Nina Funnell

So little things like that, like just, you know, letting the person know

know that, you know, you need to, you know, what fact checking is and why we do it.

Or another really big one that comes up all the time in my work now, so now I work as a journalist specifically reporting on victim survivors, is every time we make a really serious allegation, say about an institution that has maybe covered up sexual assault, as a journalist, I have an obligation to go to that institution and offer them a right of reply.

yeah now if you don't tell the victim survivor that and suddenly they're reading the article and they see that you've gone and quoted the institution that has harmed them they will feel betrayed yeah so it's as simple as just explaining to the person here is what a right of reply is here is why i'm obliged to do it as part of our journalistic code of ethics um it doesn't mean that i disbelieve you or anything like that it's just part of the process after um my story being in the news um i did graduate i um

I had a very, very, I had a wonderful, um, honours supervisor, Professor Catherine Lumby in the media school at Sydney Uni.

And she, um, she realised that I was really spiralling.

And so she put a lot of support in place around me to help me.

Like I went part-time to finish my honours thesis and I ended up, I was at risk of disengaging and dropping out of my degree, my honours degree.

And I always say it was because of her support that I, I graduated and I got first class honours and I got a scholarship to do a PhD and, and,

ended up working with Catherine for quite a while as well and doing work with some of her work with NRL football players and their attitudes towards women and consent and domestic violence and so on so I did that for a bit and then finally in 2016 I was like oh that's right I always wanted to be a journalist maybe I should actually try my hand at that and see if I'd be any good at it given that that had been the master plan um since high school you know I was edit one of the editors of the school newspaper I'd always wanted to go in that direction and I'd sort of

gone off course for a bit and then I came back and course corrected yeah course corrected that's right it's Monday morning and your mind is already racing and you're replaying an awkward conversation you had during the week

Sure.

So good question.

So in 2016, when I decided to become a journalist, my first project that I set for myself was I wanted to do 52 articles in 52 weeks on university campus sexual assault.

And the reason I chose that was I had gone into working at a

you become a little bit of a lightning rod for disclosure when you're public.

And so I'm working on a university campus.

I was relatively young.

You know, I became a university lecturer at 24.

And I suddenly start receiving disclosures from my students because they recognize that I would be