The Little Royal Typewriter That Roared

Facebook reminded me yesterday that 10 years ago, in 2012, my last year working in print newspapers, I had answered the plea of a young female cadet reporter working at The Canberra Times by giving her this little Royal portable typewriter. She is Canberra-born Jacqueline Williams, and when I keyed her name into Google search I was very pleasantly surprised to see she has been working for The New York Times since July 2015. And that is a long, long way from The Canberra Times, I can tell you - not to mention a very short time from a starting point to world journalism's pinnacle. Indeed, Jackie's career trajectory has been quite spectacular, to say the least, and I'm left wondering whether her Royal typewriter has helped inspire her progress along the way.

I've taken the liberty of altering the logo from The York Times's Australian recruiting page, replacing a laptop with a more appropriate writing machine.

In January 2017 Jacqui was chosen as one of two journalists "to lead [The New York Times's] expansion into Australia". She had joined the NYT in New York 18 months earlier, after completing time as a Fellow at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. In New York she won wide admiration with the NYT's investigative unit, helping to break open the growing furor of daily fantasy sports, which led to regulation of the industry. She was then part of the team that exposed the NFL’s flawed concussion research and ties to the tobacco industry, and revealed how the billion-dollar expansion of the new Panama Canal collided with reality. She also did a stint on culture, covering the Nate Parker rape trial. And to think I introduced her to the work of Edward Albee ...

One of Jackie's big admirers is Walt Bogdanich, the investigative journalist and three-time Pulitzer Prize winner. Bogdanich graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1975 with a degree in political science and received a master's in journalism from Ohio State University in 1976. He is assistant editor for The New York Times' Investigations Desk and an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Before joining the NYT in 2001, he was an investigative producer for 60 Minutes on CBS and for ABC News. He has also worked as an investigative reporter for The Wall Street Journal.

Bogdanich recruited Jacqui to the NYT after seeing her outstanding work in his investigative reporting class at Columbia University. He said of Jacqui: “She develops sources easily and isn’t afraid to think big ... she also cares deeply about accuracy - not a bad trait to have." 

Besides her Columbia master’s in journalism, Jacqui has a master’s in globalisation studies from Dartmouth, where her thesis examined the investigative journalism industry in Australia.