Welcome to my world

I'm an ‘aspiring’ journalist. That means I haven't got a job as a hack yet and need to get better at doing the kinds of things a journo might need to do. I've heard that I'm not exactly alone in this, so here's my diary of doing all the things that are supposed to be good if you want to work somewhere in the industry.

Why do this? Well, for starters one of the things on my rather lengthy to do list is to start a blog as a way of practicing writing. Also, some of the things I've learnt so far took a surprisingly long time to find out about, and I could have used a site like this to help me out. On top of that, I just don't have a decent way of recording what I'm up to at the moment and this is a neat way of proving to myself I'm actually achieving something...

Those glossy industry-produced but uninformative ‘getting into journalism’-type guides are initially interesting, but I wanted something to take me through step-by-step instead of just saying ‘immerse yourself in newspapers’, ‘get industry knowledge’ or something similar. The internet's a great resource for this, since it's the only thing quicker than the printed press. But it takes some time to look through everything, so I'll be hunting down things that interest me for posting on this site, sometimes in a pseudo-story kind of way if the subject is recent enough as opposed to general industry goop. Hopefully one or two things here will interest someone else.

Today I've actually been geeky enough to write up a little guide for myself on the things I ought to be doing over the next few months, again done to cover another of my to do list points - getting to know QuarkXPress. In my first stab at journalistic integrity I should point out It's largely a condensed version of what I thought were some of the most important tips on getting into journalism from the 2005 edition of Chris Alden's In Print, published by MediaGuardian, and all credit goes to that little book for making things clear for once. My version has made most of the tips a little more practically accessible with the addition of key web addresses as starting points.

●Download ‘Starting Out In Journalism’ as a PDF file.