Kate Halfpenny
Kate Halfpenny uses entertainment, celebrity behaviour and everyday life as raw material for sharp opinion columns and feature stories for The Age. Her work sits where pop culture, social media and personal experience collide, drawing out what public moments say about boundaries, manners and modern adulthood. She brings decades of magazine and newspaper experience to this beat, with a voice that is conversational, self-aware and precise.
Entertainment and public behaviour
Halfpenny’s entertainment coverage is driven less by reviews than by how public figures behave, and what that behaviour reveals about the culture around them.
In a recent column on Anthony Albanese’s offhand “melons” remark, she treated the episode as a test of intention, tone and context, concluding that it showed a daggy, boundary-pushing persona rather than outright misogyny. She has examined television and sports media moments in the same spirit, questioning the familiarity of on-air interactions and whether it is appropriate to kiss a colleague while both parties are “drawing a wage” from the interview.
Her writing on comedian Dave Hughes’ angry social media rants uses his public frustration as a way to explore performance, online persona and the strain that constant broadcasting places on both performer and audience. Across these pieces she keeps the focus on conduct and consequence, using well-known personalities to probe what is acceptable, what is merely awkward, and how audiences read intent.
Social media, sleep and the texture of daily life
Alongside celebrity and political moments, Halfpenny writes frequently about the habits and technologies that shape everyday life. In her social media columns, she treats deleted platforms and lost timelines not as tech stories but as emotional and cultural losses, noting how vanished feeds take milestones, breakdowns and even a dog’s novelty costume with them.
Her pieces on sleep look beyond medical advice to the narratives people build around rest, invoking public figures and cultural touchstones to argue for a more honest reckoning with exhaustion and overwork. She returns often to themes of nostalgia, letting go and the risk of living too much in the rear-view mirror, framing practical choices as “golden rules” drawn from hard-won experience.
The result is lifestyle writing that treats small, familiar problems as part of a wider story about midlife, ageing and the pressure to keep up.
Profiles and long-form conversations
Halfpenny extends the same curiosity about interior lives and public image to her feature interviews. In Sunday Life, she has written cover stories with actors such as Christina Hendricks, focusing on the reflection that comes with turning 50 and the reassessment of work, relationships and ambition. Her magazine background includes years of celebrity cover work, where she interviewed global figures from film, television and music and shaped stories around high-profile events such as divorces, weddings and royal milestones. These profiles balance access and candour: she is comfortable with glamour and celebrity machinery but uses it to surface vulnerability, self-doubt and the private calculations behind public careers.
For communications teams, this makes her a natural fit for talent who are ready to talk about turning points, reinvention and the costs of visibility, rather than simple promotion.
Experience, format and voice
Halfpenny writes as a regular columnist for The Age, contributing opinion pieces that sit within the masthead’s broader commentary offering. Professional bios describe more than three decades of work across national newspapers, magazines and digital outlets, including extended runs at celebrity and lifestyle titles and ongoing commentary for major metropolitan dailies. She also runs a content business that draws on her editorial background, and appears on radio and in podcasts where she speaks to resilience, career change and storytelling craft.
On the page, her format tends to blend first-person observation with reported detail and cultural reference: she moves quickly from a personal anecdote to a wider question about etiquette, gender or generational change. The tone is direct, often wry, and she is comfortable using humour to make uncomfortable points about work, relationships and the way public life blurs into private habit.
This combination of entertainment literacy, opinion framing and lived detail means her pieces can carry both a newsy hook and a reflective core, suited to stories that benefit from a human, midlife lens on culture.
4 more entertainment journalists.
Abigail Flores-Johnson
Abigail Flores-Johnson covers food, beer and entertainment for the Coloradoan, with a focus on how people eat, drink and spend their free time. She reports on new restaurants and bars, closures, grocery development, local businesses and the changing dining scene. Her past coverage includes Shake Shack’s first Northern Colorado location, Los Tarascos’ closing after 31 years, national recognition for Social and La Boutique, and guides to local tacos, bars and restaurants. She also covers festivals, live music, cultural celebrations and events such as Taste of Fort Collins, FoCo Fall Fest, Juneteenth, FoCoMX and Dude Dad’s Mini Golf Open. Her reporting is practical and detail-heavy. She uses guides, lists and previews with addresses, hours, tickets, vendors, schedules and activities to help readers decide where to go and what to do.
Ailish Delaney
Ailish Delaney is a news writer at Mamamia who turns entertainment, news, crime and lifestyle stories into emotionally driven narratives that keep women at the centre. She works where hard news, pop culture and everyday life intersect, using clear reporting and vivid detail to show how events and trends land in real people’s lives. Her beat spans women-centred news, crime, safety, social affairs, entertainment and practical lifestyle advice. She profiles women making high-stakes choices, covers relationship dilemmas and revisits stories of resilience and mortality. Her entertainment work translates awards seasons, policy and self-help into everyday terms, including podcast segments and lived experiments. Drawing on experience in regional newsrooms and at 7NEWS.com.au, she reports court, crime and safety incidents with disciplined timelines and verified detail, balancing empathy, practical warnings and accessible, solutions-focused guidance.
Alexandra Del Rosario
Alexandra Del Rosario anchors fast-turn entertainment and culture coverage at the Los Angeles Times Fast Break Desk. She reports breaking news across film, television, music and online celebrity culture, with a real beat at the intersection of celebrities, courts and controversies. Her work covers legal filings, arrests, lawsuits, allegations, social media posts, ratings, casting news and personal milestones, and she also writes on video games and Asian American and Pacific Islander representation in media. She reports in clear, compact summaries that put the key facts first, then add context from a subject’s career, roles or industry trends. Before the Los Angeles Times, she covered TV ratings, casting and development at Deadline and served as an associate editor, with additional experience at The Hollywood Reporter and TheWrap.
Amy Lyall
Amy Lyall combines fast-paced celebrity and reality TV coverage with first-person lifestyle and money writing across Nine’s digital platforms. She is an associate entertainment editor at Nine, setting the daily agenda for celebrity, reality formats and movie stories while also reporting. Her beat centres on celebrity relationships, rumours and personal milestones, tracking long-running speculation through to confirmed updates and public discussions of grief and loss. Reality TV is a second focus, following couples and personalities beyond the shows themselves. Alongside this she writes Spend Less, Live More, a recurring lifestyle money series for 9Honey that uses her own budgeting and household habits to show practical ways to save. Her archive also includes wellbeing and relationships pieces and explainer features on language and everyday culture, including terms, names and how people use them.