Graeme Wood

Career

In January 2013, Wood was named as a prominent backer of a new digital edition of The Guardian in Australia. He said it would add quality and diversity to Australian media as well as fostering a closer interaction with the rest of the world. The deal includes a new Global Investigative Journalism Fellowship for an Australian journalist and full-time research desk for the consortium.

Other businesses Wood has founded, co-founded, or acquired interests in include Wotnews, which closed down in 2012 after spawning We Are Hunted, a music recommendation website sold to Twitter in 2013.

Wood also founded Wild Mob in 2008, a not-for-profit organisation that aims to protect Australia’s most threatened species and ecosystems, and Artology in 2011, an organization that unlocks the creative potential of young people through experiential learning in the performing arts, through programs such as WotOpera. In 2011, Wood partnered with January Cameron through Triabunna Investments to purchase the Triabunna Woodchip Mill in Tasmania.

Although the mill was supposed to keep operating for five years it remains mothballed.

Achievements

• He is the founder of online travel site Wotif.com and The Global Mail, a not-for-profit multimedia site for journalism in the public interest. Wood was made a Member of the Order of Australia (Department of Administration and Management) in the 2012 Australia Day Honours. He has been awarded Suncorp Queenslander of the Year, received an Honorary Doctorate of Economics from the University of Queensland and has been a large donor to the University.

Politics

An environmentalist and advocate of government transparency, Wood gave the largest political donation in Australian history in 2010, to the federal Greens party.

Membership

In July 2013 The Global Mail became the first institutional member of the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), as part of Wood’s three-year, United States$1.5 million grant to bolster cross-border investigative reporting. In June 2013, Wood also was elected a member of the board of directors of the United States-based Center for Public Integrity, the nonprofit, nonpartisan news organisation that supports the ICIJ.