Liam Newbigging
Liam Newbigging reports for the Edmonton Journal, covering how real estate, office life, and civic institutions reshape the city’s core and the people who use it.
Real estate and the downtown core
On his real estate beat, Newbigging focuses on the tension between office workers returning to the city’s centre and the retail and restaurant businesses that are leaving it.
In his coverage of office workers moving back downtown while some retailers and restaurants pull out, he treats the business district as a living system, tying workplace patterns and leasing decisions to what happens at street level.
The emphasis is on concrete change: who is coming back to offices, who is closing up shop, and how those moves alter the mix of services and storefronts around them.
Across this work he writes in a straightforward style, with clear framing of the economic shifts and the people affected, rather than leaning on boosterism or alarm.
Civic institutions, education and public services
Newbigging also reports on how public institutions make decisions that reach into classrooms and households.
His Edmonton Journal coverage of second-language programs in public schools looks at curriculum changes as a governance issue, not only a pedagogical one, showing how language instruction sits inside broader debates about priorities and resources.
At Edmonton Edge, he has written on whether Alberta micro-manages its universities, bringing the same attention to the balance of authority between government and higher education.
In a separate Edmonton Edge piece on the “credit crunch” in student education, he follows the rising cost of living and studying, focusing on how tuition, rent, and day-to-day expenses threaten students’ ability to stay in school.
His reporting for The Griff on a major contribution to the campus food bank similarly tracks how funding decisions translate into capacity to meet basic needs, keeping the story close to the concrete effects on people using those services.
Technology, policing and privacy
Newbigging brings a particular interest in artificial intelligence to his coverage of local institutions.
He has reported on Edmonton Police testing AI-driven facial-recognition body cameras, examining the deployment of new surveillance tools before formal approval by the provincial privacy commissioner.
In that work he follows both the technology and the oversight structures around it, linking police practice with regulatory gaps and public concern.
He has stated that artificial intelligence and Canadian politics are key reporting interests, and that focus carries into appearances where he explains how new tools are changing fields such as health care.
The result is coverage that treats AI as part of everyday civic life, not a niche tech topic, and connects it to rights, accountability, and working conditions.
Broad local reporting experience
Newbigging’s real estate and institutional coverage sits on top of broader experience in local news reporting.
He has worked as a reporter and producer with CBC Edmonton, where he is described as focusing on local stories with nuance and depth.
His bylines include CBC, the Globe and Mail, and Edify Edmonton, extending his reporting beyond one newsroom while keeping it centred on public-interest stories.
He has also served as news editor for The Griff and written for Edmonton Edge, giving him regular exposure to municipal issues, campus life, and community organisations.
Individual pieces have ranged from breaking news about a hit-and-run that left a teenager injured, to longer-form investigations into restaurant cleanliness, showing that he moves between quick-turn coverage and sustained reporting when the story requires it.
Taken together, his work shows a reporter who treats the city’s built environment, its schools, and its services as interlocking beats, and who uses real estate stories to anchor wider reporting on how policy, technology, and economic pressure reshape daily life.
4 more real estate journalists.
Addie Morfoot
Addie Morfoot covers how real estate, culture and media meet, focusing on people, rules and the way homes shape a life. She reports for The New York Times on housing and lifestyle, from personal narratives about finding a home after loss to features on how short-term rental policy affects everyday owners and renters. She writes real estate stories that connect laws and regulations to the choices available to ordinary residents in specific towns and cities. She is a regular contributor to the Sunday Routine franchise, following actors, comedians and designers through a typical day and showing how settings like homes, studios and subway cars shape daily experience. She also has a long track record covering documentary film and the entertainment business, including legal questions around fair use, changing docu-series formats, festival premieres and financing. Her portfolio spans more than two decades of work for The New York Times, Variety, The Wall Street Journal and Crain’s New York Business.
Alcynna Lloyd
Alcynna Lloyd is a real estate reporter and economic journalist at Business Insider whose work is distinct for treating housing as a core economic system people must navigate. She covers how housing markets, costs, and mobility shape everyday life decisions, connecting data on rents, home prices, and city trends with stories of people managing debt, multigenerational living, and moves abroad. Her beat centers on housing costs, renters, and household strategies, following renters pushing back against landlords and tracking “desperate home sellers” using concessions in unaffordable markets. A second strand of her coverage focuses on relocation, remote work, and cheap cities as everyday economic strategies. She regularly uses rankings and lists, such as best and worst states to buy a home and Rising Stars of Real Estate, and reads city housing and migration shifts as signs of broader economic change.
Alec Lazenby
Alec Lazenby covers how provincial politics and government decisions shape housing, real estate and the wider social fabric. He reports for The Vancouver Sun from the provincial legislature. His work examines HousingHub, middle-income rentals, affordability, stalled projects, empty condos, developer layoffs, municipal housing targets and land use. He also covers health, addiction, safer supply, involuntary care, water rights, resource management, Indigenous rights and Crown land. Lazenby connects policy language to specific buildings, rents, projects, services and people. He explains financial, regulatory and market pressures, then follows how institutions, professionals, developers, municipalities and affected communities respond. His reporting tests government goals against practical outcomes and shows how policy reversals, construction costs, interest rates and political accountability shape housing and public life.
Amir Ali
Amir Ali links housing, disputes, and oddball neighbourhood stories in case-based, street-level reporting for Daily Hive. He holds a senior editorial and writing role, listed on the masthead as part of Vancouver leadership and described as a staff writer. His core beat is real estate, especially the rental market and housing affordability, tracking rent ranges, market shifts, and how pressures land on people trying to stay housed. He also covers crime, civil tribunals, and mental health, explaining decisions and conflicts in plain language that focuses on timelines, behaviour, and outcomes. Ali writes offbeat hyperlocal features, traffic and transport disruptions, business, food, and general local news, often turning infrastructure, small businesses, and civic systems into tangible stories. A former radio producer, he brings tight pacing and clear stakes to written pieces and maintains an active social media presence as a broadcaster and writer.