The Age, Sydney Morning Herald use data journalism to hook audiences, boost subscriptions

By Craig Butt

National Data Editor

The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, Brisbane Times, and WAToday

Melbourne, Australia

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Data journalism is often assumed to involve highly technical stories that feature complicated graphs, maps, and other visualisations.

The Age and Sydney Morning Herald's "Do You Earn Enough?" interactive took a different design approach to focus on what our audiences want: Content that feels personal, is relevant, and easy to understand. We used data to give people a tailored tour of their job and suburb, presented in a mobile-first format that was simple to grasp.

The data-driven journalism offered just enough information for non-subscribers that it convinced many to subscribe, making the interactive piece the second-highest converting story of the year when it was published.

The interactive works by asking readers to enter two pieces of information - their job and their suburb. From there, it takes them through a host of information, such as their job's average income, how it ranks among more than 1,000 jobs, the number of people who do that job in the reader's suburb, the most common jobs in their suburb, and more.

The data itself is primarily from the Australian census. However, with more than 500,000 possible job and suburb combinations for each state, it was a challenge to obtain, analyse, and process the information.

Anyone who uses the interactive encounters only a tiny fraction of the entire data set, since they only see the data specific to their job and suburb.

The interactive was custom built by our developers, and it is the first time we - or any publication in Australia - have used this format to present detailed data to online audiences. We drew inspiration from end-of-year wraps from apps such as Spotify and YouTube that break down listening or viewing habits from the past year.

The data was also used for a series of stories in print and online, highlighting jobs with surprisingly high earnings, unusual jobs, and how essential workers were increasingly being priced out of inner-city suburbs.

One story pinpointing the Sydney suburbs with the most teachers, lawyers, CEOs, and other jobs was accompanied by an illustrated map that proved so popular with readers it was turned into a tea towel and is now being sold in our online store.

Not only did this interactive drive engagement, but it also resonated deeply with audiences, becoming the highest-converting story in July and the second-highest of the year when it was published.

Even with major news stories competing for attention - the assassination attempt on former U.S. President Donald Trump, the CrowdStrike outage, the U.K. election, and U.S. President Joe Biden withdrawing from the U.S. election - it was still the eighth most-read story.

This demonstrates how personalised content can capture readers' interest.

The interactive was placed behind a paywall, tying into our content strategy for premium content. But to entice people to try the interactive, we built a "teaser" interactive that was embedded in stories to give readers a preview of what they could learn from the main interactive.

The teaser interactive allowed people to enter their job to see its average income and from there follow a link to the main paywalled content to explore more details.

The Age and SMH were among the first media companies in Australia to see the potential of data journalism. Investing in it has paid conversion dividends with data stories among our most popular and highest-converting content.

Data journalism leverages the power and interactivity of digital media to draw in audiences with personalised insights from large data sets, satisfying reader curiosity and fuelling subscription growth.

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About Craig Butt

Craig Butt is the national data editor at The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, Brisbane Times, and WAToday in Melbourne, Australia.

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