At Your Writing Service – Journalism

Posted On 22/01/2023

To say my journalism career is a tad unorthodox, would be understatement of the year.

I was, and still am, a round peg in a square hole, but this didn’t stop me churning out innumerable stories as a staff journalist on the Scunthorpe Evening Telegraph, The Preston Reporter, The Lancashire Evening Post and for the Scottish national press agency Newsflash.

When I got my first staffing journalism job at the Scunthorpe Evening Telegraph in the summer of 1999, my journalism tutor John Foscolo sent me an article about how people who lived in this part of the country lived longer. Well, I’m nearly half a century in and I’m not dead yet…

The biggest story I covered was while I was at Newsflash. It was the death of Donald Dewar in 2000, the First Minister of Scotland, who had a seemingly harmless fall off a step outside his official residence Bute House. The next day, he died from a brain haemorrhage.

The smallest story of my journalism career happened one rainy wet Tuesday morning on a supermarket car park on the outskirts of Manchester.

I was on trial back in my home town with the Manchester Evening News and the news editor sent me and a snapper out to Kwik Save in Oldham.

On their trolleys, alongside the British pound slot there was also a Euro coin slot too. I was charged with writing up a story angled something like: Is this the end of the pound?

In that moment staring into the deadened and disbelieving eyes of the shop manager my love of words and people were briefly snuffed out.

All I could think was: This is the end of the road for me in traditional journalism.

As the old saying goes, you can’t keep a good woman down, so after licking my wounds from being in that bear pit, I decided to do things my own way.

It has been a real labour of love to set myself up and offer a range of writing services that covers most things to do with words – not forgetting my first foray into professional writing – journalism.

Now, it is a joy to write pieces of work that tell stories for all kinds of people equally and help clients develop their businesses and themselves.

If you would like a traditional journalism story investigating, researched and written up, then punted out to the relevant editorial desks, then send get in touch or leave a comment below.

Or in a piece of reverse engineering, if you would like a press release writing to attract the same interest from journalists and / or editors for them to investigate, research and write up for their publication, I can do that too.

Or if you want a more modern form of story writing please see my blogalism and blogalist services.