I’m an award-winning journalist with an unquenchable passion for technology who has written across a wide range of subjects during 30 years of media reporting in print, online and broadcast media.
Early on I researched for TV and talkback radio. I worked as a reporter and investigative journalist at The Sunday Mail, Brisbane in the 1990s, and as Consumer Affairs Reporter, Legal Affairs Reporter, City Hall Reporter, and Assistant Chief of Staff at The Courier-Mail, Brisbane, after that. I was also the paper’s first online journalist.
At The Australian newspaper I have worked as Deputy News Editor online, Media Development Editor helping build the paper’s content management system, and over the past decade, Senior Technology Journalist. I enjoy my passions for journalism and tech wrapped into one job.
I first encountered computers at school in the late 1960s and studied computer science in the early 1970s at Monash University. Programming was mainly on IBM and CDC mainframes. From the mid 1970s, I worked for almost a decade in TAFE colleges in Victoria and Queensland teaching computer awareness and programming courses, as well as mathematics and science. I also taught computer awareness programs in Victorian prisons.
My main time coding was in the mid 1980s when a friend and I formed Brisbane start-up Aquatic Software. Both of us loved innovation and being at the cutting edge of our profession. At that time PCs were relatively new and were standalone machines, not networked or connected online.
So we set about building PC network solutions for business, providing them with solutions involving both hardware and multi-user software. Our systems cost business thousands less than equivalent mini-mainframe ones. Our body corporate/community titles system managed about 26,000 apartments at its height in the mid 1980s, in pre-Internet days.
My work at The Australian comprised weekly device reviews, features about the latest technology trends, hundreds of technology columns, news stories and segments discussing gadgets and technology on Sky Business. I co-hosted a Sky Business program called tech.biz.
I’m available for special projects such as freelance news and feature writing, newspaper, TV and radio commentary, technical report writing, media training and strategies, MCing conferences and seminars, and conducting classes covering how to use specific consumer technology. Feel free to contact me at crgriffo@gmail.com.