It’s been a long a winding road, most of it on the air, but a quite a lot of it in print too.
Head-shots, profile pics and the like are never a fun part of the job. At one point in the ’90s a publisher I worked for thought a sketch of the editor would be way cooler on the masthead than a photo. It’s actually one of the better images of me ever published.
Here are some bits and pieces from the ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s:
My first front page newspaper story after 2 decades focused on radio. You can see the whole thing here.
BBC was an early adopter of online platforms, and during my time as a World Service stringer covering Parliament Hill in the ’90s a lot of my stuff got out on the internet… and some of it is still there:
You can see some random stuff that lives on in the giant memory halls of the BBC servers here, here, here, here, here and here.
In the days before shows like Dragon’s Den and Shark Tank entrepreneurs relied on the business press to get the word out about new and innovative products. This one I wrote about for the magazine “Profit” never took off. But, I can testify that it worked. The samples I was sent are still going strong in my kitchen, nearly 20 years later:
My interest in beer started in 1984 with the launch of the Granville Island Brewing company (which my father, brother and I had a small number of shares in)… and I wrote about it a lot during the first wave of the Craft Brewing Revolution in the late 80s and early 90s. My focus was mainly on the business and marketing end.
After this long in the news business stories start repeating themselves. Take for example, calls for the federal government to spend more on infrastructure or complaints that legislation is too vague:
Max Keeping influenced a generation of reporters in Ottawa, and showed us that even in the seat of government, it’s local news that matters most to the people who live there. I got to spend several hours with Max to write this profile.
Some say the job can age you… after nearly 10 years as News Director at Coast FM, my appearance certainly “evolved” 😉
Sean Eckford 