Greg Hadfield speaks to Brighton journalism students
March 2010

Greg Hadfield, Cogapp's director of strategic projects and a former award-winning Fleet Street journalist, spoke to students at Brighton Journalists Works, the independent journalism training company based at the offices of The Argus, Brighton's regional daily newspaper.

On the last day of a 10-week course, the students were seeking advice on how to get their first job in the fast-changing world of journalism, in an industry where traditional media-owners are struggling to address the challenges presented by the internet.

Greg, a former assistant editor of The Sunday Times and investigative reporter on the Daily Mail, told how he started out on the Wakefield Express, a weekly newspaper in West Yorkshire, in the days of typewriters and carbon paper. His first news article was headlined: "Angry mums demand pelican crossing."

He got his break in national newspapers after a stint at the Western Morning News in Plymouth - where he won a British Press Award for a campign highlighting cancers and other disorders among British ex-Servicemen forced to witness nuclear bomb tests in 1950s, with little or no protective clothing.

In the mid-1990s, Greg was the first journalist to leave Fleet Street for the internet, when his son - then aged 12 - created Soccernet, the world's most popular football website, subsequently sold to ESPN for £25 million.

He discussed with the students some of the qualities that a good journalist needs, as much now as ever: curiosity, passion, scepticism, and an appetite for hard work. Despite the threats to traditional media, he said he was as optimistic as ever about the future of journalism and journalists.

Greg urged students to look for novel ways and environments in which they could exercise their new-found skills. He suggested, for example, that good journalism was being achieved by NGOs and charities, by people working for football club websites and television channels, by start-ups, and by individuals working by themselves or as teams of online journalists.

Whatever the future holds, Greg - who joined Cogapp in March after being head of digital development at Telegraph Media Group - encouraged the students to build audiences by blogging, by curating their Facebook pages and, by amassing followers on Twitter.

These were modern equivalent of the old-fashioned "cuttings book", he said. "However tough it is out there, don't just wait until someone offers you a job. Get out there and do some journalism and publish it online," he added.