Matt de Neef and Kelly Theobald have been appointed joint editors of upstart for the first half of 2010. The pair will take over the reins from Tom Cowie, who has kept upstart alive and kicking right through the long hot summer.

Matt (yes, that’s him) is completing his Graduate Diploma in Journalism and blogs at both A Cursory Glance, which is a compendium of his opinion pieces, and The Climbing Cyclist, which details his encounters with some of Victoria’s most popular climbs. Matt recently had a feature published in The Age that examined the censorship of videogames in Australia, and a follow-up article in upstart that told the story of how an assignment he’d written for La Trobe morphed into the aforementioned Age piece. Matt, who has a Bachelor of Arts (Communications/Philosophy) from Monash under his belt, will be responsible for upstart‘s burgeoning Sport section during this semester.

Kelly, pictured above with a camel in Kuwait,  completed her Bachelor of Journalism last year, and has enrolled in Honours this year. Over the summer, Kelly completed an internship with the Australian edition of Rolling Stone, and has since been working with Beat magazine. She also has her own blog, Music Meets Girl. In the coming months Kelly will edit the ETC … section, which includes reviews and opinion pieces.

Tom Cowie, who is about to commence an internship at Crikey, joins a long and illustrious list of former upstart ex-editors. Actually the only former upstart editor is Erdem Koc, who is now working as a radio journalist as SBS. (If you’re new to upstart, you might be interested to know that we only launched last June.) We all wish Tom well with whatever comes next for him, including his Crikey stint, and look forward to seeing many more of his musings in upstart.

To contact anyone in the editorial team, please go to the Contact form on the site. And if you’re thinking of writing for upstart, please have a look at our publication guidelines.