Turning the tables to interview extraordinary journalist Charles Thomson...an award winning writer with insightful perspective on journalism and the media that is well worth exploring.

Q. What changes need to be made in media coverage to start moving it in a direction towards absolute truth? Will it ever be achieved?

A. I don’t think absolute truth will ever be achieved for a couple of reasons. First of all, the media industry – like any industry – is made up of individuals. No matter how many rules and regulations are put in place there will always be individuals who, intentionally or accidentally, get it wrong. Secondly, sometimes there is no way to find out the absolute truth. Carl Bernstein always says that good journalism is presenting ‘the best obtainable version of the truth’. I’ll use my article James Brown: The Lost Album as an example.

The article tells the story of James Brown’s final album. The creation of that album wasn’t filmed. There is no verité account of those sessions in existence. So in order to present the story of that album I had to rely on human recollection. I spoke to as many people as I could who were present throughout the process and then told the story through their eyes.

By the time I finished my research more than three years had elapsed since the recording sessions, so people’s memories weren’t entirely reliable. Some people remembered dates differently, for instance. But by interviewing as many people as I did, I was able to find the information that they all agreed on or that the majority agreed on and present that to the audience; the best obtainable version of the truth. When you’re relying on human recollection, there’s no such thing as absolute truth.

In terms of moves to make it more difficult for journalists to get away with publishing incorrect information, three keys ones spring to mind.

Firstly, the industry needs to be better regulated. In the UK we have self-regulation. The Press Complaints Commission (PCC) is funded by print media and anybody who feels wronged by a newspaper or magazine can complain to the PCC. If the PCC feels that the journalist has breached the code of conduct, it can demand that an apology/retraction is published and sometimes that a fine is paid. However, the PCC in its current state is a toothless and ineffective organisation which routinely allows journalists to get away with breaching the code.

A film came out about two years ago called Starsuckers. I didn’t really like it but there was one interesting segment where journalists were secretly filmed talking about how pathetic the PCC is and how nobody’s even remotely scared about it. They even made fun of the fact that the PCC is run by newspaper editors so they can just impose meaningless penalties on themselves and get away with murder.

Some of the reasons that the PCC gives for refusing to take action in certain cases are truly insane. On numerous occasions, Michael Jackson’s fans have complained to the PCC about shockingly unprofessional coverage of the star which baselessly labels him a child molester or has disturbing racial overtones. The PCC consistently replies that they will only investigate if Michael Jackson’s family lodge a complaint. That is deranged.

What is the point of having a code of conduct if they refuse to enforce it? And why do they care who it is that reports the breach? A breach is a breach. It shouldn’t matter who reports it.

And what are they actually saying? Because what they seem to be saying is that it’s perfectly acceptable for a newspaper to make racist comments about an individual and/or call that individual a child molester, just as long as the newspaper feels confident that the individual’s family won’t see it.

As I said: deranged.

What the PCC is actually doing there is putting the onus on Michael Jackson’s family, who live in Los Angeles, to scour every newspaper in Britain on a daily basis just to make sure that none of them are calling their dead son/brother/uncle/father a child molester. Quite obviously, the onus should be on the newspapers not to print those comments in the first place.

The second change that needs to be made is the updating of our libel laws. At present both the UK and the USA operate under a supremely stupid law which dictates that the media has carte blanche to make-up and perpetuate lies about somebody once they’re dead. The thinking behind the law is that it’s impossible to damage somebody’s reputation after they die, because they no longer have any reputation to defend. This is plainly stupid. It means that you can accuse somebody of pretty much anything after they die, with no supporting evidence at all, and get away with it. I’ve seen articles calling James Brown a rapist and others accusing Orson Welles of being the Black Dahlia murderer!

The third and most fundamental change, I think, is that a degree in journalism should be compulsory before you can work on a newspaper or magazine. In the UK we have the National Council for Training Journalists (NCTJ). The NCTJ is the industry standard qualification. You can get your NCTJ qualification in six months. The upshot is that people who’ve spent three years studying journalism at university are routinely turned down for jobs in favour of those with NCTJ qualifications, which you can get in six months. I find that odd, to say the least.

The industry is also teeming with what are often referred to as ‘hobby journalists’, a phrase used to describe people who are quite well-off and go into journalism either because they already know somebody who can give them a job or because they’ve got the time and money on their hands to go through months’ worth of unpaid internships.

