2015: A Year in 10 Stories
One election, electronic vigilantes, Trump, toilets, headless chickens and handfuls of cheques, a sinkhole, a South African, selfie sticks and a lot else in between.
As 2015 draws to a close, I’m acutely aware I’ve survived another year of freelance life — and luckily, I still seem to be moving forward, rather than standing still (or worse) slipping back.
In previous years I’ve felt slightly typecast: alternating between a longform feature writer or a tech reporter in 2013 and 2014, I’ve managed this year to broaden my skillset. I’ve introduced politics, news investigations, and iterative reporting into my repertoire. Doing so has increased the number of great editors I’ve been able to work with, and the range of stories to pick from to sum up my year.
So here’s a small taste of my 2015: 10 stories to tide you over until the new year arrives.
2016 is just around the corner, and I’m always looking to report and write. If you’re an editor, and like what you see below, please do get in touch. You can email me, or find me on Twitter.
January | New York Magazine
Did the Selfie-Stick Inventor Get Shafted?
As 2015 ticks over into 2016, hoverboards are all the rage, but 12 months ago selfie sticks (remember them?!) were leading the zeitgeist. I spent the first week of 2015 talking to Wayne Fromm, who claims to have invented the selfie stick. What I found was something more complicated than a cut-and-dry claim of ownership on a tech gizmo.
“The word selfie,” Fromm notes, “hadn’t yet been invented” when he started selling Quik Pods. The selfie stick, he argues, “predates so many things that I don’t think anyone could’ve imagined when I launched it in 2006.”
July | The Kernel
Behind Dark Justice’s crusade to bring down pedophiles
In the past two years Britain has faced a reckoning with its past. Child abuse has been reportedly rife, and one thankful corollary of a realisation that something needs to be done is the attention paid to finding and imprisoning paedophiles. But police can’t do it all, which is how I found myself profiling Dark Justice — a pair of vigilante paedophile hunters based in Newcastle. Others wrote about the duo, but didn’t bring in as much context — or draw out as much from the subjects themselves about why they have this hobby.
They didn’t act until one evening in October 2014. “We said: ‘Are we going to fucking do this?’” Callum recalls. They were: They signed up to Plenty of Fish and Badoo, got talking to two men, and soon arranged to meet. “We thought, Jesus Christ, that was easy.”
May | BuzzFeed News
Inside One Man’s Obsessive Quest To Be The First To Declare The Election Results
What motivates a man to devote his working life to a single, inconsequential prize? Perhaps a better question is what motivates a young journalist to talk to that guy months before his story becomes pertinent? The obsessiveness Bill Crawford holds in aiming to get Sunderland its general election results within 42 minutes of polls closing was the focus of this story, which was warmly welcomed by political wags before the 2015 UK election.
There’s no prize for the winner, beyond personal and civic pride, and a brief TV slot blathering at David Dimbleby to help fill in the long, slow hours of dead air between polls closing and the mass of constituencies announcing their results. So why do it?
June | BBC
The many groups that have copied Alcoholics Anonymous
For those who ascribe to the Twelve Steps, anonymous peer support groups are a lifeline — as I found when I visited an Alcoholics Anonymous group above a busy shopping street one Saturday afternoon in June. But some people believe it’s hokum; and it’s not just alcoholism that the ‘…Anonymous’ groups tackle.
On Monday alone there were four Narcotics Anonymous meetings in Manchester, a Marijuana Anonymous meeting in Fitzrovia, central London, and an Overeaters Anonymous session in Cannock.
July | The Economist
In Johannesburg, dreaming of Fontainebleau
I came across Boniswa Lakheni Ntshingila on Indiegogo, trying — and failing — to fund a business school eduation in France. So I spoke to her, and profiled her plight for The Economist. An INSEAD graduate read about her story, and helped her find funding to get on the MBA course in time. Not only did the story have real world consequences, but also found a human way into what can be a dry subject.
With just a few months until the first class begins at Fontainebleau, Miss Ntshingila does not have the requisite funds to take her place, though she has scraped together her deposit. Getting funding has become more exhausting than securing her place at the school.
August | The Message
Check, Please
Did you know the Nazis were one of — if not — the first people to harness the power of the novelty oversized cheque for propaganda purposes? Neither did I, until I took a deep dive into the archives to try and explain why, in a world where you’re more likely to Venmo friends your rent, or pay your water bill via BACS, we still wave around big bits of cardboard when we win the lottery.
There he is, in the photo: Joseph Goebbels being presented with an oversized check for 200,000 deutschmarks. It’s a version of that moment when money gets handed over today at a charity fundraising dinner — just a million times more sinister, what with all the Nazis.
August | The Sunday Times Style
Web wars
Some people are great profile writers; some people can cover events with aplomb. I’ve not yet figured out my niche, but feel one of my strengths is being able to explain the normal, everyday things that happen to us, or that control or affect our lives, in an accessible, people-led way. So it was for The Sunday Times Style Magazine, writing about generic top level domains (gTLDs) and cyberbullying, through the story of Donald Trump’s insatiable mania to ensure you can’t set up a website called DonaldTrumpSucks.com.
When news broke that Trump owns 3,155 different domain names — including NoMoreTrump.com and ImBeingSuedByTheDonald.com — it became clear he is not spending all of his cash on natty baseball caps and chintzy cufflinks.
November | BuzzFeed News
Local Councils Are Selling Toilets And Canoes On eBay To Make Up For Government Cuts
Sometimes the best stories are the ones that no one else has been dumb enough to think of. I’d been thinking about pitching a story on celebrities casting off their red carpet clothes on eBay, and came across the fact that a couple of UK councils sold items too on eBay accounts. As local government cuts hit home, I figured this was perhaps a bigger thing than just a couple of councils. I was proven right, and to date still turn up leads from the FOI request that gave me the data for my original story.
Nottingham city council, which was only able to provide income from the past three months of sales, earned £729 on 206 identical green felt “Robin Hood/Peter Pan” hats. It noted it had sold more than 2,000 items in total.
September | BBC
The chicken that lived for 18 months without a head
I thought a long time about pitching a story about the 70th anniversary of the decapitation of a fairground chicken to a longstanding editor at the BBC, but bit the bullet anyway. What resulted was one of the oddest — but most fun — stories I’ve ever written. And some really killer pull quotes.
For a human to lose his or her head would involve an almost total loss of the brain. For a chicken, it’s rather different. “You’d be amazed how little brain there is in the front of the head of a chicken,” says Smulders.
November | The Sunday Times Magazine
What lies beneath
How do you tell an engaging story about a big hole in the ground? By talking to those affected by it, and by finding the postman who first fell into the hole when it was less than 66 inches, not 66 feet, wide. This was a weekend’s worth of reporting on a complicated subject that kept changing like the earth underneath St Albans.
Around the corner, laughing children frolic in a playground. Residents park their cars in a field, out of harm’s way, and lug their groceries to their doors. Life goes on in this little corner of St Albans, but in a most precarious way.
2016 is already lining up to be another good year. On January 2nd I’ll be telling the story of a heroic veteran of the Iraq war, and how he readjusted to life after losing a leg through an unusual hobby for The Guardian’s Weekend Magazine — so keep an eye out for that. I’ve also got lined up in the coming months some amazing stories with all the incredible editors I currently work for.
But I love to tell stories — for newspapers, magazines and websites. I can’t get enough of it.
If you like what you’ve read here, and you’d think there’s a story you want telling for your publication (or you’d like to hear what kind of stories I think could work for you), then please do follow me on Twitter and send an email to say hello.
