Upstart editor, Erdem Koc, and writers Kelly Theobald and Tom Cowie, are getting ready to head to Kuwait later this month, as part of a ten-day student journalist delegation led by Melbourne’s Institute for Design, Entertainment and the Arts. All three will be filing stories for upstart while they’re away. With Erdem graduating from his Law/Media degree in November, Tom Cowie will take on the role of upstart editor over the summer.

In upstart this week, we’re really pleased to run a series of articles written by final-year  Bachelor of Journalism students in our features section over the coming weeks. Material from two of these articles – Sarah Baker’s Defying the age barrier, and Elise Moore’s profile of the world’s oldest competitive rower (to be published on upstart tomorrow) – has already been featured in a Sunday Age story about athletes who keep competing into their 70s and beyond.

With the footy season over, our new sports section is featuring updates from Ben Asgari on the Melbourne Spring Racing Carnival in the coming weeks (including this preview), and we’ve also just published a very entertaining profile of Roller Derby girl “Candy Rocks” by first-year student Carey Scheer.