Press Gang

November 1998. After a traumatic journey to London in a people carrier, via a few illegal u-turns on Oxford Street, six aspiring journalists from Cardiff University arrive at the NUS student media conference. The weekend, incorporating the student media awards, will include talks and seminars from people who work in the media, designed to inspire and assist us on our route to success in the industry.
Among my seminar selections are travel writing (even though I hate flying) and a session with the editor of Sky Magazine, because I want to hear what he has to say about his mysterious new project ...

Earlier that year we'd become aware of what was known as 'Project J', after two of our colleagues at the student paper had interviewed this editor about his career so far. Still in his twenties, he'd already edited Smash Hits at the age of 23, before moving on to Sky Magazine. Now he was promising 20 top tips for writing a great article and who better to learn from than the man who had edited magazines I loved?

Project J was nearing completion by now and he told us that 32 staff had been recruited, emphasising that 4 of them were fresh out of university, including one of our former colleagues from Gair Rhydd, the Cardiff University student newspaper. It made the idea of walking straight out of university into a job at a national magazine seem easy.

The highlight of the weekend was the awards ceremony, where we didn't win but did drink a lot of wine. I ended up staggering around East London with Matt, crying because we couldn't find a taxi, while another from our party got ridiculously pissed trying to keep drinking pace with Chris Moyles, culminating in an excursion onto the tracks of Docklands Light Railway ...



Hanging drunkenly off the podium on the stage at the 1998 NUS media awards, determined that our paper and radio station would get the acclaim they probably didn't deserve. I'm disgracefully shitfaced. Matt & Jon probably were too.

'Project J' revealed itself in February 1999 as Heat magazine. You might have heard of it? 'Original' Heat, however, was nothing like its current incarnation as a celebrity gossip rag shifting upwards of 500,000 copies per issue. It was a much more serious take on the world of entertainment, in many ways a slimmed-down weekly version of Sky, but without the best bits (Karen Krizanovich's advice column, for example). I bought Heat in 1999, partly out of loyalty to a former colleague and partly because I genuinely liked it. By January 2000, I was busy working in my 'stop gap' job at an insurance company when the call came. Did I want to write something for Heat? Bloody right I did. How was I to know that this translated as "do a vox-pop outside a Barry Manilow concert" and that, by now, the man who had spoken to us in London - Mark Frith, of course - was hard at work revamping a failing magazine.


I don't claim to have any journalistic integrity. Everyone loved Bazza. It was impossible to find a balanced range of opinion, so 'Sarah Walker' was invented in a desperate bid to include an alternative point of view (pic is my friend Gwyn)

The story of Heat is well-documented in Frith's book, The Celeb Diaries. In his entry dated 8th December 1999, he writes: "It doesn't help that I'm listed in the magazine as Editor but I'm not actually in charge. For the last year I've always had an Editorial Director above me and I've played deputy". This surprised me. I'd been led to believe in late 1998, by Frith himself, that Heat was his brainchild. Had he tried to impress a bunch of student hacks by overplaying his role? Or did he later decide to distance himself from the original, disastrous version of the magazine? Maybe I'm just remembering it wrong - I drank enough wine that weekend to pickle a horse.

What did I learn from Heat? That it's more desirable to be popular with everyone than well-liked by a minority? That to win that popularity, you need to dumb down? No. Journalism is a business and a business needs to sell its product to succeed. If that's the lesson I take from this - bearing in mind I still work in the insurance industry - then it's probably not a bad thing at all.