Hannah Link
Hannah Link reports news for the Times Colonist with a focus on education-adjacent stories that connect post-secondary research, science and public policy to the lives of local people. Her coverage ranges from university-led climate initiatives to justice, infrastructure and community events, and she treats each as part of a broader public-interest beat rather than a narrow institutional focus. She works in a straight news format, building her stories around clear explanation, expert voices and the concrete impact on residents.
UVic satellites and climate change research
Link’s education beat is anchored in post-secondary research, illustrated by her reporting on UVic satellite launches designed to advance climate change research, where she foregrounds what the mission will measure and why it matters for understanding changing conditions. She extends this interest in climate science to broader environmental phenomena, such as explaining forecasts that the current El Niño is expected to be the strongest on record and what that means for regional weather and risk. In her work on permanent daylight time and sundials, she uses a small, tangible detail - how local sundials will read once the clocks no longer change - to make an abstract policy shift understandable. Across these stories she draws on expert commentary and scientific context, while keeping the focus on how decisions by governments and institutions shape everyday experience.
B.C. Ferries funding, daylight time and regional infrastructure
Link regularly reports on infrastructure and funding decisions that affect education and mobility in the region, including rallies calling for fairer federal funding for B.C. Ferries and what reduced support would mean for Island communities that rely on ferry links for work, study and health care.
Her daylight time and sundial coverage treats timekeeping as an infrastructure story, showing how provincial decisions reverberate through everything from transit schedules to outdoor public spaces. She also contributes reporting to coverage of a fire in a Victoria waste facility, documenting how smoke from a refuse pile affected surrounding neighbourhoods and how the site operates as a transfer station for commercial customers.
In these pieces she combines policy detail - funding arrangements, operational descriptions, timelines - with accessible language that highlights practical consequences for residents.
Courtrooms, social services and vulnerable families
Link covers court proceedings and systemic failures involving children and families, including a case where the death of a malnourished girl in Duncan is described by defence counsel as a “systemic” failure, and she lays out the roles of different institutions rather than treating the story as a single incident. She follows the long arc of child-protection and missing-person cases, such as a father’s efforts to have authorities search for his daughter’s body under Stamp Falls, showing how families navigate police, coroners and government agencies over time. Her reporting on a landscaping program that supports addictions recovery and helps people rebuild their lives links frontline services to housing, employment and community reintegration, giving space to participants’ own accounts of change.
Together these stories show a consistent interest in how social services, the justice system and health supports interact, with particular attention to vulnerable children, Indigenous families and people in recovery.
Pride Parade, cross-Canada runs and community events
Alongside education and justice coverage, Link reports on community events that define civic life, such as the Pride Parade and festival that take over downtown streets, where she details routes, programming and the role of local organizations. She profiles individual effort and endurance in stories like the cross-Canada run that ends at Mile Zero, describing the runner’s journey, symbolism of the finish location and the response of onlookers. She contributes to feature-style pieces about community fundraising, including coverage of an enormous Nanaimo bar made in Ontario to raise money for youth charities, connecting a playful record attempt to concrete support for young people. These assignments show her range from hard-news courts and policy stories to lighter human-interest coverage, while maintaining a clear, factual style that explains who is involved, what is happening and why it matters to the wider community.
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.