There’s too much bad news permeating the world of journalism and its tenuous business models. But now we can report some
genuinely good news.
Crikey is embarking on a serious editorial expansion. Over coming months we will be assembling a team of around a dozen
full-time reporters with a challenging brief: dig, probe, uncover, explain, expose, deconstruct, connect the dots, lift
the veils and help our readers better understand the back-stories, the side-stories and the stories someone somewhere
doesn’t want you to read.
We’re calling this “inquiry journalism”. We have now started recruiting reporters and an editor with journalistic nous;
dedication to facts and accuracy; determination, grit and persistence; a distaste for spin and managed news; a passion
for independent journalism untainted by corporate influence and ideological agendas; a mind open to original and
unconventional ideas; and, above all, a fierce, unrelenting curiosity — and we’re looking for them here.
This initiative, which aims to launch by April, is the culmination of a long-running collaborative project between our
company Private Media (owner of Crikey) and two of our bigger investors, John B Fairfax and Cameron O’Reilly.
John B Fairfax’s family has a storied history at the centre of Australia quality journalism. It started 177 years ago
when his namesake acquired The Sydney Morning Herald, and ended two months ago when Fairfax Media was taken over by the Nine television network and, in the process, the
Fairfax name was jettisoned.
Cameron O’Reilly’s family controlled the global media company Independent News and Media — which included a stable of
Australian regional newspapers, The Independent in London, The Irish Independent and The New Zealand Herald — for more than 35 years.
Now the Fairfax and O’Reilly families have returned to journalism in a different way, as investors in an ambitious
venture within Crikey, which has 18 years of digital independent journalism under its belt.
You can start reading the work of Crikey’s team of inquiry journalists in a month or two.