Emily Blake
Emily Blake is a senior reporter at Cabin Radio who treats education as part of a broader public-policy beat, following how institutions, laws and local decisions shape life in northern communities. Her work connects education stories, political developments and justice issues, focusing on accountability and the practical consequences of policy. She writes across hard news, explainer pieces and longer features, with a consistent interest in how systems affect people.
Education institutions and public policy
Education coverage for Emily centres on institutions and the relationships between them rather than classroom anecdotes. In reporting on northern education institutions gathering to strengthen ties, she focuses on how colleges, universities and training bodies coordinate, and what that coordination means for access to learning and services. She approaches education as an infrastructure and governance story, situating institutions within wider debates about funding, capacity and regional development.
That lens makes her education reporting a fit for stories that connect schools or post-secondary organizations to policy, partnerships or community impact.
Politics, legislation and institutional accountability
Much of Emily’s recent work tracks political decisions and the rules that govern public life. She reports on proposed legislation affecting first responders, explaining how changes to compensation and coverage standards would alter protections for firefighters and other workers. She follows municipal governments as they develop bylaws, such as vacant building rules that tie permit fees to assessed property values, and shows how these policies target specific problems like derelict buildings and housing pressures. Her coverage of calls for audits of resource management bodies focuses on oversight and governance, treating watchdog reports and advocacy groups as starting points for examining how public agencies steward land and resources. Across these stories, she consistently connects technical policy details to their concrete effects on residents and communities.
Justice, policing and human rights
Emily regularly covers justice-system stories, with particular attention to policing and the treatment of Indigenous people. In reporting on reviews of police use of force in the arrest of a Dene man, she lays out the findings of oversight bodies and the official justifications given by police, while highlighting the broader questions raised about accountability and trust. Her work often sits at the intersection of court processes, law enforcement and human rights, bringing together legal outcomes, community concerns and the perspectives of advocates.
That focus on justice and rights informs her wider reporting, including stories where legislation, policy or institutional decisions have implications for marginalized groups.
Resource development, community life and cross-format storytelling
Beyond politics and justice, Emily’s reporting ranges across the everyday consequences of resource development, service delivery and cultural life. In news roundups and newsletters, she brings together mining issues, post office operations and scientific work, treating them as part of a single narrative about how northern communities function.
She writes features that follow individuals, such as authors and artists, using their stories to explore themes of belonging and home while keeping a clear news focus.
Emily also hosts a soundtrack-focused radio show, bringing her reporting sensibility into a cultural format by examining film and television music with guests. That mix of hard news, features, newsletters and broadcast work shows a reporter who can move between policy-heavy stories and accessible, personality-driven pieces while keeping institutions and systems at the centre.
Beat priorities and story fit
Across subjects, Emily’s through-line is institutional accountability in northern public life. Education stories sit alongside coverage of legislation, bylaws, audits and police reviews, and she treats them with the same attention to governance, rights and outcomes. She is well suited to stories that involve concrete decisions by governments, boards or institutions, especially where those decisions affect education, labour, housing, resource use or community services.
Details, documents and clear policy stakes feature strongly in her work, making her coverage a fit for sources who can speak to systems, not just individual experiences.
4 more education journalists.
Abby Russchen
Abby Russchen ties education, community institutions and individual stories together, showing how policies and decisions register in people’s lives. She reports for CBC on education and community life, working across text, video and photography for different CBC platforms. Her education coverage centres student achievement, provincial and national test results, classroom technology and the forces shaping learning conditions, connecting policy language and expert analysis to observable changes in performance. She treats AI, screens and digital tools as part of the education beat, focusing on their impact on student well-being. She also reports on community institutions and local services, from bank closures and changing city status to small-business growth. Her human-interest features follow people, public memory and recognition, and her long-form background supports detailed, fact-grounded narratives across formats.
Alexa Phillips
Alexa Phillips reports on education as a financial system, tracing who pays, who benefits and who bears the risk when policy changes reshape schools and universities. She covers education policy, funding and regulation for The i Paper, with a consistent focus on money, power and their impact on students and staff. Her reporting follows fees, budgets and reform into classrooms and lecture halls, using concrete figures to show how tax changes, funding mechanisms and loan reforms translate into course cuts, job losses and access. Phillips brings wider experience on public services and regulation, including work on gambling oversight and healthcare access, so education sits in a larger accountability story. She writes straightforward, reported news pieces that combine policy detail, financial data and case studies, built from official records and regular call‑outs to readers affected by the systems she covers.
Alexandra Holyk
Alexandra Holyk is a multi-skilled journalist at CTV News who reports on education and youth issues through the daily lives of students, families, and local communities. She covers school and campus decisions, student safety, youth behaviour, and neighbourhood incidents, with a focus on how they affect the people directly involved. Her work includes stories on graduation choices, concerns about Black students in a school board, federal research funding at the University of Waterloo, and students who helped after a cyclist collision. She also covers vandalism and other local disruptions around schools and neighbourhoods. Holyk pitches, researches, shoots, writes, edits, and presents stories for broadcast and digital platforms. Her previous work includes video journalism for provincial coverage, along with reporting for campus and regional outlets and major Canadian newspapers and business media.
Annabelle Olivier
Annabelle Olivier ties system-level themes in Quebec’s school system to the immediate realities of parents and students, treating education as a lived experience rather than an abstract policy field. She is a digital journalist with CBC News, covering education and related public policy. Her work spans data breaches and digital privacy in schools, institutional conflicts and labour disputes that disrupt study plans, education on the campaign trail, and school infrastructure and land use. She reports on incidents like mass emails exposing sensitive parent data, suspended classes that leave students feeling like bargaining chips, and proposals to turn racetracks into schools. Her background in digital production at another major Canadian broadcaster shapes an online-first reporting style, grounded in specific incidents, clear descriptions, and detailed, verifiable facts drawn from documents, statements and interviews.