Hello. Thanks for visiting my site.
I’m a UK freelance journalist based at Castle Donington in the East Midlands, close to Nottingham, Derby and Leicester.
I’ve been a regular writer on football for The Independent and Independent on Sunday newspapers for more than 25 years, during which time I’ve also contributed to the Guardian, Sunday Times and Sunday Express as well as a number of magazines. Nowadays, I write often for the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Telegraph.
I also write about cricket for the ESPN Cricinfo website.
Although most of my work has been in sports journalism, my specialist interest is simply in delivering high-quality copy to brief, to length and on time.
On that basis, I can supply copy for Press Releases, Web Pages, Newsletters, Blogs, Booklets, In-house Newspapers, Brochures, Sales Letters, Company Histories, Tourist Guides, Factsheets, Advertorials…in fact, anything that requires professionally-written words.
That includes Web Content and Blogs, while I’d be happy to help with Ghostwriting, whether it be for articles or full-length books, as well as Proofreading, meticulous Copy Editing and quality Rewriting.
Not to mention magazine and newspaper journalism of the highest standards.
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Awful match report on Stoke v West Ham in the Telegraph. It just talks about Berahino and Butland. Were West Ham there at all? There was no mention of them.
Hi Barry.
Thanks for getting in touch. I’m sorry my piece in today’s Telegraph didn’t meet with your approval.
Just by way of information (not an excuse), the dynamic of the Monday match report has changed recently in that ‘match report’ is something of a misleading description. Because of blanket television coverage and the internet, newspapers nowadays work on the assumption that, by Monday, most readers will have seen television highlights and read a match report either online or in a Sunday paper, and therefore want to offer something different.
This tends to be what we call a “follow-up” story, arising from the match, but not necessarily having much to do with what happened on the field. The nature of the follow-up is often dictated by which people – players and coaching staff – are put up by the clubs to be interviewed after the game and what they have to say. Once all these interviews have been completed and the “quotes” transcribed, the journalists then have to evaluate which quotes would lend themselves to an interesting follow-up, taking into account any that have already appeared online or in the Sundays.
On this occasion, we looked at the fact that Berahino, who is a controversial and therefore newsworthy individual, rarely speaks at any length. We also took into account that Mark Hughes also spoke about Berahino, and we felt that mention of Butland had to be made because Gareth Southgate had turned up specifically to watch him, and was therefore also newsworthy. Because of where the teams are in the table, neither challenging at the top end nor having serious fears about relegation, the match itself was not of any great significance, and the quotes from the West Ham personnel did not present a compelling story from the West Ham angle.
The other factor in all of this is space – if I’d had 1,000 words at my disposal I could have explored West Ham angles further down the piece, but the fact is that I had less than half of that.
I hope this provides a bit of an insight. Inevitably you can’t please all of your readers all of the time. Once again, many thanks for contacting me.
Kind regards
Jon
Thanks for taking the time to reply Jon. I do take your points but still say that there should have something about West Ham somewhere in the piece. Think we need to agree to differ on this.
Not a problem. It’s a perfectly valid point you make and one that I will bear in mind for future Monday pieces. Ultimately, the reader’s view is the most important one.