Work experience, internships and navigating journalism's snakes and ladders the hard way
Appearances can be deceiving. I went to Cambridge. I now freelance for papers and magazines including The Guardian, The Times and Wired. I've had plenty of people look at those bits of evidence and come to the conclusion that my mummy and daddy must have given me a leg up in my career. While my parents worked their arses off to give me opportunities in life, I don't come from a well-connected family. My mum works in the medical industry and my dad offers computer training. Neither of them went to university, they both got their start in the Royal Navy and built their careers from there.
I went to an independent school but my family was never well off when I was young. I got picked on mercilessly at school by children with richer families and far more opportunities than me. I still have a huge chip on my shoulder about that. I never thought about going to university, let alone Cambridge, until my history teacher, Mr Seymour, a fine teacher and an inspirational man, suggested that it could be the right place for me. I owe him a lot for giving me that confidence, especially when other teachers did so much to discourage me. I remember their names too.
At university, the student newspapers mimicked the structure of their professional counterparts and even some of their staff. Editor of Varsity when I was in my third year? Mr James Dacre, son of Paul. Many of my student newspaper peers ended up getting prominent jobs at places like The Guardian and Esquire. How did they get on staff there so quickly? Work experience and badly paid internships. Why didn't I try for that? Because my mummy and daddy didn't know the right people and they didn't have the cash right then to bankroll me bobbing about in London on low wages while I ingratiated myself with editors who might be able to give me a full-time job.
I'm happy with the way I made a career for myself and greatful to the people who gave me help along the way. My first job was at Pensions World Magazine, a trade magazine then based in Croydon. The long-standing editor Stephanie Hawthorne gave me a lot of responsibility early on and sent me to conferences to get my head around complex financial instruments and the state of an industry in trouble. It taught me a lot about writing features on tricky topics and how to make seemingly boring material sparkle a little.
From Pensions World, I moved to Stuff where I edited the news section and learned some crucial lessons from Simon Osborne-Walker and Will Findlater who both gave me help and advice in spades. Next, I went to Q where I had a tough time but got a bit more resilience and made the contacts that allow me to write about music now. I'd always dreamed of being at the NME but now I'm just an occasional contributor to NME.com and that suits me.
The point of this little dash through my CV is this: I did something that is sadly rare today in magazines, newspapers and news websites – I worked my way up and got the contacts and clients I have now by hard work and trying not to piss off too many people. I got no leg up from being at Cambridge or from my family. If journalism is a trade and I think it is, I learned it through being on a not very glamorous title doing tough work. It made me greatful for the opportunities people like David Rowan, Greg Williams and Ben Hammersley at Wired gave me to write about fascinating topics.
A lot of people I know who had the internships and the leg up from friends of the family are great writers and deserving but they don't necessarily realise what they've got. They had the steroid injection of status into their career early on. Doors open up a lot more easily with The Times on your business card than they do with Pensions World emblazoned on it despite the latter being a powerful and respected publication in its field. Internships and work experience for the rich and privileged just exarcerbate one of their most common problems: knowing the cost of everything but the value of nothing.
