Some people become journalists because they believe in the power of the written word as instrument of social change. They adhere to principles of objectivity, fairness, impartiality, and public accountability; they conceive of themselves as defenders of freedom and champions of truth, faithful servants of a society inextricably linked to the proper and rapid distribution of information.
Then there are journalists like Colin Ashwood.
It's not that he's a bad reporter — far from it. It's not even that he's an unethical one — indeed, Colin tries his level best to adhere to every professional standard of which he's aware. But at the end of the day, Colin does what he does for a purely instrumental reason: to tell the Colonies' most compelling stories so his own name might find itself under the lights.
Born twenty-six years ago to a well-to-do family on Leonis, Colin will be the first to tell you that his childhood was hardly a difficult one. His parents were firm believers in the policy of benign neglect, giving him free rein as long as he kept himself out of trouble and avoided bringing too much shame to the Ashwood name. In such an environment, it should come as no surprise that Colin's natural ambition found few avenues for expression. Devoid of any career aspirations beyond scoring with hot college coeds, Colin worked just hard enough during secondary school to win acceptance to Southern Leonis Coastal College — which is to say, he didn't work much at all.
Once at the sixth-best party school on the southern continent, Ashwood switched fields almost as frequently as he switched girlfriends, eventually settling on journalism in the middle of his third year because of the department's lax graduation requirements. The department even let him cover for his shoddy writing skills by specializing in documentary journalism, which gave him a ready-made excuse to hobnob with aspiring actresses looking for somebody to film their invariably pathetic screen tests.
Colin might have continued along this shiftless path if not for an act of pure desperation. Devoid of anything remotely resembling a senior research proposal, he called back each of those actresses to seek their permission to use pre-recorded footage for his final project. To his pleasant surprise, nearly all of them even agreed to a second round of follow-up interviews, which he interwove with snippets from their audition tapes to create what his stunned advisor praised as a "raw and poignant study of the siren song of celebrity." And upon graduating with honors from SLCC, Colin discovered something that he'd never realized before: that acclaim as a result of excellence felt good.
To his credit, Ashwood devoted himself to making up for lost time. His advisor pulled some strings to get him an internship at Kythera's main news station, where he honed his narrative skills while producing the requisite puff pieces on those dog and pony shows no self-respecting reporter would accept. He would have done more of those, too, had not a second big break fallen into his lap (literally!) one night at a bar: Michaela Gordon, an attractive single mother who'd just been fired from her post at Cartwright-Wyatt Systems for refusing to cook the books. Once that story broke, his meteoric rise was practically assured. He's been the face of TV4 News at Eight for the past three years.
Ashwood survived the Holocaust along with his not-quite-fiancée Marty Dames and two other members of his lighting team: Frankie Holquin and Chris Calita, all of whom were sheltered from the bombardment while covering a protest at an H-Train station in Morningvale. He encountered a Colonial advance scouting party on 15 May 2041 AE and saved it from a Centurion ambush with the help of his friends.
He is a noted connoisseur of chamalla in all its splendor and, when nervous or under the influence, tends to revert back into an exaggerated version of the surfer patois that is his natural way of speech.