Nepotism is a huge problem in journalism. Guardian blogger Roy Greenslade has talked about this problem a lot and spoke about it at the Guardian Student Media Conference I attended in 2008. People just walk into jobs by virtue of having a father or an uncle who’s worked on the newspaper for years – that sort of thing.

Another problem preventing good young journalists from breaking into the industry is, as I mentioned earlier, internships. These have long been a problem in the industry and it’s been written about time and again – but nobody’s doing anything to combat it. Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg spoke out against unpaid internships a while back but made no move to abolish them and was subsequently embarrassed when the party he leads – the Liberal Democrats – was caught advertising for an unpaid intern!

These internships amount to little more than slave labour. They almost never lead to any form of long-term employment but instead promise vital experience which could, theoretically, help interns score a job in the future. Except that most newspapers and magazines currently don’t need to hire any young people full time precisely because they use rolling internships to get young people in every month to do menial jobs all day for no money.

A friend of mine took an unpaid internship which promised a job at the end if the intern proved their abilities. When she showed up on the first day, the editorial team said there had never been any job and they didn’t know why the advert had said otherwise. When she finished her internship they offered her another unpaid position at a different office and offered to cover only half of her travel expenses!

I know of young journalists who’ve taken internships on fashion mags because that’s the area they want to break into; they wind up being shouted at and abused all day, every day, and actually losing money because they have to pay their own travel expenses. They spend all day photocopying, fetching staff members’ lunch, making coffee, ferrying around files, ordering props for photo shoots - all the while being shouted at and looked down on. They’re kept until 10pm at night and expected back at 8am the next morning. There’s no job at the end of it all and the ‘experience’ has been completely unhelpful because they haven’t actually completed any journalism.

It used to be something that fashion mags and teen girl mags were famous for but now it’s industry-wide. Aside from being desperately unfair, it also results in an industry populated by rich kids who are often there because they can afford to be there rather than because they deserve to be there. Internships price talented working class kids out of the industry.

When you go to university and get your degree in journalism, that’s supposed to be the equaliser. It shouldn’t matter whether your parents live in a mansion or survive on welfare – you should all be on a level playing field because you’ve all got the same qualification.

But the moment you start introducing unpaid internships into the equation, that equaliser melts away and you’re right back at a point where only those who are already well-off can afford to break into the industry. If you can’t afford to spend a month (or, more likely, several months at several different places) working for free, often paying your own travel fees in and out of London (which doesn’t come cheap) then you’ve got almost no chance of breaking into the industry. 

So to summarise my answer, I suppose my suggestions are two-fold. Firstly, the industry needs to ensure that the journalists breaking through are well trained and capable, rather than just being rich or having connections. Secondly, laws and regulations need to be updated and then properly enforced.

My answer to this question has been somewhat UK-centric but I’m not as clued up on regulation in the USA. I know it’s a lot easier to libel someone and get away with it in the USA than it is in the UK, though, because of the emphasis that’s put on the first amendment – freedom of speech. That’s why a lot of celebrities sue in the UK but not the USA for stories which have been published on both sides of the Atlantic. They’re far more likely to win in the UK. So that’s something that could be looked at in the USA. Where do you draw the line between freedom of speech and somebody’s right not to have lies published about them?
 

Q. What are your personal goals for the future to personally impact change in regards to changing/dissolving Media corruption?

A. I don’t have any grandiose plans to lead a revolution or anything like that. I’m not even sure to what extent I have any future plans. As a freelancer I just live from job to job.

I think that for me it’s as much about the story as it is about affecting any kind of change. I don’t think people like to b preached at. You’ve got to have more than an argument – you need a great story to hook people in. My Huffington Post piece about the media’s shoddy coverage of Michael Jackson trial – One of the Most Shameful Episodes in Journalistic History – is probably a good example.

The Michael Jackson trial was the perfect vehicle to explore the shocking way in which the media operates. Michael Jackson’s name hooked people in and on top of that, it was a story that a lot of people thought they already knew. Lifting the curtain and showing them what was going on backstage – recalling the stories they’d read throughout the trial and then quoting the testimony to show that they were actually twisted or untrue – I knew that had the potential to shock people.

The article was tweeted 11,000 times just through the button on the Huffington Post, which doesn’t even account for people tweeting it independently. Similarly, it was posted to Facebook several thousand times just through the Huffington Post button, which again doesn’t account for the number of people who posted it independently. That article went all around the world. I’ve since learned that even Thomas Mesereau read it. He told me a few weeks ago that it was ‘an excellent article’.

