This award-winning Tasmanian journalist combines forensic documentation with narrative warmth across three core areas:
Recent Impact: Her 2024 mining industry exposé directly influenced Tasmanian Parliament's A$22M regional housing package. Kempton maintains a 92% open rate on source outreach emails, prioritizing responses to pitches containing verifiable local data sets.
We've followed Helen Kempton's three-decade journalism career as it evolved from Western Australian newsrooms to becoming Tasmania's foremost documentarian of community narratives. Her work at The Advocate reveals a journalist deeply embedded in the North-West's social fabric, blending investigative rigor with human-centric storytelling.
Kempton's 20-year tenure in Tasmania followed 13 formative years in Western Australia, where she honed her ability to transform regional stories into compelling narratives. This dual-state experience manifests in her nuanced understanding of rural economies and community dynamics.
This 2,500-word deep dive into a local dispensary's history exemplifies Kempton's talent for institutional storytelling. Through manager Lisa Pearton's perspective, the piece traces Tasmania's healthcare evolution from hand-mixed ointments to modern pharmacotherapy, using pharmacy records to map community health trends. Its viral success (shared 1.2K times locally) demonstrated the appetite for hyperlocal business biographies.
Kempton's investigative report on the 2024 Zeehan District Hospital stabbing combined crime reporting with systemic analysis. By obtaining staff schedules and security audits, she revealed how healthcare worker safety protocols lagged behind other states. The article prompted Tasmania's Health Minister to fast-track A$3.6 million in security upgrades.
This environmental economics analysis tracked how renewed mining activity in West Coast Tasmania caused residential rents to increase 300% in 18 months. Kempton's use of historical lease agreements and interviews with displaced families provided a ground-level view of resource boom impacts, later cited in state parliament debates about mining town sustainability.
Kempton prioritizes stories supported by verifiable local records - whether business ledgers, municipal documents, or historical archives. A successful pitch might highlight unpublished retail turnover statistics from Burnie's business association or newly digitized mining safety reports from the 1990s. Her pharmacy story succeeded because she cross-referenced oral histories with 40 years of prescription logs.
Rather than abstract climate discussions, she examines environmental shifts through workforce changes. The mining rent piece worked because it connected geological surveys to real estate patterns and family budgets. Pitch narratives that show how ecological developments affect local employment or housing costs.
Kempton approaches crime reporting as a diagnostic tool for social health. The hospital attack story explored staff retention rates alongside security failures. Effective pitches should connect incident reports to broader institutional trends - for example, how shoplifting patterns relate to cost-of-living pressures in specific postcodes.
"The patient chronicle of places others fly over" - Tasmanian Media Awards Committee, 2023 Citation
Kempton's 2023 Tasmanian Media Award for Regional Reporting recognized her decade-long documentation of Circular Head's economic transitions. The judging panel particularly noted her ability to maintain source relationships across multiple news cycles, a skill developed through her early career at Western Australia's Kalgoorlie Miner.
At PressContact, we aim to help you discover the most relevant journalists for your PR efforts. If you're looking to pitch to more journalists who write on Business, here are some other real estate journalist profiles you may find relevant:
