Sophia Baker
Sophia Baker reports for The Standard on how local decisions, prices and projects affect everyday life, with a particular focus on motorists and the cost of running a vehicle. Her automobile coverage sits alongside reporting on energy developments and community culture, giving her stories a consistent lens on how policy, pricing and change land for ordinary people. She works as a journalist with The Standard’s newsroom, contributing both hard news and feature pieces.
'Top your tanks up now': fuel price surge warnings
In the article titled "Top your tanks up now: motorists urged to fuel up before looming price surge", Baker covers an impending jump in fuel prices through the perspective of drivers being urged to act before costs rise further. The headline makes clear that she treats fuel price movements as a practical problem for motorists, framed in terms of timing and clear advice rather than abstract market analysis.
Her automobile beat is grounded in these kinds of service-oriented stories, where price shifts are translated into concrete actions and budget pressures for people who depend on their cars.
'Something to vote for': election promise to axe wind farm
In "‘Something to vote for’: campaigners react to election promise to axe wind farm", Baker reports on a Coalition commitment to rescind the Southern Ocean Offshore Wind Farm Zone and the response from local campaigners.
The story details how the No Offshore Wind Farm Zone – Warrnambool and District Network welcomes the pledge to cancel the planned offshore wind farm area adjacent to Warrnambool and Port Fairy. Her treatment connects energy infrastructure and electoral politics with the concerns of residents, showing how national or state-level promises are received by organised community groups close to the affected projects.
This work sits near her automobile coverage by tracking how large-scale energy decisions intersect with cost-of-living, environmental and transport debates.
'Going out on the right note': local band’s final bow
Another strand of Baker’s reporting is evident in "‘Going out on the right note’: long time band takes its final bow", which profiles Warrnambool band Lost in Suburbia as it prepares for a final show.
The piece highlights the band members and their last performance, marking the end of a long-running presence in the local music scene. Through this kind of arts and community coverage, she documents cultural milestones and the way long-standing groups shape and reflect the identity of their area.
It adds a human-scale, nostalgic dimension to her portfolio, complementing the more hard-edged stories on energy and motoring costs.
Role within The Standard’s newsroom
Baker works within The Standard’s reporting team and has been in that role since 2024. Her bylines span automobile-focused stories, energy policy coverage and features on local culture, indicating that she operates across news and feature formats rather than a narrow single-topic brief.
Across these varied assignments, she maintains a clear emphasis on how decisions, projects and price shifts affect residents’ daily lives, whether at the bowser, in their views on offshore wind farms or in the venues where they watch long-established bands play their final shows.
4 more automobile journalists.
Aditya Nadkarni
Aditya Nadkarni turns new model launches and first drive reviews into clear, buyer-facing information, with a strong focus on detail and incremental updates. He is principal correspondent at CarWale, where he covers passenger vehicles with an emphasis on launch news, facelifts and road-test impressions for mainstream and premium cars. His core news work tracks new introductions and lifecycle updates, explaining what changes, when the car goes on sale, and how each variant is configured. He writes “variants explained” pieces and structured first drive reviews that link driving impressions to a model’s place in the market and its recent update or launch. His reporting is factual, methodical and model-specific, avoiding broad commentary and treating even minor tweaks and new features as news. His bylines also appear at Mobility Outlook and CarTrade, with the same detail-first style.
Alexis Hooi
Alexis Hooi reports on how China’s partnerships in electric vehicles, green technology, tourism and agriculture reshape markets and communities, with a focus on Australia and the wider Asia-Pacific. He writes for China Daily, drawing on experience as a national news page editor, columnist and long-form reporter, and earlier work in other media and organizations. His beat covers Chinese EVs in Australia, green transition projects, innovation hubs, wine, geothermal energy and agricultural cooperation, treating each sector as a lens on China–Oceania economic ties and sustainable growth. He follows concrete outcomes like shifts in car choices, visitor numbers, exports and investment, and reports through project-focused stories and personality-driven features. He also covers culture and identity, diaspora roots, tourism flows, animal attractions and commentary on perception and language, grounding China–Australia relations in everyday experiences.
Antonina Joson
Antonina Joson covers how Southeast Asia’s car markets and fleet decisions respond to new technologies, environmental pressures, and policy shifts. She writes for AfMA, focusing on the automobile sector and its implications for fleets and mobility services, and works as a communications officer with a background in writing, digital marketing, and content creation. Her reporting tracks month‑to‑month changes in car sales in Indonesia, Thailand, and Singapore, linking sales data, segment performance, and national policy to corporate strategy. She reports on electric vehicles as strategic assets tied to air quality, energy policy, and industrial ambitions, and follows regional moves such as XPENG’s entry into Indonesia and calls for Toyota to shift production. She also covers safety campaigns, mobility platforms, online marketplaces, book recommendations for fleet professionals, and contributes to FleetDrive advertising and content planning, bringing a commercial, cross‑industry perspective to fleet‑focused coverage.
Aranya Mondal
Aranya Mondal is a business and technical writer who edits and writes analytical coverage of the global aluminium industry for AL Circle, with a through-line of connecting trade patterns and supply risks to aluminium competitiveness. She focuses on aluminium trade flows, bauxite diplomacy, tariffs, scrap imports and strategic materials adjacent to aluminium such as gallium. Her beat spans scrap, recycling and the shift from linear to circular aluminium markets, alumina and aluminium production trends, regional vulnerabilities and project developments, as well as automotive and mobility uses of aluminium including product launches like the Anytec A28-T boat. She works mainly on long-form explainers and recurring formats such as weekly sustainability recaps, using clear language, trade data and value-chain context to unpack production, policy and energy trends for an industry audience.