Libby Lester

Dr Libby Lester worked as a journalist for 15 years for a number of Australian newspapers and magazines, including the Age and Melbourne Herald, before joining the University of Tasmania in 2002, where she now coordinates the Journalism, Media and Communications Programme.Her special interests are politics, environment and ethnic affairs, for which her work as a journalist was commended with a Media Peace Awards special citation. Her undergraduate degree is in Prehistory and Geography from the Australian National University, Canberra, and her PhD in Media and Communications was completed at the University of Melbourne. Her recent research on media-source relations, news access and mediated conflict has appeared in Media, Culture & Society, Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism, Journalism Studies and Media International Australia. While at the Reuters Institute, she is working on a book for Polity Press, Media and Environment: Conflict, Politics and the News, due for publication in 2010.