Kellie Balaam
Kellie Balaam covers entertainment for PerthNow and The West Australian, focusing on how global pop culture, celebrity stories and social media trends play out on Perth stages and in everyday lives. Her work combines hard entertainment news, tour announcements and live show recaps with personality-driven features on influencers, athletes and local figures in the spotlight. She brings a reporter’s structure and detail to stories that sit at the intersection of fame, lifestyle and online attention.
Music tours and live shows
Music coverage is a core strand of Balaam’s reporting, with regular pieces on major tours and headline shows coming through Perth and around Australia. She writes detailed announcements that set out dates, venues and broader career context for artists such as Genesis Owusu, explaining how new albums and reputations as “electrifying” live performers underpin national tours that include Perth stops. Her coverage of pop star Kesha’s tour outlines routing, venue details and recent releases, linking a long-awaited Australian run to an ongoing period of creative control and renewed success. For marquee shows like Kylie Minogue’s Tension Tour opener at RAC Arena, she switches to live update and recap formats, tracking set lists, staging and crowd reaction over the course of a two-hour performance.
Across these pieces she treats concerts as both news events and pop culture markers, anchoring them in album cycles, artist narratives and the local experience of seeing global acts on Perth stages.
Influencers, OnlyFans and social media careers
Balaam gives significant space to stories where social media and influencer culture drive career and life changes, treating them as full narrative features rather than brief gossip items. In her coverage of Perth influencer Jules Neale, she traces the fallout from a high-profile breakup with an AFL player through Neale’s own account of public support, relocation and immersion in the city’s fashion and social scene.
The piece follows Neale’s move back to Perth, the growth of her audience on Instagram and TikTok, and her positioning as a premium hairdresser, using pricing and salon details to underline how content creation and professional services feed into the same personal brand.
In a separate feature on Isla Moon, Balaam documents a psychology and neuroscience graduate’s decision to reject a PhD offer after discovering the earning potential of OnlyFans, charting the shift from academic research assistant on a modest salary to top-earner status built around an outdoor lifestyle persona. She includes follower counts, creator rankings and hosting duties on a fishing television show to show how online platforms can reshape work, income and media presence. These stories share a consistent frame: social media is treated as a serious economic and cultural force, and the subject’s own voice, decisions and metrics sit at the centre of the coverage.
Sport, screen and celebrity lifestyle
Beyond music and influencers, Balaam reports on entertainment-adjacent figures whose stories sit between sport, screen and lifestyle. Her profile of Dallas Cowboys cheerleader Faith Ward follows a Perth-raised dancer returning home between an NFL schedule and a New York press tour for a Netflix series about the cheer squad, highlighting the demands of making the team and the visibility that comes with streaming exposure.
In coverage of retired swimmer Shayna Jack, she tracks the athlete’s post-Commonwealth Games life, including her return to Perth, Olympic relay successes, world records and the impact of a past suspension, framing her retirement and future plans as part of an ongoing public narrative. Balaam’s approach in these pieces is to treat athletes and performers as entertainment personalities whose careers, controversies and social media updates continue to attract attention even as competitive chapters close or shift.
The tone is descriptive rather than celebratory, with timelines, achievements and turning points laid out cleanly to give a clear picture of where these figures sit now in the broader entertainment landscape.
Perth social scene and new venues
Balaam also contributes to social and lifestyle coverage that documents how entertainment plays out in Perth’s bars, restaurants and events. Her report on a new restaurant and bar in West Perth focuses on the concept behind the venue, the owner’s long-term ambition and the goal of becoming one of the city’s most loved dining destinations, using quotes and launch-night detail to convey the mood and positioning. In social gallery-style pieces, she captures openings and gatherings that fuse food, fashion and entertainment, giving readers a sense of who attends, how they present and how new spaces fit into the existing social fabric. This work complements her reporting on performers and influencers by showing the settings in which audiences and personalities meet, and by mapping the local venues that sit alongside big-ticket tours and online fame.
Reporting background and format
Balaam works as an entertainment reporter at The West Australian, contributing extensively to PerthNow’s entertainment and social coverage. She joined Seven West Media in 2019 and started her career as the sole journalist at the Narrogin Observer, producing a weekly newspaper.
She then spent two years in the Albany newsroom as a court, arts and environment reporter, experience that informs her current attention to structured narrative, legal and reputational detail in entertainment stories. Her present output spans breaking celebrity news such as a major country music star’s divorce filing, tour announcements, live show recaps, personality features and social scene reports, often within the same week.
Across formats she keeps articles tightly reported and accessible, favouring clear timelines, direct quotes and concrete metrics - dates, follower counts, prices and achievements - to show why a particular entertainment or lifestyle story matters now.
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