Episode 39: Sarah Elks

Sarah Elks is Queensland political reporter at The Australian.

During her decade of writing for the national newspaper, Sarah has reported on many of the biggest news stories that have taken place in Queensland. It takes tenacity and passion to be a daily news reporter, and Sarah clearly has an abundance of both of these qualities. After extensively covering the fall-out from the closure of the Queensland Nickel refinery in late 2015, Sarah was named Journalist of the Year at the Queensland Clarion Awards for her stories that uncovered Clive Palmer's use of the alias 'Terry Smith' to manage his business while also holding office as a Member of Parliament. The judges for that award in 2016 noted that Sarah's work is "a tremendous how-to for journalists young and old, and deserves recognition".

I met with Sarah at her home in Brisbane's inner-north in early July to record a conversation which touches on how she manages an unpredictable workload that can vary drastically from week to week; how she handled the paranoia of 'correspondent syndrome' while working as The Australian's sole reporter based in Far North Queensland; how her two years in that role took her to a remote island in the Torres Strait, where few people will ever have the privilege of setting foot; why she has a deep and abiding passion for court reporting, which is not shared by many other journalists, and how she increases her likelihood of getting Clive Palmer to respond to her text messages during the course of reporting on the man himself.

Sarah Elks is the Queensland political reporter for The Australian. She began her career working for the newspaper at its Sydney headquarters in 2007, before moving back to her home state of Queensland. After a two-year stint in Cairns as the paper's north Queensland correspondent, Sarah returned to Brisbane to cover general news and legal affairs, including some of the state's highest profile criminal trials. Now, as well as state politics, Sarah reports on the continuing fallout from the $300m corporate collapse of Clive Palmer's Queensland Nickel. In what is surely a sign of love and respect for her ongoing work, Mr Palmer recently tweeted: "Is it true or did you read it in the Australian". Sarah's only useful skills are catching beach worms with her bare hands and arranging cheese platters.

Show notes and links to what was discussed in this episode: http://penmanshippodcast.com/episode-39-sarah-elks/

Sarah Elks on Twitter: @SarahElks

Penmanship on Twitter: @PenmanshipAU

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