Hi.
I’m a tech-savvy freelance journalist with more than 30 years’ experience of writing, editing, design, photography and videography. In addition to producing my own work, I also provide a range of services for clients, including:
Research
Face-to-face interviews, filmed or for print
News and feature writing
Design and page layout
Video projects
Supplements and special projects
Product pages
Text editing and sub editing
Blogging
My background
NCTJ-proficient and trained on the Redbridge Guardian during the late 1980s, I became a freelance sub-editor and production editor, primarily at the Times Educational Supplement.
At the same time, I started working in a number of NHS communications roles in north-east London. It was the usual fare, handling press enquiries, and managing and producing publicity for various events. However, in what increasingly became a contract publishing role, I wrote, designed and produced magazines and newsletters for a number of NHS trusts for around ten years.
The Royal Marsden, in partnership with the Institute of Cancer Research, and Whipps Cross University Hospital were my primary NHS clients. One of my main projects for Whipps Cross, The Magazine, won best design and best feature at the 2002 Northclife Public Sector Publishing Awards.
My NHS work also included some strategic communications. I developed a crisis communications plan to formalise the handling of potential emergencies arising from the reprovision of mental health services from Victorian psychiatric hospitals – in this case, Claybury Hospital – into the community. The plan was signed off by senior management across a number of emergency services and became the blueprint for similar reprovisions in other parts of London for many years afterwards.
A different path
Some writers aren’t writers. They’re mere escapees and refugees on an exile from the jungle of thoughts.
With a long-held interest in politics, economics and the environment, I originally became a journalist because I firmly believed in the importance of compelling stories in highlighting truths. However, I increasingly diverged from anything approaching a traditional career path because of what I saw as media capture by powerful interests and the distorting impact on news coverage.
Though newspapers have always had their editorial positions, facts were being relegated in importance behind what they wanted to convey as a binary choice between right – their political stance – and wrong. Quite apart from betraying the whole point of journalism, I thought the results were less interesting, with less room for nuance and competing truths.
Probably the biggest issue, for me, was the future that climate scientists were revealing but received precious little unbiased coverage. These were some of the most important stories affecting humanity given the inescapable consequences that burning fossil fuels and destroying habitats would deliver. Then, as now, many of these stories remain under-told, misrepresented or completely ignored by much of what is now called the client media.
I’m with the former Daily Mail and Telegraph journalist Peter Oborne on this one:
A client journalist is a journalist who sees his job as decorating power, or legitimising power, and talking the language of power rather than challenging power [and] running stories which make power accountable. [Journalists] were part of power, rather than holding it to account. The idea which you get taught in journalism school and that most journalists genuinely believe – that they’re there to hold power to account – is not true.
Partly in reaction to this, I developed and launched GreenerLiving magazine in February 2007. Not great timing, that, as the financial crash began to play out just a couple of months later. The crash sparked the deepest advertising recession in 40 years, leading to a significant remodelling of the publishing industry. GreenerLiving had little chance of survival, but it’s still a piece of work I’m very proud of.
Later, I became managing editor of Ethical Performance, one of a small collection of news outlets that served the global corporate social responsibility (CSR) market, to prepare it for sale to a media company following the death of its founder, Alastair Townley. EP’s parent company, Dunstans Publishing, was sold to 3BL Media in 2015.
After my time at EP, I increasingly moved into environmental campaigning and developing two businesses – the Green Plaque and Osira – as I believed there was an urgent need to make positive impacts on the ground.
Return to the fray
Work on both of these projects, combined with Covid lockdown, meant I have almost completely left my communications work behind over the last five years.
However, with most of the modelling on those projects now complete, I feel the need to return to the scene, especially given the state of traditional media and the crucial role new digital video channels now play in keeping people informed. Or misinformed.
As Peter Hitchens once said:
I became a journalist partly so that I wouldn’t ever have to rely on the press for my information.
I want to do my bit to make facts great again.
Commission me
If you want help promoting your business, project or cause, then feel free to drop me a line at info@peterbatt.co.uk