Comparative Online News Journalism Analysis

Comparative Online News Journalism Analysis

ABC Online News and Global Voice

Introduction

This article conducts a critical comparison of the reports released by the traditional mainstream media ABC News and the participatory news platform Global Voices after the 2025 Bondi Beach attack.

1. ABC Online News: abc.net.au/news

Publishing Context

As Australia’s national public broadcaster, ABC News primarily relies on government subsidies rather than commercial advertising to sustain its operations. This funding model enables ABC to prioritize public interest news reporting, especially during times of crisis when accuracy and timeliness are paramount.

The latest audience data further reinforces ABC’s dominant position in the Australian media market. According to the “Digital News Report Australia 2025”, ABC has long been ranked as one of the most reliable news media outlets.

Meanwhile, data from SimilarWeb for February indicates that the ABC News website has a high volume of traffic, making it an important gateway for the public to obtain information during emergencies.

Timeliness, accuracy and authority

As one of the earliest mainstream media outlets to report the news, ABC News’ article “At least 12 people dead as Bondi Beach attack declared act of terrorism”

adopted a typical style of breaking news writing, with concise language and a focus on facts. The information was presented in an inverted pyramid structure, with the most important details, including the time, location and number of casualties of the incident, prioritized in the opening paragraph. The overall tone was objective and neutral, with almost no subjective comments. The credibility of the news was enhanced through on-site reports, journalists’ signatures, and quotations from statements by the police and emergency services.

As one of the earliest mainstream media outlets to report this event, ABC’s coverage clearly relied on authoritative sources. This demonstrated the professional norms of traditional news in the early stages of an event, namely “emphasizing facts over explanations”, and also conformed to the role of traditional media as a source of authoritative information during uncertain times.

According to the Australian Financial Review, multiple false news reports about the incident were widely spread through AI-generated content and social media, reflecting the instability of the information ecosystem. These reports are highly likely to mislead the public’s perception and judgment. For the Bondi shooting case involving sensitive topics such as “shooting”, “death”, and “religion”, any slight mistake could lead to serious negative impacts.

This further highlights the importance of mainstream media outlets like ABC in reporting accurate information: providing timely and accurate information, stabilizing the public’s uneasy emotions, and controlling the spread of public opinion.

As Usher (2016) pointed out, professional journalism plays a crucial role in screening and verifying information in the digital environment.

Modular news structure builds a complete narrative

ABC does not merely release a single report. In the days or even months following the incident, different journalists continuously follow up on the aftermath and details of the event, providing ongoing updates from multiple perspectives, including the background of the perpetrator, the circumstances of the victims, witness statements, and “heroic acts”, thus forming a fragmented yet comprehensive reporting system.

This approach reflects the modular structure of digital journalism identified by Bradshaw (2023), in which news narratives are built incrementally across interconnected stories rather than in one definitive piece.

Multimedia digital presentation

ABC extensively employs multimedia elements to enhance the presentation of news, including live pictures, videos, and real-time updates, which heighten the immediacy and authenticity of the news. Its hyperlinks are mainly used for internal navigation, guiding users to explore more ABC-related reports and thus forming an information loop within the platform.

Meanwhile, ABC News provided information such as emergency call and psychological aid hotlines in the sidebar of the report, and they were also clickable hyperlinks. This not only demonstrated its function of providing public service support to the public, but also well showcased the digital design of online news.

A few months later,, ABC integrated videos taken by multiple witnesses before and after the event and published a deep report titled “Dozens of synced videos capture humanity amid horror of Bondi attack”. The report created a map showing multiple dynamic videos based on the witnesses’ locations at that time, demonstrating ABC’s strong resources and team for in-depth exploration of the information it wants to report and its powerful ability to integrate these public information resources.

Meanwhile, the report also employed digital presentation technology. As users browse through the written accounts of different eyewitnesses on the right side, the corresponding video and timeline are simultaneously displayed on the left side.

Overall, ABC’s financial structure, audience trust, extensive coverage capabilities, and digital media technologies have enabled it to become a major and authoritative source of information.

Meanwhile, this immersive digital storytelling reflects innovative forms of online journalism identified by Kulkarni, Thomas, Komorowski, & Lewis (2022), who highlight how visual integration and interactive design strengthen depth and engagement in digital news. Solidifying its core position in the contemporary news ecosystem.

2. Global Voices：https://globalvoices.org/

Publishing Context

Global Voices operates as a non-profit, participatory journalism platform that relies on volunteer contributors and decentralised funding sources such as grants and donations. Unlike ABC News, it does not aim to deliver immediate breaking news but instead focuses on interpretation and global perspectives.

In terms of audience and market position, Global Voices occupies a niche and globally distributed space within the digital media ecosystem. Its absence from large-scale audience reports such as the Digital News Report Australia (2025) reflects its relatively small scale and specialised readership, rather than a lack of relevance. Instead, it is better understood as part of a broader shift towards alternative and participatory forms of journalism.

In this Bondi incident, it did not pursue being the first to report, but rather placed more emphasis on explanatory content and a global perspective. Nine days after the incident, a report titled “Mass shooting at Hanukkah celebration at Australia’s Bondi Beach shows the best and worst of humanity” was published.

This positioning aligns with what Nikki Usher (2016) describes as networked journalism, in which news production is distributed across multiple actors and platforms rather than controlled by a single newsroom. In this model, participatory platforms such as Global Voices play a complementary role by aggregating, interpreting, and contextualising information produced elsewhere.

