Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate the public relations industry and I certainly don’t hate people who work in it. Some of my best friends…..(Jayne Howarth, Ros Dodd etc). Unlike some journalists I actually feel grateful to good PR firms. Let’s be honest, in recent years working on a newspaper would have been far harder without them. Continue reading “I hate public relations (PR)”
Farewell Birmingham Post
My last day at the Birmingham Post was Tuesday 22 December 2009. I slid out on a farewell blog like Santa on his sleigh. Here is my heart-felt post, with added pictures, which was published in the Birmingham Post that day.
Continue reading “Farewell Birmingham Post”
A cyber-room of one’s own
When Virginia Woolf famously said a room of one’s own was necessary for a woman to write, she could not have envisaged a room that looked like the one below.
But for me, having my own space on the web in which to doodle my thoughts and write my life feels every bit as important as the hut at the bottom of the garden, for which so many women yearn.
I’m quitting the Birmingham Post
I have just volunteered to leave a newspaper I love and a job about which I am passionate.
Last week Trinity Mirror, the company that owns the Birmingham Post, announced 41 journalists in the Midlands are to lose their jobs by the end of the year. I am offering to leave as part of the cull.
Why?
Elizabeth Fry is my nan
See this woman. I’ve just found out that she is my great great great great grandmother.
Earlier this week, as part of a feature I was writing for The Birmingham Post, I went with family historian Paul Wilkins to Birmingham Central Library to trace my family tree and discovered, amongst other great worthiness, that I am a direct descendant of Elizabeth Fry, the woman who reformed prisons in the nineteenth century and is commemorated on the back of a fiver. Continue reading “Elizabeth Fry is my nan”