Jacqueline Maley, who started as a Herald cadet in 2003, is a Walkley and Kennedy award-winning reporter and columnist for the Herald, where she writes about politics, people and social affairs and hosts the Inside Politics podcast.
I remember being in Parliament House in 2018 when prime minister Scott Morrison gave the apology to the survivors of institutional child sex abuse.
I remember being at the Manly Leagues Club in 2019 when prime minister Tony Abbott gave his concession speech, having lost his seat to this new phenomenon, a “teal” candidate, Zali Steggall, after 25 years of incumbency.
I remember the happiness of the newsroom in 2017, when, gathered around the television, we watched an Australian Electoral Commission spokesperson announce the results of the same-sex marriage survey.
I remember the far more sombre newsroom atmosphere in 2023, when Australia voted against the Voice to Parliament.
I remember us all putting our heads down to file, the common feeling of knowing that we had to do this moment justice.
Being a journalist for the Herald has given me extraordinary access to history and to the people who make it.
By far the greatest privilege of the job is the small and everyday miracle of having ordinary people open up to you.
We journos get to ask people invasive, personal and often impertinent questions.
And if they trust you, and they trust the values of the masthead you work for, people will answer them.
I found this when I did my reporting, along with the legendary Kate McClymont, on sexual harassment allegations against former High Court judge Dyson Heydon, in 2020.
Following separate leads, Kate and I started to see that Heydon had engaged in a pattern of alleged behaviour that had probably spanned many years, and had occurred in different settings.
We knew there were plenty of allegations to be found.
It was just up to us to find them, and report them.
That meant phone calls – hundreds of them.
Note-taking about who knew what, and who might go on the record.
Asking about witnesses and for independently verifiable accounts, or any contemporaneous records that may have been taken.
Putting in freedom of information requests.
I felt the weight of responsibility – firstly, to get it right because there was no doubt we were destroying a man’s reputation and tainting his legacy.
But mostly, I felt a responsibility to the alleged victims of Heydon’s alleged predation – to assuage their anxiety about going public, and to tell their stories with sensitivity.
The best outcome would have been to hand them back some of their dignity, and I think we did that.
I know that the story made a positive difference to the culture of the legal profession, because I’ve had lawyers tell me so.
I know that other men in that profession who harassed women were put on notice, because I had women tell me so.
I know that young women in the legal field felt emboldened to insist on safety at work, because they told us.
The only reason we can do what we do is that people trust us enough to tell us things.
That is the magic and that is the privilege of being a Herald journo, which I am, to my bones.
Cindy Yin was selected out of hundreds of applicants to take part in our traineeship program two years ago.
She is the Herald’s youngest reporter and covers urban affairs.
It was a Thursday in June 2024 when I got the call that I had secured a traineeship at the Herald.
My initial elation quickly morphed into trepidation – I didn’t grow up in a family that read the news, and I felt like an imposter, with a constant hunger to prove myself.
I was presented with the opportunity to do this when, fresh out of the year-long traineeship, my editor suggested I team up with the Herald’s transport and infrastructure editor Matt O’Sullivan to cover the ICAC inquiry into Transport for NSW from July to November 2025 [the marathon public inquiry ran for 54 days].
Hearing tales about Ibrahim Helmy, the mastermind behind the corruption scandal, and his cash exchanges in brown paper bags, yellow Mercedes cars, and scheming on bushwalking dates meant it was a frustrating but genuinely fascinating story to cover.
Helmy was on the run for months before police and the ICAC investigators found him hiding in a cupboard in a Lakemba apartment.
When Helmy was sentenced, the adrenaline I felt as photographer Edwina Pickles and I frantically sprinted after him as he dashed out of the only exit at the Downing Centre will be hard to forget.
I remember stubbornly thinking that I didn’t want to let him go, and beyond all else, that becoming a reporter was the most rewarding thing I have ever done.
I was 21 when I joined, and now, at 23, I am the newsroom’s youngest reporter as the Herald celebrates its 195th anniversary.
I am very conscious that I am part of an institution that has existed for 8½ of my lifetimes.
While I still feel like an imposter sometimes, being able to tell the stories of our city and contribute to the masthead in ways I am proud of is what being at the Herald means to me.
That’s the feeling that beats all else at the end of the day.
Elizabeth Knight is an award-winning business reporter who for decades has written a daily column for the Herald focusing on companies, markets and the economy.
The Sydney Morning Herald is more than a publishing brand, it’s an institution imbued in Sydney’s cultural DNA.
Serving its readers with a daily column can be as relentless as it is rewarding.
I started out as a cub reporter in what is now Nine Entertainment and after many years of writing a business column I am still motivated to deliver something informative and entertaining.
You can’t please everyone all the time but hopefully I have inspired interest in sometimes dry topics and even generated a few laughs.
Over my near 40-years at the Herald, I’ve followed the nasty underbelly of the casino business complete with cash stashed in Eskis and the ethics-lite period of financial services when brown bags were the cash receptacle of choice at some branches.
A royal commission exposed banks and insurance companies charging zombie customers and more recently Qantas was accused of selling tickets on ghost flights.
Even the supermarkets are being pursued for a claim of fake discounting.
Sex scandals too litter the history of corporate Australia – most recently billionaire Wisetech founder Richard White’s “sex-for-financial assistance” exploits.
However, none compare with the page-turning tales of the Murdoch family dynasty and the lengths to which its patriarch, Rupert, was prepared to go to manage the financial and political legacy of his media kingdom.
The Murdoch story felt like an amalgamation of Family Feud, Survivor and the HBO hit Succession – which was inspired by the family’s Machiavellian intrigue.
The decades-long and brutal pitting of sibling against sibling was always destined to reach a gladiatorial climax – it didn’t disappoint.
Rupert Murdoch takes his duties as the promoter and custodian of his media companies conservative voice in the Western world.
The public interest in the means by which he handpicked the heir to that throne to enshrine his legacy has bled well beyond the traditional readers of the Herald’s business pages.
Murdoch’s ascension to the most powerful media player in the world has been one of ruthless aggression, risk-taking, luck and brilliance.
In the early 1990s his heavily indebted empire was a whisker away from financial ruin and the patriarch was obsessed with the empire remaining in the Murdoch family.
But the succession feud had all the elements of a thriller: money, power, lies, backstabbing, wives, ex-wives, wives-in-waiting and four control-thirsty siblings that had learnt the strategic corporate dark arts at the knee of their father.
The mechanism through which control of the empire was held was a family trust.
Perversely the means by which control passed contained little actual family trust.
By December 2023, Rupert and his chosen successor and firstborn son, Lachlan, had been working on a secret plan to amend the family’s trust to strip three of Rupert’s other children – Prue, Lis and James – of their power to influence the direction of the family business.
Ironically the plan’s code name was Project Family Harmony.
When he summoned them to London to outline his plans, he was met with bewilderment and ultimately hostility.
“You are completely disenfranchising me and my siblings,” Lis reportedly told him.
“You’ve blown a hole in the family.” Rupert and Lachlan’s fight to alter the inviolable family trust that bestowed voting rights to his four elder children, was fought and ultimately lost in a less-than-salubrious courtroom in Reno, Nevada.
For the ageing mogul who had already experienced a range of health issues, time placed an additional layer of urgency to find a settlement.
After the court loss, it was clear that....
