Portfolio

A colourful Page 3 story subbed for Metro about a high-speed lawnmower built by Honda. It required a lightness of touch and as many lawn mower puns as possible (hence ‘start your rotors’).

Asiana Airlines is considering legal action over a TV news report that broadcast four spoof names that it said were the pilot’s involved in the San Francisco plane crash.

This was a revealing look at the growth in online grocery shopping and the giant Ocado warehouse by Etan Smallman that I subbed for Metro. As with all these pieces, care had to be cut the copy to length without losing interesting details (such as the XBox-like controllers used in the warehouse). I also used a play on words in the headline that I feel suits the story extremely well.

It’s a relaxing drive in a safari park that turns into a terror ride. A five-tonne male elephant smashes its way through the window of a car full of German tourists moments after fighting with another member of the herd.

A feature I subbed for Metro’s In Focus section that examined the state of children’s TV in the digital age. The copy needed to be cut back while retaining colour and all the main points. As with all these pieces, this was not a case of just chopping paragraphs but a line-by-line revision to fit the space without losing the detail.

Nessun dormouse: That’s all it took. This was a headline I wrote a while back that started to trend on Twitter.

This was part of Metro’s coverage for Lady Thatcher’s funeral which I subbed that examined the impact her policies have had on Britain today. It was a story of many parts in that the reporter had gone to great pains to study each aspect. However, as is often the case in these type of features, the sum total overran. Each section had to be carefully reduced to fit the required space without losing the key points.

This was a story about a digital map of the various languages Londoners use on Twitter. It needed a bit of a rewrite to add a splash of colour but the main challenge was the extremely tight space for a headline. After much gnashing of teeth I came up with ‘Twitter of Babel’ – a play on words of the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, which tells of the birth of various languages.

For the relaunch of The National’s website I was asked to research, write and edit a resident’s guide for newcomers to the UAE. The Guide, as it became known, is divided into three sections: practical advice for day-to-day living; social tips for enjoying free time; and a final section on the heritage and culture of the UAE.

For the 50th anniversary of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, I helped produce this interactive to add another dimension to The National’s business coverage.