His first job was as a finance journalist at the
Daily Telegraph in Sydney. Later he worked for Maxwell Newton's economic and financial publications in Canberra and then for the
Australian Financial Review during the 1970s. In 1979, he founded his law publishing company, Law Press of Australia, and since then has continued to be the publisher of two important Australian legal journals,
Justinian and the
Gazette of Law and Journalism. GLJ was later acquired by Stephen Murray in 2025. Ackland also publishes a newsletter on politics, media and the law,
Spilled Ink. He worked for the
Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) in the 1980s, first as the presenter of the ABC Radio National breakfast program,
Daybreak.. He was the founding host of Radio National's discussion program
Late Night Live. Subsequently, from 1998 to 1999, Ackland was the writer and presenter for the ABC-TV show
Media Watch. During this time he was awarded a
Gold Walkley together with colleagues
Deborah Richards and
Anne Connolly for their expose of the notorious
cash for comment affair. Ackland was the legal columnist for
Fairfax Media and edited and published the online journal
Justinian. Ackland stopped being employed as a regular columnist by Fairfax in June 2014 to write for
The Guardian and
The Saturday Paper. In 2016 he was appointed a
Member of the Order of Australia for significant service to the print and television media industries, particularly through reporting on legal issues, and as a publisher. In September 2016 he was awarded a Doctor of Letters (honoris causa) by Macquarie University. == Personal life ==