The West Australian (2015 – 2017)

While I wrote primarily for the Geraldton Guardian while working for 7West, when a big story reared its head, The West Australian also took interest in having my writing across their pages. 

Of these, my favourite was undoubtedly an interview with a young pilot who’d tried to make a romantic proposal in the air only for the plane to break down mid-flight, forcing him to make a death defying emergency landing before he could pop the question.

My court reporting also featured in The West a number of times, most notably for the Liyanage murder trial.

The Geraldton Guardian/Midwest Times (2015 – 2017)

In my time with the Geraldton Guardian I took on beats for heritage, agriculture, court, environment and business, but—working with our small team—contributed to all sections of the paper as needed. We published 3 times weekly, distributing to 12,000 subscribers, while The Midwest Times was a free publication which reached around 30,000 readers with each weekly issue.

An early point of pride in my work with the Guardian was my work on the Point Moore lease situation. Parts of Geraldton’s coastline face grim future habitation prospects due to coastal erosion and rising sea levels. Unfortunately the situation is complex form both the technical and bureaucratic perspectives, and the worst affected areas are home mostly to elderly retirees who cannot easily find other homes. Through my reporting the Guardian was able keep people up to date and work closely with involved parties to ensure all voices were being heard.

With a more rural focus, the Midwest Times provided a great platform to dive deeper into agricultural science and conservation. In particular, establishing an ongoing relationship with the Gnaraloo Turtle Program gave the paper great access to their cutting edge work satellite tracking loggerhead turtles (and the follow up research), and allowed us to report on the discovery of an entirely new and unique breed of black-footed rock wallaby.

Acting as the Guardian‘s court reporter was a technically and emotionally challenging role, but rewarding in its importance to the local community. The Dr. Liyanage murder case was my highest profile work, but other key issues for the community included discussions within the courts about the local meth problem and continuous attacks from uncontrolled dogs.

On the lighter side, I also regularly photographed social pages for both The Geraldton Guardian and Midwest Times, which was a great chance to hone my profile photography.

WAToday/The Age/The Sydney Morning Herald (2015)

While working as an intern for Fairfax during my last semester of university, I filed a wide range of stories, a complete list of which can be found here. The fast, online-first environment proved a challenging step up from the university publications I’d worked on, but I was able to adapt and provide youthful utility to the team by following up on stories rising up out of social media discussions. While not the heaviest of news, these stories did bring plenty of traffic to WAToday, topping the site’s daily traffic on occasion, even spreading over to The Age and Sydney Morning Herald, and eventually national television news. Good news stories like this local-tradie-turned-millionaire or local-chef-turned-youtube-celebrity also saw plenty of readers.

Though less trafficked, I took great pride in my science reporting, including a story about UWA researching vaccines to shrink cancerous tumours. By the end of my internship I had even stretched out to some international politics.

The Western Independent (2012 – 2015)

Putting in more than a few late nights alongside the Curtin University student team, whipped into shape by the excellent print-news-die-hard Sean Cowan, I worked as chief of staff, production manager and reporter (at different times). When writing myself, I took the chance to grapple with youth affairs, as well as tech and environment reporting.

The Eyeopener (2015)

While studying abroad in Toronto, I joined the team of the Toronto Metropolitan University’s Eyeopener, working as a contributing writer and copy-editor. The piece of work I’d pick out of my time with the Eye would be our investigation into Bill C-51. This was a particular challenge, as I had to learn Canada’s political situation from the ground-up to work the story, without any previous knowledge, but it was great lesson in how to uncover the important bits of a broad topic as quickly as possible.

Inkwire (2013)

Though no longer online, Curtin University’s online publication was a great place to get started as a young reporter. From my time there, a couple of my favourite yarns were tackling the tricky issue of trike licensing and diving into WA’s special olympics.