Memories of The Guardian in the noughties
I know it’s not the end when a company makes redundancies but the sad news of 180 jobs going and the closure of the weekend supplements brought back lots of memories of my time working there in the early 2000s.
I was 24 and had just been made redundant myself when I found a new website called learn.co.uk that looked relevant to my last two jobs. I’d worked on Usborne’s first website and some CD-ROMs and then at Dorling Kindersley’s Multimedia division where we made pretty ace CD-ROMs that unfortunately no one bought. It was the second round of redundancies for that team and this time they closed it down.
I was very lucky to get some money out of it and invested in my first custom built PC from Alan Sugar’s company, Viglen. I also went with my brother on a holiday to Costa Rica where we visited Paolo Wanchope’s home town (we discovered) and did some snorkelling and sloth hunting. We saw both the nocturnal and diurnal sloth one day, it was amazing. I felt guilty about leaving my boyfriend at home and bought a massive online supermarket order to keep him going – maybe it was the excitement of internet shopping in the dot com boom.
Learn.co.uk was set up by the Guardian and provided online interactive learning for schools so I wrote speculatively to see if they needed people and got called in for a chat.
It was a weird interview. The day before, I was in our flat doing the ironing when my boyfriend got a call to say that his brother was dead. It was harrowing. His brother was the first in the family to go to university where he read English and then returned home to apply for jobs and nobody was interested. Three years of drinking vodka and eating just a bowl of rice in honour of his idol, Brett Anderson, and he wasted away to nothing. His heart failed.
I was blank from all the tears and did as best as I could in the circumstances during the interview. It didn’t matter. They wanted me and I started the next week.
There were 11 of us in a former foundry on Ray Street next to the main Guardian building in Farringdon. (The building is now owned by All3Media who bought the company I worked for next.) The team was led by a Guardian exec and a former editor of the Education supplement, and they had bought the URL off an early internet tycoon for a tidy sum.
I wasn’t sure what I should be doing but a week later they brought in an amazing woman, Emily, who knew exactly what to do. She found a teacher and a journalist and set up a format for a weekly lesson plan based on a news story. I was pretty inspired by the way she shaped both the news article and the lesson plan working closely with the authors. At some point I took over the format and found many teachers to write lesson plans and worked closely with the Education supplement’s commissioning editor to align news with school learning every week and then build it in Dreamweaver.
I tried to get a balance of curriculum subjects but some of the most powerful lesson plans were by English teachers on really crunchy news stories. It’s a cliche now, but I’ll never forget the day when someone turned on the TV in the office and we say the twin towers come down. I stood there aghast and once the news sunk in I knew we couldn’t publish the science lesson plan I had commissioned, and found a teacher to quickly write a lesson about what had happened. Doing the picture research for that piece was really awful.
Emily is one of my heroes (now championing children’s authors and reading for the Book Trust). I thought of her as a typical Guardian person and, early on, she took me on a tour and introduced me to lots of her journalist friends. She showed me where she sat previously, next to John Crace (now doing searing political commentary but also this heartfelt piece on coronavirus’s impact on his mental health) and Araucaria, the famous crossword composer, although he wasn’t in that day. In the corridors people were smoking and she told me there was an uproar when you weren’t allowed to smoke at your desk any more.
There are many great Emily stories but one that left a big impression was in the early days. We had an Aussie developer who had soft porn on his desktop. In the nicest possible way, Emily confronted him. She laughed and said something like ‘this is the Guardian, we don’t do things like that here’ and he was so embarrassed he removed it. I hadn’t realised you could do that so gently, and I’m still practising.
Ray Street was also the home of the Guardian website, which was new and growing. The Telegraph website was a photo of the newspaper front page, so I heard! Maybe that’s an urban myth.
The guy who ran the Guardian website had a blog, which was a new thing that my boss told me about. I think there was some healthy competition going on. He wanted me to start one for schools, but I didn’t know where to start and I parked that idea and moved on to something else :-)
I had some great opportunities there including writing articles for the paper and editing a book of revision tips with Hodder that was given away with the paper on Saturday. I was interviewed in the Guardian studio by a Manchester-based radio station on how to get through your exams. I was in the bottom division of the squash league so everyone new who was any good had to play me to climb their way up. I joined a mentoring programme and read with kids at a local girls’ school, where they all swooned over the up and coming commissioning editor who I thought was a bit of a twat. I ended up renting a flat round the corner from the talented designer of the Berliner, so I could come in at weekends and get bacon and eggs from the canteen after a night out.
Learn.co.uk was treated like a startup and we went through many iterations of management and business model, but we really profited from the government’s investment at the time in digital learning and grew quickly. There were 45 staff when I left, and the team pivoted onto business to business services under the banner, Guardian Professional.
It was a tight gang and there are so many stories and memories. Everyone I met from the Guardian was amazing. I feel so lucky and privileged to have been there and hope the staff get through the rough ride.
