ABC News Story Lab reporter Julian Fell scored a hat-trick at the annual Australian IT Journalism Awards (the Lizzies) on Friday night, winning Best Security Journalist, Best News Journalist and the Gold Lizzie for Best Journalist.
The Lizzies celebrate Australia’s best in tech, comms and science reporting. The Gold Lizzie recognises the journalist judged to have produced the highest quality of work during the previous year across all individual categories.
The awards recognised Julian’s impactful investigation in which he demonstrated how a popular robot vacuum cleaner could be hacked, allowing the ABC to watch live through the robovac’s camera.
His technology reporting also investigated TikTok Live’s money-making machine and linked an Australian media lawyer to a ‘parasitic’ AI content farm.
Other ABC winners included ABC NEWS Verify’s Kevin Nguyen (Best Technical Journalist) and ABC Entertainment’s Gianfranco Di Giovanni (Best Gaming Coverage), who has won this award two years in a row.
ABC Investigations and ABC NEWS Verify were highly commended for Best Video Program, an award for the team (Kevin Nguyen, Michael Workman, Jessicah Mendes, Sissy Reyes and Sarah Smaje) that produced Rise of the AI Pimps and What the Fake.
Also highly commended, in the Best Audio Program category, was ABC Radio National media, culture and technology podcast Download This Show, presented by Rae Johnston.