In 1981, while a student at Chevalier College in Burradoo, NSW, Hartcher was national winner of the Sydney Morning Herald Plain English Speaking competition and won a trip to England, where he won the international final the following year. [1]

His career in journalism began the following year with a cadetship at the Sydney Morning Herald. In 1986, he took up his first overseas posting as the newspaper's Tokyo correspondent.

On his return to Australia in 1988, Hartcher was made chief political correspondent, a position he held until 1991, when he accepted a job with the Australian Financial Review as Tokyo correspondent.

Between 1995 and 2000 he was the Australian Financial Review's Asia-Pacific Editor and then went to the US for three years where he was the Washington DC correspondent. In 2004, Hartcher rejoined the Sydney Morning Herald in his current capacity.

Hartcher's 1996 investigative series uncovering the secret negotiation of a security treaty between Australia and Indonesia won Australia's leading journalism award, the Gold Walkley.

In 1998, Hartcher was the recipient of the Citibank Award for Excellence in Journalism. In the same year, published his first book, The Ministry, an exposé of the role played by Japan's Finance Ministry in that country's economic collapse and subsequent stagnation.

Alan Greenspan and the Missing 7 Trillion Dollars, Hartcher's critique of the Federal Reserve Board's management of the US economy through the years of irrational exuberance, was published in 2004 to a mixed reception in the US, where Greenspan retained his iconic status, but was met with greater critical enthusiasm internationally.

In 2007, Hartcher wrote Black Inc's first Quarterly Essay for the year, Bipolar Nation: How to Win the 2007 Election, an analysis of the Australian electorate's collective psyche and what he argues is its peculiar susceptibility to manipulation. It was the best-selling Quarterly Essay in the publication's history.

In 2009, Hartcher's book To The Bitter End: The Dramatic Story of the Fall of John Howard and the Rise of Kevin Rudd was published. (Crows Nest, NSW:Allen & Unwin. ISBN 978-1-74175-623-4)