News Highlights 2017: Alex Lavelle, Editor, The Age

Print and online editors choose their highlights of 2017.

Alex Lavelle, Editor, The Age

The simplest ideas are often the best and that is true for design. Adele Ferguson and Sarah Danckert’s cracking exposé about retirement village operator Aveo ripping off elderly Australians through complex contracts and eye-watering exit fees had been months in the making.

It needed a great cover in our biggest-selling paper, The Saturday Age, to showcase this important and agenda-setting journalism.

Our print editor Mark Fuller said: “I wanted to convey the vulnerability of the elderly people who were being exploited, while emphasising their very basic desire for the security of a roof over their heads in their later lives.”

The paper looked great and the stories were also displayed beautifully online with a specially developed interactive. Ferguson and Danckert’s stories ended up winning the Walkley award for investigative journalism and the newspaper cover was my favourite of the year.