When Joanne McCarthy joined the Newcastle Herald, she said it was for a year. In 12 months, she would leave journalism and move on to something else.
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That was 16 years ago.
“The Newcastle Herald was a good fit for me,” she says.
In 2006, she began writing about instances of child abuse in institutions, particularly in Catholic and Anglican churches in the Hunter region of NSW, for which she won the Graham Perkin Award for Journalist of the Year in 2012, and the Gold Kennedy Award for NSW Journalist of the Year, the Gold Walkley Award and the Sir Owen Dixon Chambers Law Reporting of the Year Award in 2013.
It was the reporting that would lead to a NSW inquiry and eventually a royal commission into institutional child abuse.
In a Newcastle Herald editorial in August, 2012, she wrote: “There will be a royal commission on the church’s handling of child sex abuse because there must be.”
In Part IV Inside the Newcastle Herald, Joanne discusses her career, her defining work in the Newcastle Herald, and sheds light on where the stories come from.
Inside the Newcastle Herald
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