This is another In Focus feature spread that I subbed for Metro. The topic here is YouTube’s ‘Geek Week’ – a celebration of its many filmmakers who have launched themselves as successful ‘channels’. The challenge with this one was fitting the four case studies into the same piece. I had to tweak the copy to fit without losing any of Ross’s irreverent and lighthearted writing style.
This was an In Focus news feature for Metro into a serious subject – a review into the police’s use of stop and search powers. The original copy was about twice the length needed so required a heavy rewrite. However, the reporter had a lot of good first-hand interviews and set the scene well, especially with the case study ‘Barry’. Careful line-by-line tweaking was needed to reduce the story to length.
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’).
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.
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.
This story originated from an everyday ring-in to the district office about a charity evening for IVF research. When I asked the caller, who turned out to be Martin’s sister, why she was organising the evening she told me about her 19-year-old brother who had terminal cancer and wanted to have a baby with his fiancee after his death. I made a direct approach to Martin and he and Susan agreed to speak to me.
This opinion piece was inspired by a previous blog post on the World Cup. The post was based on a timely and popular topic that was getting a lot of interest in The National newspaper. It was the only comment piece that day to have been written in-house by a staff member.
A write-up of the F1 2010 video game launch in the Middle East. It was the first one for Codemasters outside the Middle East that shows how important the industry has become in the region, worth $750m in 2009, to the appeal of motorsport in a part of the world obsessed with cars.
In June 2003, six members of the Royal Military Police – known as Red Caps – were shot by a mob while on a patrol of
Ellington Colliery in Northumberland, the last deep mine in the North East of England, was closed by its owners UK Coal in January 2005; bringing the
This was a backgrounder to a long-running court case I covered at the end of 2003. A serving police officer had been using the services of a violent pimp in return for access to the force’s computer. The case highlighted how the vice trade operated in a city that is not blighted by an obvious ‘red light’ district.
Before leaving the Newcastle Evening Chronicle and moving to the Middle East, I found myself breaking the story of Emirates Airline extending to Newcastle Airport.
This story first surfaced as a ‘diary job’ for the Evening Chronicle before the 2006 World Cup that was soon picked up by national and international media organisations…
Not only did I film the Dubai24 endurance race preparations and produced an audio slideshow from the race, I also produced copy for the print edition of The National. As it was a 24-hour race I was able to produce a before and after stories over two days.