Spotlight on Clare Blumer
Winner of the 2020 Walkley Award for All Media: Innovation with Dylan Welch, Alexander Palmer and Suzanne Dredge
“Anatomy of a suicide bombing”
“Journalism can create change. And what I do now, digital production for the ABC Investigations team, my whole job is to get our stories out to as many different people as we can and explain the stories to them properly.”
“Anatomy of a suicide bombing” mixed written, audio and video content in a way never seen before. Working with helmet-camera video by a US national guardsman, Dylan Welch, Alex Palmer, Clare Blumer and Suzanne Dredge created a compelling first-person experience of a suicide bomb attack by a child on an Australian official and his US bodyguards in Afghanistan. The impact of the finished piece was twofold — revealing the dirty underbelly of an often-censored war and doing it in an innovative and immersive manner.
We spoke with ABC Investigations’ digital journalist Clare Blumer about how they told the story in a simple yet successful way, the importance of a diversity of voices in journalism, and the reckoning moment for Australia’s defence force.
How does it feel to be recognised by your peers in the industry for this particular piece of work?
It’s really great to be recognised for this one — it’s a really difficult subject matter [and] something that is very difficult sometimes to get the audience to engage with, so to also have our peers recognise it is fantastic. It’s also sometimes difficult to have the digital production side of things recognised. Winning this Innovation award recognises that process — we spent a lot of time working on digital production.
How did you come across this story?
David Savage, who’s the person in the story who is approached by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan in 2012, had that footage because the US sergeant who was employed to protect him had his helmet camera on. When this happened, eight years ago at this point, it was a very rare insight into life as usual for soldiers and people on the ground in Afghanistan who were engaged in the war effort. Savage wasn’t there with Defence, he was there with AusAID, trying to investigate how they were going to rebuild the province of Uruzgan after decades of war.
On this particular mission, he was surrounded by these American soldiers who were wearing helmet cams as they’re walking through the village. As they’re on this journey, there are some indications that maybe it’s not a very safe place to be. And by the end of the video you see all that led up to the explosion and immediately after.
There was an inquiry into it — David Savage produced the helmet cam footage, which he’d obtained from the American soldier. He feels like that footage wasn’t properly taken into consideration by the ADF when they were doing their inquiry into the suicide bombing and his terrible injuries that resulted from it. That’s when he came to Dylan Welch, who’s actually been over in Afghanistan at various times, and the Investigations team and said, “Look, I really want this shown to the Australian public so they can understand for themselves and assess whether or not the inquiry found the right outcome”.
The story was in the background for Dylan and Suzanne, the researcher, for months if not years, and then one day it was finally going to happen — we suddenly had an airdate with 7:30 — and Dylan said, “I think this would make a really good online story, but how long do we have?” Because it’s technically quite difficult to achieve — what we did. That’s when we knew we had to engage Alex Palmer, the designer in the ABC Investigations team, to really take people on a journey to see the same signs the soldiers were seeing as they walked, that indicated a suicide bombing might be about to happen.
It’s such a rare opportunity to do that. Watching the footage for the first time was mindblowing, to see them [Savage and the soldiers] wandering through an Afghanistan village and then the warlord’s son drives by on a motorcycle, and there’s somebody with orange hands — an indication that they might’ve made homemade explosives — and then the labourers abandon their tools in front of them.
The worst thing that you see in this video is this distant shot of a boy walking across the edge of one of the compounds in pure white and looking directly towards David Savage. That boy died in that moment; he blew himself up for the cause. David Savage was terribly injured, but in a way the boy is as much the victim in this story, and I don’t think many people have seen that [before].
Being handed the rare opportunity to tell that story was something we really wanted to get right.
The story had been sitting in the background for a while and then it turned out you had about two weeks to pull everything together in the end?
Yeah. In a way, we had to keep it simple. We had to start where we were going to end, and really show people that they were about to see a suicide bombing, as horrible as that is, and also if they don’t want to see a suicide bombing then they need to turn off and head to another page because this is about to get wild. You do see real blood, it’s really horrific.
We teased with the approach of the boy, then we rewound back in time. And Alex Palmer, the designer, came up with this great concept of having the map, because I wanted to show their progress and that they were on a journey with a beginning and an end, so you could see them walking through the village and their progress on the map. Keeping in mind that we’re building all this for a mobile screen, so it’s all about vertical. The helmet cam vision itself was shot in vertical, so it was actually the perfect marriage of two ideas. We also needed to let people know when they needed to scroll on, so we have this spotlight circle on what we want you to focus on, and a timer around the edge of it, because it was really important to give people that idea of momentum.
That’s how we worked on it — simple ideas and a simple narrative structure, tease where we’re going to get to, then rewind to the beginning.
We could really focus on the story of this footage, because the guts of the story — about the Defence inquiry and all of David Savage’s backstory and career — was in a different story. I think that’s really important, to be very clear on what story you’re telling.
What are some of the impacts that you’ve seen this story have?
It comes at a time when Defence is under massive scrutiny, and this is another inquiry that David Savage definitely felt wasn’t properly done. We’ve just seen the end of the IGADF Inquiry, which was really thorough but came at the end of a time where it wasn’t really a priority for Defence to be transparent.
David Savage has received compensation for his terrible injuries — he’s in a wheelchair and will probably never fully recover — but he thought it was really important to say, “people need to learn from the mistakes of this”. He didn’t feel that Defence recognised that this was an important moment to admit fault and move on. He felt that the onus was on him, and there was a lot of classic victim blaming, a lot of focus on him not wearing an Australian issued bulletproof vest when the one that was provided to him didn’t fit.