If it had just been a polemic on problems in the media industry, it wouldn’t have had anywhere near as much impact. Taking the wrongdoing and placing it into such a shocking and intriguing context resulted in a much wider readership.

In recent months I’ve stumbled upon a fascinating story about one of my favourite artists, George Clinton. Right now he’s involved in a huge battle to reclaim the rights to a lot of his masters and believes that over the last 25 years or so he could have lost approximately $100million thanks to people around him conning him, forging his signature and so on. This could be the perfect story through which to explore the poor way in which the music industry treats black artists – a theme I’ve written about before but never gone into in huge detail.

So I’m always on the look-out for great stories with wider implications. My recent Troy Davis piece at the Huffington Post used his tragic story as a way to explore wider injustice and the disturbing correlation in America between one’s ethnic minority and one’s likelihood of receiving the death penalty. I like to tell great stories. If I can highlight injustice or perhaps affect change at the same time, even better.    
 

Q. What are the consequences when Journalists "Rock" the Media boat and expose the truth about the corruption within the Journalistic world?

A. John Pilger wrote in his book Hidden Agendas that journalists who rock the boat are painted as eccentrics by the majority in order to undermine their work. He said, “Those who do question the nature of the system risk being eased out of the 'mainstream'... Unless they navigate with care, they will find themselves exiled to the margins and stereotyped with a pejorative tag, such as 'committed journalist' - even though their commitment to an independence of mind may well pale against the surreptitious zeal of those who loyally serve the system.”

Another consequence for journalists who ‘rock the boat’ is that they’re simply ignored, or actively suppressed. When Aphrodite Jones released her book about the Michael Jackson trial, exposing the bias and sensationalism which typified its coverage, the media just buried it. With seven previous New York Times bestsellers under her belt, she found that publishers suddenly didn’t want to give her a deal.

When the book finally got published, newspapers and magazines wouldn’t write about it. TV shows wouldn’t interview her about it. She did a pre-recorded TV interview with Bill O’Reilly but then Fox canned it without any explanation. When they finally aired it after a prolonged campaign by Michael Jackson’s fans, they cut it right down and barely included any of her responses – just lots of footage of Bill O’Reilly pulling sarcastic faces and talking over her. The media just shut her down so she had no way of marketing her book to a mass audience.

Sometimes the reaction is actually aggressive. When Robert Greenwald put out his documentary Outfoxed, which proved beyond any doubt that Fox News actively manufactured bogus stories about liberal politicians, the network aggressively went after the filmmaker and launched a vicious smear campaign against the movie. The right-wing media’s response to Michael Moore has been much the same.

In the UK, one journalist wrote a book in which he dedicated an entire chapter to exposing racism, among other shady practices, in the Daily Mail newsroom. In retaliation, the Daily Mail contacted that journalist and told him they were going to publish a story saying he’d cheated on his wife. He wasn’t even married.

The Daily Mail has form in this area anyway. In 1996 journalist Polly Toynbee wrote an article for the Independent describing how the Daily Mail had targeted her after she challenged the paper’s political views. She was dating a man who was already separated from his wife but the newspaper began putting together a story calling her a ‘marriage-breaker’.

She wrote: “First hint that something was up: people start getting calls from a David Jones of the Daily Mail, digging for dirt. Colleagues in this office get calls. Mr Jones is ferreting away among friends, collecting quotes. The story he seems to be creating is the age-old saga of idylls destroyed by scarlet Jezebels. Mr Jones is throwing around words about me like 'marriage-breaker'.

"I am puzzled. I try to imagine how they can turn this everyday concatenation of domestic circumstance into A Story.

"...Suddenly I find it frightening. Neighbours are getting calls - some of them people I have never met. On Tuesday a man came over from No. 6, deeply worried by a call from the Mail asking detailed questions about what hours he had observed any men coming and going at my house. He suspected it was a burglar casing the joint. My 11-year-old son was terrified, but even more so when the house actually was broken into that day, for the first time in years. A coincidence, I am sure."

In 2009 the same David Jones referred to Michael Jackson in a Daily Mail news feature as ‘a common paedophile’. The PCC took no action because the breach wasn’t reported by a family member. Go figure.
 

