James Massola

Massola grew up in Melbourne, Victoria and graduated from Xavier College, and then Monash University with a master's degree in International Relations.[1] His great uncle is Aldo Massola, the anthropologist, author and museum curator.

He moved to Canberra in 2007 and worked in the Canberra Press Gallery for 10 years, mostly for Fairfax Media. He began working for The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald in January 2014.

In October 2017, he announced via Twitter that he was leaving the job of chief political correspondent and in 2018 would take up the job of south-east Asia correspondent for the newspapers.[2]

In November 2018, Allen and Unwin published his first book, The Great Cave Rescue, about the rescue of the Wild Boars football team from the Tham Luang cave in Thailand, in July 2018.[3]. The book was published by Duckworth Books in the UK in October 2019. [4]

Massola was a finalist in the Walkley awards for journalism[5] for reporting with Peter Hartcher a detailed leak from former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott's cabinet.[6] In 2016 he was a finalist in the Quills for the David Feeney residence scandal [7][8] and in 2017 he was part of the team that won the Grant Hattam Quill award for investigative journalism into the Sam Dastyari Chinese influence story, involving Huang Xiangmo.[9][10] In 2019 he was named "outstanding foreign correspondent" in the Kennedy Awards [11]