Farewell to the iTnews newshound

By

A few words about Ry Crozier.

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.

Farewell to the iTnews newshound

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.

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Brett Winterford

One of Australia’s most experienced technology journalists, former iTnews Group Editor Brett Winterford has written about the business of technology for 15 years.

Awarded Business Journalist and Technology Journalist of the year at the 2004 ITjourno awards and Editor of the Year at the 2009 Publishers Australia 'Bell' awards, Winterford has extensive experience in both the business and technology press, writing for such publications as the Australian Financial Review and The Sydney Morning Herald.

As editor of iTnews Brett has led a team of award-winning journalists; delivered speeches at industry events; authored, commissioned and edited research papers, curated technology conferences [The iTnews Executive Summit and Australian Data Centre Strategy Summit and also shares the judging of the annual Benchmark Awards.

Brett's areas of specialty include enterprise software, cloud computing and IT services.

Read more from this blog: System II

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