The Jacoby-Walkley Scholarship with Nine

Hannah McKinney – 2024 winner

Testimonials

Anita Jacoby, AM – Scholarship founder 

The Jacoby Walkley Scholarship, now entering its 13th year, is a unique opportunity to experience a newsroom environment and program making up close. Scholarship winners spend 10 weeks at NINE’s head office in Sydney: in the newsroom, at NINE digital, Today and A Current Affair. And finally, they spend a month at 60 Minutes, all whilst being paid. The winner also spends two weeks at the Walkley Foundation, meeting some of the extraordinarily talented journalists involved with the organisation, along with undertaking a course through the Open Program at the Australian Film TV and Radio School.

It has been incredibly rewarding over the many years seeing the winners and finalists using the Jacoby Walkley scholarship as a springboard to go on to forge successful careers. In setting up this scholarship in 2013 in memory of my father Phillip Jacoby, it was always my hope that it would pave the way for talented budding journalists, giving them that all-important foothold in the industry. I know first-hand just how tough it is to get these kinds of breaks, especially if you don’t have the right connections.

I am proud to say that more than 30 young journalists (a mix of winners and finalists) have secured roles in the media industry because of this scholarship.

Hannah McKinney – 2024 winner

I am now working as an Associate Producer at Nine News in Sydney. As part of my role, I work with a highly experienced team to help deliver news for the 11:30am, 4pm and 6pm news bulletins. It is a privilege to work in Australia’s best newsroom in such an early stage in my career. Without the Jacoby-Walkley Scholarship I would have never formed the priceless connections that I did at Nine, nor gained the unparalleled experience of interning across all the different news and current affairs departments.

Kevin Ding – 2023 winner

I am an Associate Producer at Nine, working with the Today Show team bringing news to Australian audiences each morning. My role involves building live crosses on the biggest stories of the day, including helping out our Foreign Correspondents in Nine’s London and Los Angeles bureaus. The Jacoby-Walkley scholarship was what opened the door to the industry for me. During the valuable 10-week placement, I was able to immerse myself in Nine’s Sydney newsroom, seeing the day-to-day tasks of broadcast journalists up close.

Caroline Tung – 2019 winner

The Jacoby Walkley Scholarship was a unique opportunity to kickstart my journalism career, and continues to be a defining achievement that stands out to employers. Interning across news and current affairs programs opened my eyes to the inner workings of commercial news production.  

Following completion of the scholarship, I remained in Sydney throughout the COVID-19 pandemic to work in B2B journalism and briefly at News Corp before relocating to Albury Wodonga to work as a journalist for The Border Mail. The scholarship helped me gain a highly competitive cadetship at Australian Community Media, where my breaking news reports on the Japanese encephalitis outbreak earned a finalist nomination for the Walkley Foundation’s William Buckland Fellowship. 

I am currently on a career break and working for the Australian Taxation Office since returning to Melbourne. 

 This year, I am planning an independent documentary about health care accessibility and education in rural Ghana (filming in 2026), and publishing articles on the topic of neurodiversity. I am still very passionate about telling the stories of multicultural communities. I am volunteering my writing and editing expertise with the Vietnamese Museum Australia to tell their inspiring journeys of immigration. 

I am grateful to Anita Jacoby and the Walkley Foundation – the scholarship truly was a gift. I highly encourage students who are serious about pursuing a career in journalism to apply! 

Megan Stafford – 2014 winner

Winning the Jacoby-Walkley scholarship was a changing point in my life.  The exposure to Australia’s leading news programmes and newsroom provided me with clarity about the kind of stories I was passionate to tell, and also opened my eyes to the collaborative and commercial world of news.  It was the greatest gift.  

I won the scholarship with Kirrily Schwarz and, as we both came from regional towns to Sydney to take up the scholarship, it was fantastic to share the experience with someone.  We are still friends now, our trajectories still with their own synchroncities, such that we both moved overseas (she to Canada, me to Ireland) in the exact same month last year.

Due to Anita Jacoby’s generosity, I was able to intern at ABC’s Australian Story at the end of my scholarship.  Since then, I have worked in communications at a government agency and spent the better part of the last decade working in banking.  Now, I am in Ireland and have just applied to register as a teacher here.  All the while, I have been writing on the side for my own business, Me’anda Media: travel blogging, podcasting, and recording oral histories so that loved ones never have to say with regret, “I wish we’d gotten [their] story down.”