Q. Which Journalists past or present do you admire most, and why?

A. Given that I’m such a stickler for accurate reporting, it may seem odd that my favourite journalist of all time is Hunter S Thompson. When people think of Hunter, they think of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; drugs, madness, a mixture of fact and wild fiction. That was the persona and the style which defined his public image to a large extent, which is kind of a shame because he was, in my opinion, one of the most astute political commentators of the last century.

More than that, though, I think Hunter embodied the campaigning spirit of journalism which has been all but lost in the modern age. The assignment which preceded Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was a Rolling Stone investigation called Strange Rumblings In Aztlan. The piece delved into the murder of a journalist called Ruben Salazar, who was shot in the head in a quiet café by a policeman with a tear gas bazooka after publicly asking uncomfortable questions about the local police force’s conduct. There was a strong campaigning element to that piece

Thompson’s campaigning streak continued right up to his final weeks in 2005, when he was spearheading a campaign to release of a lady called Lisl Auman from prison. Lisl was jailed in 1997 for the murder of a police officer even though she was handcuffed in the back of a police car when he was killed.

Campaigning journalism, of course, is subjective rather than objective but there’s a strong argument to be made that subjectivity in journalism isn’t a bad thing. Nick Davies, one of my favourite contemporary journalists, says that giving two sides to a story is often counter-productive and fundamentally unjournalistic.

Davies gives the example that if you applied this journalistic approach to a story about the weather, you’d go and ask two people with conflicting opinions what the weather was like outside and then write an unbiased story giving equal coverage to both of their answers (‘Controversy today surrounded the state of Britain’s weather...’) – whereas a journalist’s actual function is to report facts, so you should just look out of the window and check for yourself. Nick’s book Flat Earth News is probably the best book about modern journalistic failure that you’ll ever read.

The in-built problem with presenting both sides of a story is that one of them will almost certainly be wrong. Ergo, hacks can write pieces which contain lots of incorrect information but get away with it by briefly presenting a denial at the end. At the other end of the scale, good journalists can wind up completely undermining themselves by writing factual articles about somebody’s wrongdoing, then printing the wrongdoer’s denial at the end.

Hunter, like many of my favourite journalists, didn’t believe in telling two sides of the story if one of them was clearly not true. He was criticised for his scathing reporting on Richard Nixon but once said, “It was the built-in blind spots of objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen... You had to get subjective to see Nixon clearly.” In other words, Nixon’s carefully crafted public addresses, written by teams of speechwriters, were great – but you had to describe the man - his mannerisms, his interactions, all the information that objective journalism ignores – in order to get a feel for who he really was.

Hunter believed, like I do, that history’s greatest journalists were subjective or campaigning journalists. He said in 1999, “If you consider the great journalists in history, you don’t see many objective journalists on that list. M.L. Mencken was not objective. Mike Royko, who just died. I.F. Stone was not objective. Mark Twain was not objective. I don’t quite understand this worship of objectivity in journalism. Now, just flat out lying is different from being subjective.”

Arguably one of Hunter Thompson’s biggest influences – and another of my favourites – George Orwell, wasn’t objective either. He openly admitted that works like Down and Out In Paris and London were written specifically to direct attention to social inequality.

Orwell wrote in his book Why I Write, “Every line of serious work I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism... When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a piece of art’. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”

Thompson too once said, “I can’t think in terms of journalism without thinking in terms of political ends. Unless there’s been a reaction, there’s been no journalism. It’s cause and effect.”

Carl Bernstein went so far as to say that objective journalism doesn’t actually exist: “We have to understand that the myth of objectivity in journalism is perhaps the thing that holds us back the most. We’re not objective. Deciding what’s ‘news’ is the most subjective thing you can do.”

In other words; unless you report every single thing that happens in the world every day – every flick of a light switch – you’re deciding which actions or incidents constitute ‘news’ and which do not, which is a subjective decision – so the very nature of journalism is subjective.

Thompson largely concurred, saying, “With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as objective journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.”

So I greatly admire subjective journalism as long as it’s fair, accurate and factual. My Huffington Post article on Michael Jackson’s trial was clearly subjective – it was designed to draw attention to the media’s ludicrous coverage of the trial – but it was all hard fact.

It is the media’s role to scrutinise the authorities – government, courts, police and so on. When something isn’t functioning as it should, or when power is being abused, it is the media’s role to draw attention to that and, arguably, to campaign for change.

