Jon Wells
Jon Wells is a reporter and long-form journalist at The Hamilton Spectator whose education coverage leans on immersive, narrative features that draw out the human stakes in classrooms, labs, and school communities. He brings techniques honed in true-crime and investigative projects into stories about learning, turning campus and high school settings into backdrops for questions about identity, mortality, and community responsibility. His work stands out from beat-driven education reporting by favouring deeply reported, character-led narratives over brief, transactional coverage.
Education stories as personal history
Wells treats education as a place where memory and personal history intersect with institutional life, rather than as a series of policy announcements. In a feature on an anatomy lab, he spends multiple sessions observing dissection and study of cadavers, interviewing teachers, students, and families of donors to capture how formal medical training collides with emotional and philosophical questions about the body and death. His opinion piece on an ’80s high school band reuniting uses a school-based story to explore how youth culture, friendship, and creative ambition reverberate decades later, treating the school not just as an institution but as a crucible for lasting identity.
Across these education-related stories, Wells favours close observation and extended access over quick quotes. He follows participants through their routines, documents physical spaces in detail, and situates individual experiences within the longer timelines of programs and school communities. The result is coverage that helps readers understand how learning environments shape lives over many years, not just during a single semester or school year.
Long-form investigations and true crime
Wells is also a prominent true-crime and investigative writer, and that experience shapes his approach to education and institution-based stories. His multi-week series “Poison” documented the crimes of a serial poisoner, the police multiple-homicide investigation, and the court cases that followed, described as one of the largest single investments of journalistic resources in the paper’s history and later recognized with a national award.
He has written books drawn from this work and other true-crime reporting, building a reputation for detailed reconstruction of complex cases.
More recently, a two-part investigation into the disappearance of Emily Bailey was central enough to the newsroom that Wells co-hosted a public event discussing the reporting and its findings. A dedicated true-crime topic page describes him delving inside the mind of a killer, underscoring a recurring focus on how individuals, systems, and communities respond to extreme acts of violence. These projects demand careful sourcing, sustained time on a story, and an ability to translate investigative files and court records into accessible narratives, skills that he can apply when examining how schools, universities, and other institutions handle safety, ethics, and accountability.
Community, environment and culture features
Beyond crime and education, Wells writes wide-ranging features on local culture, environment, and community life, which give his education coverage a broader social context. A piece on a pollinator garden oasis in an industrial east end documents the long-term commitment of local gardeners and the environmental benefits of sustainable planting, blending personal story with ecological detail.
His feature on a university-formed band that grew into a nationally recognized act profiles the musicians’ work ethic, evolving sound, and social conscience, tying their success to the city and campus culture that shaped them.
Other work follows unconventional story lines where everyday passions meet larger themes, such as a narrative about muscle cars that explicitly links automotive culture to mortality on “winding roads.” Earlier in his career he has written sports features, including an in-depth profile of football player Jesse Lumsden, further illustrating his comfort with long-form storytelling in different beats. Across these stories, Wells consistently prioritizes narrative structure, scene-setting, and the voices of subjects over institutional messaging or quick news hits.
Career depth and storytelling style
Wells has reported for The Hamilton Spectator since the late 1990s and is described as a reporter, journalist, feature writer, author, and award-winning long-form journalist.
Over that span he has covered topics ranging from crime to politics, health, environment, sports, and culture, often travelling for major projects and turning them into books as well as newspaper series. Public profiles credit him with multiple national journalism awards and several books, with a particular emphasis on true-crime collections drawn from his reporting.
Stylistically, Wells blends investigative rigour with literary feature writing: he spends extended time with sources, builds stories around central characters, and uses detailed description to anchor abstract themes in lived experience. When he writes about education, he brings that same approach to lectures, labs, and school corridors, portraying them as stages where larger social and moral questions play out. This combination of beat knowledge, investigative discipline, and narrative craft distinguishes his coverage from more conventional education reporting and makes his stories well suited to complex, human-centred subjects.
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.