I want to present this lecture again

Who's going to help make that happen?

I have huge respect for anyone choosing to pursue journalism today. It takes real guts to look at the industry right now and think: I’m still going to try. That, or like me, a stubborn belief that the reasons it’s harder (there’s no money, no attention, too much AI slop and an alarming number of unchecked billionaires shaping public discourse) are exactly why it’s vital not to give up.

When London College of Fashion asked me to speak to students about my career, it forced me to reflect on the seven years I’ve spent navigating this insanely turbulent time. I want to share what I can, wherever it might help, even though I’m not where I want to be yet. Because, my god, I’ve tried (and failed) at so many things in pursuit of what I want, and I’ve picked up some useful insight along the way

I started as an intern at The Face in 2019, and things weren’t this bad… but they were still pretty bad. I remember one of the senior editors saying my parents must be worried that I’m working at a fashion magazine. I wasn’t offended, I knew what they meant. During my second week The New York Times published a piece asking whether a magazine that had defined youth culture in the 1980s and 1990s could survive in the digital age. Traditional publishing models were already under pressure, advertising revenue was declining, and although I got to write plenty of stories I genuinely cared about, there were still monthly traffic targets influencing what got commissioned and how success was measured.

Compared to what happened next, those concerns seem almost quaint. Nobody knew a global pandemic was around the corner, shutting down shoots and live events. Nobody knew TikTok was about to become one of the most influential platforms in the world, in turn making us addicted to short form videos and reducing our appetite for nuanced stories. And in the years since, who would have thought that artificial intelligence would reach the point where it can generate images and text almost instantly, at scale, for free, with almost no regulation?

Before the pandemic, I thought redundancy was a code word for getting fired. During that period, I saw that you can work incredibly hard, do everything you’ve been told to do and more, produce incredible work, and - because of factors completely outside your control - lose your position overnight because the economy is fucked.

I was taking home roughly £1,900 a month (post tax) then and thought: I could also make that working in a café if all else fails. I’d rather do it now, when that kind of money is easier to come by, than later when I’ve got used to a higher wage. So I left full time salaried employment with no real plan A - let alone plan B - just a gut feeling that I had to figure out a different way of doing this.

That was in 2021, aka still deep in the pandemic. Some of those closest to me thought I was being reckless, but I just knew the traditional media career ladder was forever broken, and wasn’t willing to wait around for my turn to be pushed off it.

My goal wasn’t to beat the system or somehow outsmart broader economic and technological shifts, but to understand the reality of the environment I was working in and figure out how to actually build a career within it. That’s why I wanted for this lecture to look closely at the reality checks (print is dead, content is king and AI is god) that have reshaped the industry and rather than trace how we got here or propose industry-wide solutions, share some of the lessons I’ve had to learn the hard way. I also wanted to share how to develop a mindset that stops trying to predict the future and instead focuses on adapting to whatever happens next.

I spent weeks preparing this talk, and it’s based on nearly 15,000 words of notes. I did consider uploading it to Substack, but it was designed to be spoken aloud for 45 minutes, and it includes quite personal material that I don’t necessarily want sitting permanently on the internet, where everyone loves to take things out of context.

I would also love to perform it again in full. If you would too, let’s make it happen somehow.