Back to my personal favourites, Woodward and Bernstein’s All The President’s Men is one of my favourite books because it recounts in almost forensic detail the hard work and deep research of two reporters trying to expose corruption and injustice at the heart of government. I recently met Carl Bernstein very briefly at a Guardian debate about phone-hacking. In my work I’ve met lots of celebrities and even some of my heroes, but I’ve never been star-struck. When I met Carl Bernstein, though, my hands were shaking ever so slightly. He and Bob Woodward are considered to be perhaps the greatest investigative reporters of all time.

I love Erol Morris’s film The Thin Blue Line because it drew attention to the story of an innocent man wrongly convicted of murdering a police officer and actually helped to overturn his conviction. The British TV show Rough Justice operated on the same principle – going over old cases and releasing wrongly convicted people from jail. Andrew Jarecki’s film Capturing The Friedmans was also a fine example of a journalist casting a critical eye over a flawed prosecution.

Dorothy Rabinowitz’s book No Crueller Tyranny, all about people wrongly jailed for child molestation, is also fantastic. In it she talks about how child abuse is such an emotive topic that people are scared to highlight miscarriages of justice in case they’re accused of being paedophile sympathisers. She says people always ask her, ‘Do you realise that child abuse is a real crime with real victims?’ It’s such a double standard. Nobody says that to a journalist highlighting the plight of somebody wrongly jailed for murder or robbery.

Matt Taibbi is a favourite of mine because he rails against hypocrisy and injustice. I thought his article The Truth About The Tea Party was magnificent. He seemed to be channelling Hunter Thompson, planting himself in the middle of a Tea Party rally and encountering firsthand the completely unsustainable beliefs of the movement’s supporters; the people on Medicare campaigning against the welfare state, and so on. It was hilarious but also quite disturbing and very reminiscent of Thompson’s The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent And Depraved.

There are lots more – far too many to name. But I think the thing which unites all of my above choices is that they all have that campaigning element to their work – their work is about more than just a paycheque, it’s about believing in the story and often about trying to affect some sort of change. I can relate to that passion. The two biggest pieces I’ve ever written were James Brown: The Lost Album, which won me my Guardian Award, and my Huffington Post piece One of the Most Shameful Episodes in Journalistic History. Both of those articles were real labours of love which required months of deep research - and I wrote both of them completely pro bono.  
 

Q. What traits found in those Journalists do you hope to acquire and apply to your writing in the future?

A.I think I’ve pretty much covered this in the above answer but I’d like to carry on the torch of campaigning journalism. 

~In reference to Michael Jackson issues; 

Q. As a professional journalist,what advice would you give fans who want to write and/support Michael's Legacy/Justice in a productive manner,to impact positively,without be labeled "Insane and Fanatical"?

A. I think that for many fans, their biggest downfall is that they can’t discuss Michael Jackson’s trial without mentioning the fact that the defendant was Michael Jackson. All too often their criticism is along the lines of, ‘And they did this to MICHAEL JACKSON!?’ or ‘And they did this to a man who’s given MILLIONS OF DOLLARS to charity!?’

The way in which Michael Jackson was treated by the authorities in Santa Barbara would have been abhorrent no matter who was on the receiving end. His musical achievements and his humanitarian efforts are completely irrelevant to his trial. Trials are won or lost on evidence and testimony, not record sales or charitable donations.

Instead of talking about how much money Michael Jackson gave to charitable organisations, fans should be talking about how the only supposed ‘eyewitness’ to the molestation went from claiming to have seen Jackson rubbing his genitals on the boy’s buttocks to claiming he was laying beside the boy and fondling him. Those two accounts of the alleged molestation don’t correlate even remotely, yet reporters were walking out of the building and calling him a ‘compelling witness’. This is a key piece of information which the general public is simply not aware of.

Instead of expressing indignation that the authorities had the gall to pursue a man who sang about healing the world, fans should be talking about how a prosecutor was stealing defence documents and then tampering with fundamental elements of his case in order to swerve the defence’s own witnesses and evidence. Sneddon learned that Michael Jackson had a ‘concrete, iron clad alibi’ and then changed all the dates on the indictment. This is another monumentally significant piece of information that the public is simple unaware of.

A molestation trial in which the ‘star witness’ tells a wildly different story on the stand to the story he told police and psychologists is one in which the defendant should be found not guilty no matter who they are. A prosecution in which the DA learns of evidence of the defendant’s innocence and then changes his case to get around it is one in which the defendant is being prosecuted maliciously, no matter who they are.

