Appointment of Australian Correspondent

Thursday 23 October, 2008

Appointment of Australian Correspondent

Fairfax Media has appointed one of its award-winning journalists to a newly established position covering Australian news, based in Sydney.

Denise McNabb, the current deputy editor of The Independent business weekly paper, will take up the post in January 2009.

Fairfax has established the role to enhance its coverage of news from Australia. Denise will work from the offices of the Sydney Morning Herald and liaise closely with The Age, Canberra Times, Australian Financial Review and the wealth of other regional titles Fairfax operates in Australia.

"The trans-Tasman connection is the most significant international partnership New Zealand has and Fairfax is investing in this area to ensure we bring our readers a more informed and insightful analysis of Australian issues and how they affect us," said David Gadd, Managing Editor - Business.

Denise will report to David Gadd and Fairfax Group Editor John Crowley. She will have a wide-ranging brief covering general and political news, but with a particular special focus on business.

Denise will bring a specific New Zealand perspective to news coming from Australia, emphasizing the importance and impact on New Zealand, alongside generating stories covering New Zealand companies and people in Australia. This material will be available for use across the Fairfax papers - including our metropolitan daily and regional daily papers, our Sunday papers, The Independent, and our online sites Stuff.co.nz and BusinessDay.co.nz. In turn Denise will also be able to provide stories to the Fairfax Australian network of publications.

Fairfax already has the leading publications, both in print and online, in Australia which gives unparalleled access to Australian news. Denise says readers will benefit, however, from having a New Zealand voice helping interpret that news. "There are many stories in Australia with strong New Zealand angles to them and it needs a New Zealander to fully bring out those aspects."

Denise is an experienced journalist with an award winning career.

She is the inaugural Brook Financial Journalist of the Year, awarded for her breaking news stories on the collapse of finance company Bridgecorp. She has won several Qantas and other journalism awards in a career which has spanned both sides of the Tasman already. She started work in New Zealand on The Press before moving to Adelaide where she worked first on The Sunday Mail then The News as a reporter then travel editor for both papers. She returned to New Zealand to work on The New Zealand Herald.

Denise then moved to The Dominion in its Auckland bureau as a business reporter and bureau chief before becoming a freelance writer and editor of arrival magazine. Four years ago she returned to the newspaper fold as business editor of The Independent and was appointed Deputy Editor in 2006. She also writes for Fairfax's online sites Stuff.co.nz and BusinessDay.co.nz.

The posting is for an initial two years and Fairfax believes it will become a highly sought after assignment by senior journalists.

ENDS

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