Based in Melbourne, Emily Parkinson brings over 20 years of expertise as a journalist, writer, and communications consultant. With a career that’s taken her across Sydney, London, and her hometown of Melbourne, Emily has worked with leading brands like Vanguard, where she helped launch Vanguard Super, and contributed to renowned outlets including Bloomberg and The Australian Financial Review.
Emily’s deep knowledge of financial markets, investments, and superannuation is matched by her passion for storytelling and creating content that connects.
We recently caught up with Emily to learn more about her career journey, her Melbourne favourites, and what inspires her work.
Q: You’re Honner’s first staff member permanently based in Melbourne. What does this expansion mean for Honner and its clients?
The move into Melbourne is an exciting strategic step for Honner and also great news for Honner clients. I think it’s fitting that after decades of growth and dominance in the financial services space in Sydney that Honner should now have a strong presence in the dynamic Melbourne market.
Honner’s Melbourne office extends our full-service offering to clients and means that all clients, not just the Melbourne-based ones, will get the benefit of access to that localised knowledge across media, communications and finance plus the comfort of boots on the ground support when needed.
Q: Tell us how you got into financial journalism, and now financial PR?
I got started pretty early with a curiosity in finance and investing. A university job with global investment bank Salomon Smith Barney delivering their morning research (by hand not email back then) really lit the spark and set me on the path to a career in financial communications.
While still studying I began working for Bloomberg in Melbourne where I was able to break a couple of headline-grabbing M&A stories between lectures. That helped speed up my ‘apprenticeship’ and I was soon reporting alongside more seasoned journalists in Sydney. From there I moved to London where I covered commodities for Dow Jones and spent a few interesting years deep in that space before moving back to Sydney to a role at The Australian Financial Review.
I’ve been fortunate to have some great reporting roles in newsrooms in Melbourne, Sydney and London, as well as challenging and rewarding communications problems to solve in PR in investments, superannuation and aged care.
Those diverse roles and experiences in financial journalism, corporate PR, issues management and content marketing, have honed a skillset that is highly flexible and pretty well stress-tested. I love problem solving and achieving great content outcomes for clients and I’m excited to put that experience to work for Honner clients.
Q. As one of Honner’s newest recruits, what attracted you to join the team?
I’ve known of Honner for many years and have also worked alongside some talented Honner staff in a former life in newsrooms. I’ve always admired Honner’s specialty focus on financial services and ability to sustain that focus over many years while also being responsive and adaptable to clients and the evolving media, investment and finance world. That change continues at pace so having smart, connected people able to navigate that complexity and seize those opportunities is a really powerful, specialized service for clients. On a personal level, it also makes going to work everyday really rewarding and challenging!