Meet our journalists: Cherie Howie

Herald journalist Cherie Howie. Photo / Michael Craig

Age 38
Job Journalist
Location Auckland
Number of years as a journalist14 years

The best story I've worked on, and why:

Best is the wrong word. But I'm most proud of a feature I suggested and wrote tracing the final journey of Daniel Bindner, a man who had fallen on hard times and died when the recycling bin he was sleeping in was emptied into a compactor.

I wanted readers to see Daniel as a person, rather than just someone who died in awful circumstances, and to shine a light where we all too often find it easy to look away.

The one that got away

A photo of the late night reunion between kidnapped 18-month-old Alyssa Barker and her parents in 2012.

I got the phone interview with Alyssa's dad, and Alyssa's parents agreed to be photographed with their daughter, but we couldn't get a photographer to Waitakere Hospital before they left.

It was gutting to be so close to having an amazing photo to go with a great scoop.

Career highlight

Doing a loop de loop over the Marlborough Sounds in a Chinese Nanchang air force plane. No words can adequately describe the experience of seeing the world - and such a beautiful part of it - come back up towards me.

I love journalism because

You find out things before other people, go places others can't, have an excuse to talk to anyone, get to tell amazing stories before anyone else and can help people who are being treated unfairly.

But if I couldn't be a journalist, I'd ...

Need to win Lotto, so I could do the other thing I love to do, which is travel.