Unique digital media design for a global audience

One notable feature of Global Voices’ coverage of this event is its built-in multilingual reading function. At the beginning of the article, readers can directly switch to different language versions, such as Serbian, Spanish and Arabic.

This design reflects Global Voices’ global orientation and inclusive philosophy. Unlike media targeting a single national audience, this platform promotes cross-cultural communication through its language-switching feature, enabling readers from different language backgrounds to access information directly. From a technical and communication perspective, this function enhances the reach and distribution of content, allowing news to circulate between different regions without relying on external translation tools.

Multi-platform integrated reporting builds authority

Unlike ABC’s immediate reporting, Global Voices’ article did not offer new factual information but rather integrated content from multiple sources. Its credibility stemmed from references to mainstream media such as ABC, and it was published several days after the event, adopting a summary and analytical writing style. The focus was not on providing new information but on integrating existing reports and offering reflections.

This form of audience-oriented, interpretive work echoes the dynamics of online audience engagement discussed by Martin & Murrell (2021), who emphasise how journalists and platforms negotiate meaning with publics in digital spaces.

It is worth noting that the article contains a large number of external links, guiding readers to the original reporting sources from mainstream media such as ABC, including embedded videos covering “heroic figures.” It also integrates video content from other media outlets, which clearly demonstrates a “content curation” model of news production. As Guallar, Codina and Abadal (2020) define, journalistic content curation refers to the process of selecting, contextualizing and reprocessing existing information from multiple sources to create new analytical value. This indicates that participatory media depend on traditional media for first-hand, verified information, while enhancing its communicative and interpretive value through selective aggregation and critical reprocessing.

This model embodies a distinct approach to credibility construction, namely, establishing authority through multi-source citations and transparent links.

Conclusion

Overall, ABC News and Global Voices present information in their own distinct media roles and production models.

ABC has an advantage in the early stage of breaking news, with its clear structure, verified information, and integration of multimedia content, making it stand out in providing timely, accurate, and authoritative information. This is particularly important in the context of widespread misinformation.

In contrast, Global Voices’ contributors do not face the immediate public pressure to release accurate information at the first moment. They can deeply interpret the emotions and context of news from the subjective perspectives of journalists and contributors. By integrating multiple sources and adding commentaries, it helps readers understand events more comprehensively, but at the cost of lacking timeliness and first-hand information. This indicates that Global Voices mainly plays the role of a “secondary interpreter” in the news ecosystem, integrating scattered information into a more coherent narrative.

From the user’s perspective, ABC emphasizes clarity, authority, and timeliness, which aligns with Usher’s (2016) description of professional digital news; while Global Voices is more in line with participatory journalism, emphasizing interpretation and community perspectives.

Their effectiveness depends not on inherent superiority, but on the stage of news diffusion and audience need. ABC delivers the factual foundation; Global Voices builds interpretive meaning. Both reflect the complementary relationship between professional verification and participatory integration in the contemporary news ecosystem.

Word Count: 1579

References

Bradshaw, P. (2023). The online journalism handbook: Skills to survive and thrive in the digital age. Routledge.

Guallar, J., Codina, L., & Abadal, E. (2020). Content curation and journalism: An exploratory scoping review. Digital Journalism, 8(10), 1234–1252.

Kulkarni, S., Thomas, R., Komorowski, M., & Lewis, J. (2022). Innovating online journalism: New ways of storytelling. Journalism Practice, 1–16.

Martin, F., & Murrell, C. (2021). Negotiating the conversation: How journalists learn to interact with audiences online. Journalism Practice, 15(6), 839–859.

Usher, N. (2016). Interactive journalism: Hackers, data, and code. University of Illinois Press.

Australian Financial Review. (2025). The five fake Bondi attack stories spread by AI and social media.

Australian Broadcasting Corporation. (2025, December 14). At least 12 people dead as Bondi Beach attack declared act of terrorism. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-12-14/shooter-at-nsw-bondi-beach-sydney-eastern-suburbs/106141572

Australian Broadcasting Corporation. (2025, December 14). Bondi Beach shooting witnesses recall running for their lives as attack unfolded. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-12-14/nsw-bondi-beach-shooting-witnesses-sydney-attack/106141716

Australian Broadcasting Corporation. (2025, December 15). Parents of man who wrestled gun from Bondi Beach shooter call son a ‘hero’. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-12-15/bondi-beach-shooting-fruit-shop-gunman-hero-parents-speak/106143864

Australian Broadcasting Corporation. (2025, December 4). ABC is №1 for audience reach across streaming and broadcast in 2025. https://www.abc.net.au/about/media-centre/press-releases/abc-is-no-1-for-audience-reach-across-streaming-and-broadcast-in/106101904

Australian Broadcasting Corporation. (2026, February 28). Dozens of synced videos capture humanity amid horror of Bondi attack. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02-28/synchronised-video-timeline-bondi-terror-attack/106282432

Global Voices. (2025, December 23). Mass shooting at Hanukkah celebration at Australia’s Bondi Beach shows the best and worst of humanity. https://globalvoices.org/2025/12/23/mass-shooting-at-hanukkah-celebration-at-australias-bondi-beach-shows-the-best-and-worst-of-humanity/

SimilarWeb. (2025). Website overview for abc.net.au. https://www.similarweb.com/website/abc.net.au/#overview