At Your Writing Service – Journalism

Posted On 22/01/2023

News Stories For Everyone Equally

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.

He was right. A lovely old lady called Eva Smith was my first front page splash. She turned 100 years old in her care home and was compared to the Queen Mother who was of a similar age.

The biggest story I covered was while I was at Newsflash. It was the death of Donald Dewar, the First Minister of Scotland . He seemingly had a harmless fall off a step outside his official residence Bute House in Edinburgh, Scotland. Within a few days, he died from a brain haemorrhage on the 11th October 2000.

Local Journalism – Let’s Broaden The Stories, Create More Community Voices & Community Leaders

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 on a trial 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: I quit.

Hire A Journalist To Tell An Interesting An Engaging Story For Your Organisation, Community & Local Area

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.

And reporting on local news stories with local people who are passionate about local causes is energising and an honour to be able to add to broader voices to the community.

It was a real honour to meet Sir Lindsay Hoyle at long last opening up some special benches in Astely Park which I covered for The Chorley Ramblers 50th Anniversary.

And great to get a 2024 front page splash on The Chorley Guardian and the editor to use the same ‘milestone’ headline and p.4 story almost without a word changed.

If you would like a traditional journalism story investigating, researched and written up, then help with getting it 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.

Although they don’t do that much at all these days sadly.

Because a more modern form of story-telling has taken over on this thing called The Internet.

There are endless exciting ways to get you story out there from social media, reels, citizen journalism, blogging and newsletters, to name hardly any of the channels and platforms.

Including a very special new development for my line of work in the Web 3.0 space called social finance or soc-fi. Here protocols are set up onchain (blockchain) and they are creator first digital economies.

Here is one of my profile where I am building a community around a project to deliver the world’s first Universal Visual Langauge in tandem with The Emoji Alphabet.

This space is really exciting and I am just so happy I get to work across all these fast changing landscapes with my simple ideas and love of the 25 letters of the English alphabet.

I look forward to hearing from you and finding out more about you and your story and if I can help.