James Panichi

I'm an Australian journalist with 30 years' experience in print and electronic media.

I arrived in Brussels in 2012, just as the whole Dalligate tobacco thing was blowing up. It got me thinking about lobbying; that, in turn, prompted me to investigate the kind of inter-institutional stories which even inside-baseball experts would find too granular.

I lucked out: I was working at the now defunct European Voice when the all-caps POLITICO bought the business. I pitched the idea of a lobbying and governance beat and my new editors like it. I chipped away at it for over a year, co-writing a weekly lobbying newsletter while attempting to map the EU's evolving transparency landscape. It was great fun.

From there I moved to MLex, the regulatory risk specialists, to become the managing editor of the Brussels bureau. From 2018 I was MLex's Australasian managing editor, based in my home town, Melbourne; in May 2020 I became MLex's senior Asia-Pacific editor.

But it was at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that I first plunged into the newsroom's too-hard basket.

First it was as a reporter (later as a presenter and executive producer) of a radio current affairs program covering the South Pacific (the region, not the musical).

I then moved to the comparatively high-brow Radio National to produce a program dealing with policy development, transparency and governance issues. It was called the National Interest.

In my heyday as an Italian-language reporter I covered Australian and Pacific affairs for magazine Diario della Settimana and filed bits and pieces for a number of publications — not all of them reputable. I spent a year in Milan working at the now defunct (this is becoming a theme) Italy Daily.

I wasted years of my life investigating a story on design theft in the world of track cycling — my incomplete masterpiece. I filed a few reports but never quite got there. All grist to the mill: that's what my therapist says.

My best English-language writing can be found at insidestory.org.au.

For my master's degree in international relations I tackled linguistic issues, nationalism and statehood, with reference to secessionist movements in Canada and Papua New Guinea. Which is why I felt right at home in Belgium.

Instead of a midlife crisis I wouldn't mind a life-affirming scoop. Contact me, but don't call.

I am married and have two daughters. I'm sitting on a number of unfinished works: a bilingual play, a TV script and a single-act radio drama. I'll get to them any day now.