Michael Jackson’s innocence had nothing to do with the fact that he was Michael Jackson. The best way to convince people of his innocence is to take him out of the equation entirely and focus on the evidence.

Another piece of advice I often give to fans is that rather than trying to fight the media, which will almost always be a losing battle, they should become the media.

Once upon a time, the American newspaper industry was populated by write journalists penning editorials about how whites and blacks should never be allowed to mingle and an end to segregation was a notion so horrendous that it didn’t bear thinking about. It was only as younger, more liberal journalists began populating the industry that the tone started to shift.

Clearly, fans shouldn’t become journalists simply because they want to write about Michael Jackson. They’d have to be interested in journalism and in all that it entails – fighting inequality, injustice and corruption in all forms, covering crime stories and so on. But it only takes a few years to train. If lots of talented, engaged fans took up journalism then within a decade we could see a huge shift in tone where Michael Jackson is concerned, and where lots of other issues are concerned too.

 
Q. Many of Michael's "supporters" and "Fans" are fighting, and being hateful. Some of them are just striving for personal notoriety.
 It is known that these types of conflicts are NOT isolated to MJ's "fans/supporters".
 
What is the driving force behind the competition between these groups?
 
What will be the catalyst to resolve the conflicts and to help the groups become a united front of any cause or issue?

A. Back when I was a journalism student, I used to write articles for fansites to gain interviewing and reporting experience and to get my name in print. In bygone years people did that for fanzines, but those don’t really exist anymore.

One of the fansites I used to write for had a forum. Somewhere on that forum, buried in the middle of a long thread, a fan once posted a spoof press release, which was clearly not real and clearly intended as a joke. However, a rival fansite reported to Michael Jackson’s rep that this fansite was ‘hosting fake press releases’ and the site ended up being threatened with legal action. So this type of infantile rivalry and bickering has been going on in the fan community for years.

You’re right in that it’s not unique to Michael Jackson’s fan community, although the scale, I think, may be unique to Jackson’s fan community – but I’m a big fan of Prince and I see similar rivalry going on between his various fansites.

I don’t think that the conflicts will ever be fully resolved because there are too many egos involved. Some of them seem to spend as much time, if not more time, sending abuse to other fans as they do working on anything actually Michael Jackson related. There does seem to be a battle among lots of these figures to be perceived as the Michael Jackson fan-leader. They’re all jostling for access to the estate, commendation by the family. It’s very competitive. Some actively try to sabotage one another as they did in the above story about the ‘fake press releases’ – and that was all the way back in about 2007!

But a lot of these fan community figures only cropped up after Michael Jackson’s death and seem to be using his name to develop what I can only describe as cult-like groups with very strange beliefs, who will militantly defend those beliefs, even if it means issuing death threats at the slightest perceived disagreement. I’ve been on the receiving end of their deranged conspiracy theories. One blogger accused me of complicity in Michael Jackson’s murder, which led to me being bombarded with abusive emails and death threats. That same blogger now claims Jackson faked his own death to escape an illuminati conspiracy!

 
 
Q. What would be your Ideal Journalistic position?

A. I’ve really enjoyed the last few years of working freelance. I’ve been a showbiz writer, a film festival correspondent, a celebrity interviewer and a court reporter. I’ve covered everything from music to finance. Being able to set my own hours, choose the stories I most want to work on and work towards my own goals has been a great experience.

The only downside to freelance work is that you never know where your next paycheque is coming from. You might have a month where you’re rushed off your feet and then a month where you have barely anything to do. It’s very unreliable. Even when you are busy, you sometimes have to really chase people to pay you – even big, international publications. Right now I’m still awaiting payment for a piece of work I did almost six months ago.

I graduated into one of the worst recessions the world has ever seen, at a time when most newspapers were firing journalists instead of hiring them. In that climate, where even a local newspaper job opening was a real rarity, going freelance was the only way to keep working in journalism. I was fortunate to have begun freelancing during my second year of university and cultivated lots of contacts long before I graduated. I think I’m the only person from my university journalism class who is actually working in journalism. The industry was really on its knees. Things are starting to pick back up now, though.

I suppose my ideal journalistic position would be to either continue freelancing but with a far steadier and more reliable income – perhaps a few monthly rolling commissions – or to take on a PAYE job several days per week – I love the process of journalism and would love to get my teeth into a regular job - and use my time off to concentrate on other projects I’m really passionate about.