I think this video clearly shows that he’s the civilian in this sense, he trusts the people around him to be looking for clues and acting on them, and it just didn’t happen, and it’s so clear.
Despite the fact that the ADF wouldn’t acknowledge that the helmet cam footage was really important to Savage’s case, the footage was being used to train civilians going into Afghanistan on what could happen in that environment.
The aftermath has been that [Savage] feels it’s all out in the open, which is a big difference. There’s been a lot of transparency issues in the past year that will hopefully cause Defence to change the way they do things for at least the next century. Not just from this story, but from all the stories that have come out about Defence not investigating themselves in the appropriate way at the right time.
It’s an important time for them to be honest with themselves, because they have a very complex task when they’re on overseas missions and everybody recognises that. David Savage went there to help with reparations, to rebuild Afghanistan after all of the wars had torn it apart. He acknowledges that he knew it was a dangerous situation. Everybody knows they’re in a dangerous situation over there, but it’s really important that everybody tries their best to make sure that stuff like that doesn’t happen again.
What was it that made you want to get into the journalism field in the first place?
Like everybody, I think it’s really important to reveal what’s hidden and educate the public on how things are governed. Governance is a huge part of what I’m interested in, the way that things are run. They should always be examined and always be made better.
Journalism can create change. And what I do now, digital production for the ABC Investigations team, my whole job is to get our stories out to as many different people as we can and explain the stories to them properly.
For example, a story about a suicide bombing in Afghanistan has nothing to do with people’s day-to-day lives here in Australia, but it is absolutely connected to our lives and our comfortable existence.
If you can tell a story to people in a way that makes them engage, it’s really, really satisfying. It’s funny when people turn onto different subjects, when something turns and it becomes a national issue at the forefront of everyone’s minds. When that happens, it feels really good. And it can happen with the simplest things, like this story we did on food in aged care. People were horrified by that, and it’s such a simple thing and it was done so simply, but it gets to the heart of the matter — and if you can do that, you’ve done a good job.
Are there any stories from your career that stand out as ones that you’re most proud of having been involved with?
The aged care investigation led by Anne Connolly is one of them, and I’ve really enjoyed working on the reporting of the Afghanistan stories these last 14 months. Very proud of that.
I really enjoy being a part of these projects to help spread them far and wide and find a new way to tell the stories and engage eyeballs. And we always know in digital if somebody didn’t engage with it. “Oh, nobody read that.”
That’s a failure because it’s not a failure of the journalism, it’s a failure with the engagement with the journalism, and that’s where I see my role.
Something can work for TV but not work for digital. The highest rated TV shows, like Four Corners, don’t necessarily rate that well in digital, and the other way around. You can have something where a million people read a story but only 100,000 tuned in to watch a more in-depth version of it. So it’s a real question; something we’re always talking about.
What do you see as the critical reasons why strong and diverse public interest journalism industry is important to Australia as a democracy and a society?
It’s incredibly important, and I know I’m in a privileged position working in ABC Investigations. I know that people don’t have time — I’ve worked in newsrooms where you barely have time to go and get a coffee or have a lunch break.
It’s important for all the different news organisations around Australia to be able to do public interest journalism because they have different audiences and different people working there. You’ve got to have the opportunity to do that kind of reporting at a local newspaper level and at a state parliament level.
We’ve got people that have backgrounds in all sorts of things, like Suzanne Dredge — also a winner of this award — she has a background working in the outer suburbs of Sydney in care, working with young kids, so she has a completely different perspective from journalists who started at 18 as the copyboy at a city newspaper.
In the Investigations team, we’re developing a model where we mentor and train lots of different journalists across the ABC with skills that our journalists have — not just general reporting but also digital, to crowdsource stories.
I’m working with some people to make that business as usual across the ABC so we hear from more voices from different areas and regional areas, and it’s not just an echo chamber of journalists based in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.
Is there anyone that you would like to thank on behalf of the team?
The obvious person is the editor of ABC Investigations Jo Puccini, who is always fostering these difficult and resource-heavy investigations that we do. Obviously Dylan and Suzanne have worked together on a lot of stories in the Middle East over the years, to establish the context to get this kind of story. And Alex Palmer, our designer, is the quiet assassin — he puts in the hours and makes it happen. The developers on the DSI team [ABC Digital Story Innovations team] are outstanding. And then none of it could have been done without the people that actually take risks to tell us things. David Savage coming to us and trusting us with the story is the cornerstone of everything — people have to trust us to tell their story in the best possible way.
Dylan Welch is a reporter for ABC Investigations. He has been a reporter for ABC 7.30, an Afghanistan correspondent for Reuters and a national security and crime reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. In 2019, Welch and colleagues were awarded a Walkley Award for a Four Corners episode, “Orphans of ISIS”, about an Australian grandmother trying to rescue her family from Islamic State in Syria.
Alex Palmer is a designer, visual journalist and illustrator for the Digital Story Innovations team at ABC News. Since joining the ABC in 2016, Palmer has won several international data and design awards. In 2019, he was part of the ABC News team who won the Walkley Innovation Award.
Clare Blumer is a digital journalist with ABC Investigations, specialising in crowdsourcing. She worked at The Global Mail then joined the ABC, where she has won Quill and Kennedy awards. Her work at The Global Mail received a commendation in the 2012 Walkleys.
Suzanne Dredge, a Wiradjuri woman, is a multi-platform producer with the ABC’s Investigations unit. At Koori Radio in Sydney, Dredge produced and presented the station’s flagship program, Black Chat. In the Middle East, she reported on the end of Islamic State. In 2019, she produced the Walkley-winning “Orphans of ISIS”.
