After years of early starts and talking mostly about rainfall, humidity and temperatures as the weather presenter on ABC News Breakfast, Vanessa O'Hanlon is relishing her new role anchoring the nightly news.
"It's a huge move - it's very exciting," she says of her switch to commercial network Nine to present its nightly news bulletins for regional NSW and the ACT.
"It's nice to get back out into the regions again and to such a brand new project."
O'Hanlon presented her first Nine News bulletin in Canberra on February 6. From February 13 she is also seen in the 6 o’clock timeslot on weeknights in the Illawarra and south coast regions.
The roll-out of Nine’s one-hour format mixing local, national and international news, sport and weather continues on February 20 with a nightly bulletin for Orange, Dubbo and the Central West. A bulletin for Wagga Wagga and the Riverina will follow.
With small teams of reporters based in each market, the bulletins are compiled and broadcast from Nine’s studios in Sydney, with O'Hanlon as anchor.
While O’Hanlon has been smiling in front of the television camera for a decade, she began her media career off-screen, in radio.
The eldest of Irene and Barry O'Hanlon's five children, O’Hanlon grew up in Melton, about 45km west of Melbourne, where "Mum and Dad still live in the family home".
She remembers a busy, loud household, with former Melbourne weather presenter David Brown and veteran news reader Mal Walden on the telly.
"Jana [Wendt] was definitely an inspiration - and Jennifer Hanson was one of the big newsreaders of the day,” she recalls.
"It would be interesting to watch the news back and see what she's wearing. I dare say her hair's permed!"
Always "a good listener", O'Hanlon studied radio at a course offered jointly by Swinburne University and the Australian Film, Television and Radio School.
Fierce ambition led her to swap the comforts of suburban Melbourne for the rugged, dry landscape of Alice Springs. She was employed by SUN-FM as the drive announcer, but her days were also filled with writing radio advertisements, and writing and reading the news.
"At that time it was all about multi-skilled staff," she said.
From central Australia she moved back to Victoria to a role closer to home on radio in Shepparton. Not content to sit behind a desk and read the news, she tried hard to have an influence on the music being played on the station.
"I would pester my program director in Shepparton and run in with people like Matchbox 20 and Savage Garden and say 'come on! You've got to give these guys a go! They're going to be huge!'" she laughed.
"So I can totally claim Savage Garden!
"And he was like 'would you just get out of my office?'"
A move to Darwin saw O'Hanlon finally score her "dream job" as a music director.
"My job was going through what had been released that week and making a decision on what should be played on the radio station," she said.
"It was a bit old school so I had to brush up on some '60s music! I'd call home and say 'mum, dad, do you remember this song?'
"It was very adult contemporary - I can't say I really loved the music."
From Darwin she moved back to Melbourne to a variety of radio and television roles - including as one of the first journalists to go up in a helicopter live on television for the Australian Traffic Network, and listening to Melbourne's late-night confessions as the host of Mix 101.1's Melbourne After Dark.
O'Hanlon scored her most recent role as the ABC's morning weather presenter in 2008. She said resigning from ABC News Breakfast and announcing her move to Nine was like "breaking up the family".
"They were really happy for me but it was also sad - our little family was breaking up," she said.
"We'd all been together from the start - although Michael [Rowland] had come in two years later.
"It was sad. There were a lot of tears. It was a month of tears."
The media landscape - and the television landscape specifically - has changed significantly since O'Hanlon started out as a journalist in 1995. But despite the fact YouTube and Facebook have become the norm for consuming video content, O'Hanlon believes television still has a role to play for Australians.
"I think [television's] still very strong, especially out in the regional areas because people are so reliant on getting their news and finding out what's happening around them," she said.
"From my experience in the regions, locals can't get enough local news."
Throughout more than two decades of reporting, O'Hanlon said it's her love of human interest stories that's kept her successful.
"I love listening to people - where they're from, how they got to where they're at," she said.
"I love covering things that are affecting people's lives - and to tell stories about people."
Speaking to Fairfax Media not long after her Nine News colleagues Amber Sherlock and Julie Snook went viral with the "white shirt scandal", O'Hanlon shied away from commenting on their respective wardrobes.
But she acknowledged that fashion plays a big role in the general aesthetic of nightly news. She said Nine News viewers could expect to see her in cobalt blue, plum and emerald green.
"With the ABC I had pretty much 100 per cent [control of wardrobe] - I would buy my clothes myself," she said.
"Obviously there were guidelines and I wouldn't go too risque, and they of course had to be weather appropriate!
"With this new role at Nine we have stylists who oversee things and make sure everything's okay, and they've been buying some new bits and pieces for me so it has been exciting to step into someone else's creativity as well.
"The Channel Nine style is a news style so I'll be wearing lots of nice blouses and jackets and still my favourite dresses.
"And lots of colours - I love colour. Cue and Karen Millen are my go-to brands."