Coast & Country has a new editor. Elaine Fisher has joined the team now that Sheryl Brown has left to write for Rural News and the Dairy Exporter. Elaine is an experienced rural journalist whose career in newspapers began even before she left school.

'Mr bus driver, Gus Dallas, himself a former journalist, suggested this career and got me my first role as Paparoa/Maungaturoto Correspondent for the Lower North Weekly News when I was in the sixth Form at Otamatea High School, and I was hooked.”

Elaine has worked for daily and community newspapers in the Bay of Plenty and Waikato and as a free-lance writer and magazine editor while her children were young.

For 10 years she and husband Graham owned a small deer farm in the Kaimai Ranges near Katikati and both share a love of the bush and boating. In 2009 Elaine travelled to the USA to see Fonterra's operations there and in 2010 accompanied a group of kiwifruit growers to Latina in Italy to learn how the disease PSA-V had impacted their industry. She also visited Antwerp and Tokyo to see Zespri's marketing in Europe and Japan. Last year Elaine won the Horticulture New Zealand Journalism Award for a series of articles she wrote about the out-break of the kiwifruit vine disease Psa-V in New Zealand. While she was editor of the Katikati Advertiser, the newspaper won the Qantas Media Award for the best community project, heading off both the Herald and the Christchurch Star to take the award for a project Elaine helped co-ordinate to raise money for a second full time St John Ambulance office in the town.

Elaine and Graham have three adult children, all of whom have left home, and the couple now live at Tanners Point, just north of Katikati.
'I'm delighted the be part of the Coast & Country and Sun Media team and look forward to continuing to write about those who live and work in our rural heartlands.”