Farewell to the iTnews newshound

This morning is the last edition of iTnews to feature Ry Crozier, the longest serving and most read journalist our little operation has had the luck to have on payroll.

We don't usually publish a tribute for a departing journo - people tend to come and go at a steady pace in this business - but Ry has put such a stamp on iTnews it would be remiss of me not to say something.

When I first arrived on the scene, Ry was flying the ship singlehandedly and had good reason to spite this lanky git selected to be his boss. To his credit he entertained (with a few mutters under his breath) a lot of my ideas - many of which didn't come off.

And despite hiring some of the best rated journalists in our sector for the six years since, Ry attracted the most readers of any of us every year on end. He was rightly awarded with Best News Journalist at the 2009 Mediaconnect Awards - but was probably most instrumental in writing the stories that won iTnews a slew of 'Best Title/Best News Title' awards since.

Crozier is a tech generalist - he has tried his hand at just about every beat, as required. I thought him strongest when stealing the show from seasoned telecommunications journos or chartering undiscovered territory writing about how IT is transforming the mining and resources sector.

There are two qualities I most admire in Ry's work. The first is sheer diligence. Delivering iTnews to your inbox by 7-7:30am every day requires somebody to be up very, very early, and for most of our history, that was Ry. But that didn't mean he was first to leave the office.

His diligence shone through in several key stories - sitting through the many, many days of proceedings in the iiTrial and delivering a blow-by-blow account for readers won him a lot of praise.

As did staying up for 24 hours to crunch the numbers on the NBN rollout in the first piece to provide genuine evidence the project was not hitting its targets. Such was the trust other telco journalists had in his scrupulous methods that most (other than some poor NBN Co crisis comms managers) reported them without question.

The other quality I most admire is Ry's genuine enthusiasm for the tech - he was drawn to the quirky stories in the technology beat - a lone beer fridge interfering with radio frequency spectrum in the Australian bush, data centres powered by cows, driverless trucks.

It's that enthusiasm he'll carry with him at his new role at the University of New South Wales, where he will be writing about and promoting research efforts in engineering and IT.

You can continue to converse with him on Twitter at @rycrozier.

Best of luck Ry.