There's a lesson from Swinburne University's exercise. Loads of great stories get missed by the mainstream media, write Margaret Simons, Andrew Dodd and Denis Muller.

On September 16, the Brumby state government tabled more than 200 annual reports of departments and statutory authorities in just one day. It’s a technique designed to ensure that no media organisation can possibly get through the lot.

So the Swinburne University of Technology journalism course decided to do something about it. We set our students to the task of holding the government to account, and scrutinising what all those reports said about life in Victoria in the lead-up to the state election.

There’s a lesson from Swinburne University’s exercise. Loads of great stories get missed by the mainstream media and our students unearthed many stories that have been missed by others. We’re not talking about yarns that the newspapers would hesitate to report. These are compelling and important issues that any media outlet would want to cover. Some are big stories, some deserve further investigation. All of them shed light on how Victoria is faring in the 11th year of Labor Government.

There are stories about contamination, crime, conflict and incompetence, about under-resourced welfare agencies and regional hospitals in unsustainable financial positions. There are examples of policy bungles, strained relations and under-performance. There are revelations about the finances of some of our biggest institutions and we see emerging trends across entire sectors that deserve greater exposure and discussion.

There appear to be several reasons why so many stories have so far gone unreported. The most obvious is that the state Government’s tactic of dumping so many reports at once clearly works.

Because the media operates on a 24-hour news cycle, newsrooms are loath to investigate a report even a day after it has been released. The tragedy of this is that while this is occurring, government and public administration are becoming more complex. Government agencies are also better at spin and managing embarrassing situations, meaning reporters have an even tougher job of finding out things. When these reports were made public, about five or six were scrutinised and formed the subject of news reports in mainstream media, meaning more than 190 received no attention. The news agenda moved on.

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Meanwhile, our students were burrowing in.

We didn’t know what to expect when we went down to the state Parliament last month the day after the reports were tabled, and walked around packing boxes. We swung back to the campus with the suspension of the cab straining under 10 boxes of tightly packed volumes. But after opening just a few reports and sampling the sort of information they contained, we knew this would be a fruitful exercise.

Crikey agreed to join forces. We invited the students in Swinburne’s journalism practice subject, as well as their cohorts in a politics unit dealing with the relationship between media and policy, to participate. Most participating students are in the first year of their degrees — not long out of school. We are proud of what they have achieved.

We divvied the material into 10 categories, ranging across topics such as “law” and “water”. When we had piles of reports left over, we devised strange categories, such as “Death/arts/tourism and the environment” and another simply called “Other”. We needed four categories for health, including one for all the metropolitan-based health agencies and three more for regional health bodies.

Promising improvements in regional health was one of the issues that brought Labor to power in 1999. Many of the issues turned up by those students reading regional hospital reports suggest that 11 years later, problems are emerging again. Several regional hospitals report they are in unsustainable financial positions.

Each student worked on about three or four reports. Some found stories immediately. Others had to dig. Some searched in vain, because there really wasn’t much worth reporting.

We particularly liked a beautifully written story, following exactly the preferred “who, what, where, when, why” inverted-pyramid formula, that was nevertheless not a yarn. A 3% increase in numbers on the Puffing Billy tourist railway. The second highest increase ever. Hold the front page — not.

We used a wiki for students to compare notes and post their lead paragraphs, and this enabled us to spot trends that required us to create new teams of reporters to piece together what was happening across a sector. These stories will take a while to emerge. The teams are still on the job.

Others found stories that were better suited for local publications and we’re working with them to place those with the best media outlets.

Another lesson we drew was that annual reporting is a variable exercise. Some agencies use the opportunity to get a message to the minister and the public, and pull few punches. Others cloak their message in polite bureaucratise and euphemism. Others waste the opportunity, issuing reports that are information light — little more than flim flam and public relations spin. They let down themselves and the public.

As a learning exercise, this was a success.

We think it has also worked as an exercise in serious journalism.

Crikey begins publishing stories from this exercise today. Together, the yarns published in Crikey and regional newspapers over the next few weeks tell us something about the texture of governance in Victoria.

Most of all, the exercise serves to remind us of the importance of investing in reporters who can do the job of finding out things.