July were opinion pieces. In light of the commercial difficulties Fairfax is facing, it may well choose to focus increasingly on comparatively inexpensive-to-produce commentary, while ceding yet more of the business of investigative journalism to ABC News and other publications.

Longer-term trends in content production and audience engagement will see such strategies emerge more clearly.

The data on the total number of visits to each news site by Australian internet users see ABC News well ahead of nearest rivals Nine News and The Age for the second month in a row; this extends an unexpected decline especially in Nine News’ numbers since the end of May.

However, news.com.au and the Sydney Morning Herald still remain well ahead of the pack and their comparative market dominance seems unlikely to change any time soon.

It’s also notable that at a domestic level, ABC News does not record a major increase in visits as a result of Chris Uhlmann’s G20 piece on 10 July; this points clearly to the fact that most of the additional attention to that article came from overseas.

Twitter may have played its role in the viral dissemination of Uhlmann’s criticism; but, as we now know from subsequent coverage, mainstream reporting and republishing of Uhlmann’s views by major US and UK outlets soon followed.