Sally White
Sally White is a former journalist and author of Reporting in Australia and co-author with John Hurst of Ethics and the Australian News Media. In the 1990s, she generously dedicated the earnings from these popular textbooks to the Journalism Education Association (subsequently to become JERAA). The funds are still used to support the Ossie Awards—annual student journalism awards that are named after her late father, Osmar (Ossie) White, an Australian investigative journalist, war correspondent and author of seven books.
In the history of the Melbourne Press Club, its website records White’s time as President from March 1989:
“Sally was the daughter of Osmar White, one of the top journalists in the days of Sir Keith Murdoch. Sally, like Osmar, was and is a strong personality.
She had done almost everything at The Age, from being a good reporter through to feature writer, science editor and arts editor. When she became president, she had just moved to teaching journalism at RMIT.
Sally was a great teacher of students. You could say, a professor of journalism. She arranged for her students to come to club lunches. They made up their own tables, brought their own lunches and did not have to pay. However, they could move around and chat with their future peers.
They were welcome indeed because members were hard to find in the early 1990s. Sally said that previously many a working journalist would come along to lunches and then charge the cost to expenses back at the office.”
