🎙️ Episode 1: Before The Books and Businesses

Welcome to season 2.

This time, we’re bringing a bit more shape to the chaos - starting by going right back to where it all began.

Before the books, the businesses and the podcast, we were both young journalists learning fast in local newsrooms. In this episode, we talk about the lessons that stayed with us - writing hooks, interviewing people, working to deadlines, spotting spin, standing your ground and learning how to communicate with people from every walk of life.

It’s a look back at the roots of what we do now, with plenty of newsroom memories, banter and a few thinking points to take away.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

This is Autumn Me Off Topic, where we talk books, brands, business, and everything else we're not supposed to say out loud. I'm Asha and Tad, let's dive in.

SPEAKER_02 0:11

Welcome everyone to the first episode of season two. Woohoo! Yay! So we're gonna. I know season two already. I say already, but there's actually been 40 episodes plus a couple of bonus episodes.

SPEAKER_01 0:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 0:26

And we're aiming to do 40 episodes every season. Yeah, that's good. So none of this Netflix and Disney and Prime Malarkey of gradually whit whittling down the episode numbers per season and hoping you won't notice.

SPEAKER_00 0:39

Isn't that annoying when that happens actually? Especially if you're really you're really kind of committed to a series. Yeah. And then it's less and less. Brace it down to me. Can we please go back to London? I love Grace. Who else is a fan of Grace? Fantastic. We love it. Shonda Rhymes, what a hero. Shonda Rhymes is brilliant. She's one of the best TV, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 0:56

She's absolutely which ties it nicely with what we're going to talk about, on the internet. It does, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_00 1:01

And I didn't do I didn't plan that at all, Tav. So there you go. I must be on it.

SPEAKER_02 1:05

So as promised, there's a bit more strategy coming into this second series. The first series was us kind of finding our feet and taking you with us on this beautiful ride towards learning how to podcast on a shoe shoestring. Show string at a shoestring.

SPEAKER_00 1:19

Yeah. Good start. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:21

We're still promising that we're still tying our shoelaces, but we're still saying that we're not editing anything, we're not going for perfection, we're just going to tell you as it is. But what we wanted to do is take you back, take you back into some of those those origin stories.

SPEAKER_00 1:37

Yeah. Back in time, goodness me. Quite a time quite a long time ago, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:40

Back to when everything was in Sepia.

SPEAKER_00 1:42

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:43

So before we'd even met, in fact. Yeah, goodness me. Life before Taz. I know, life before Asher. So we thought in this episode we'd take you way back to before the businesses and before the books, before the podcast, before the internet.

SPEAKER_00 2:00

Goodness me. It's hard to remember that time, isn't it, Ashley?

SPEAKER_02 2:03

But before we all had a mobile phone in our pocket.

SPEAKER_00 2:06

Before we even got a mobile phone the size of a brick. Absolutely. Which I remember my boss saying to me, don't worry, because if anything happens on that on that lane, we know it's, you know, it's got a bad reputation. You can just hit Mo the Head with your phone. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:18

Couldn't really do that now. No. So way, way, way back when we were but a spec, um, we both started out as journalists, as junior reporters. And some of the lessons there, if we look back, there's some of the kind of early indications that we would end up in a business that was to do with communication. So we had to learn things like writing fast, working with deadlines, flexing our style, being able to communicate with people from all walks of life. In fact, I remember when I was a junior reporter at the tender age of 16, I went to me. I know. I went to our local newspaper group twice on work experience. The first time I was in photography. The second time I went into the I forgot you started off the photography thing. Yeah. I went into the journalism department. Yeah. And I really kicked up because I was supposed to be in photography again. I thought back then I'd want to be a a photographer with maybe a little bit of news tied into the side. But I said, no, no, we want to rotate you. And I remember during those times.

SPEAKER_00 3:23

Change visual then, sorry.

SPEAKER_02 3:24

I rotated you. Yeah. Like on a spit.

unknown 3:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 3:27

At Taz kebab.

SPEAKER_00 3:29

No, I was thinking more on the merry-go-round kind of thing. There you go.

unknown 3:33

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 3:34

Not a spit roast.

SPEAKER_00 3:35

Let's not go there. Oh, for goodness sake, lower the total round. I don't know where you went.

SPEAKER_02 3:40

Just get let's just get back to the They said they wanted to rotate me around apartments, and at the end of nearly two weeks, I was feeling really put on. In fact, I was going home, still living with mum and dad, feeling really stressed about how much they were putting on me because I was, you know, only their own work experience. Yeah. You know, one toward the end of the two weeks, they sent me out on my own with a photographer to interview the owner of get this. A fish and chip shop that had burned down.

SPEAKER_01 4:08

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 4:09

So I don't know what I'm doing. This is important an important local story for them. Why are they sending me on my own with a photographer?

SPEAKER_00 4:16

What could make some really bad jokes about, I don't know. You could. They want something fishy going on. There is something about battery. I felt really battered. Yeah, exactly. That's just my god. Yeah, you can tell we were head writers. You can tell we were headline writers at one point, can't you? I felt like I was in the wrong place. Oh, stop now. Making me feel ill.

SPEAKER_02 4:38

No, sorry, ill.

SPEAKER_00 4:40

Ill, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 4:41

Oh no, I think I've got a bit of a headache.

SPEAKER_00 4:44

Oh no, that's a had coming on. There is a time and a place. More than I.

SPEAKER_02 4:50

I know. But anyway, it transpired at the end of those two weeks. They were testing me because I'd impressed them so much they wanted to open up a trainee reporters place, which they didn't do. And would I be up for quitting sixth form partway through and going to work for them full time and learning on the job? Yeah. And that's how it all began. There were a few hurdles to overcome first. Number one, dropping out sixth form part way through. Number two, I'd promised to babysit two of my cousins over the summer holidays, and mum was telling me I couldn't take the job because I'd promise to do that. I was like, hold on, what? What? You want me to miss up on miss out on an opportunity like this? Because I'm supposed to be babysitting my cousins who will be coming here anyway. You're still here, dad's still here, nan's still here. What's the problem? Yeah. And ended up talking to my aunt. He went, it's no problem. Your nan can look after them. So that's how it all began. But Asher, tell me how your journey journey in. Oh well, I've said G, I've said the J word. How your journey I knew it was going to happen. I thought we were very serious. No, we've tried. Tell me how you transitioned into journalism.

SPEAKER_00 6:00

What do you mean I transitioned now?

SPEAKER_02 6:01

How did you get into journalism? Those those early years.

SPEAKER_00 6:04

I just wanted to be a journalist from as for as long as I can remember.

SPEAKER_02 6:07

And what were you doing before that?

SPEAKER_00 6:10

What was I doing before that? Yeah. It was my first job. Yeah?

SPEAKER_02 6:13

So you were at school? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:15

So you were transitioning from a school. Okay, alright. I'm I'm just sorry, I'm in somewhere. So yeah, sorry. I am driving at the same time, which is obviously, you know, trying to multitask. Yeah, yeah. But so for me, journalism started, it was something I always wanted to do from a very young age. Absolutely obsessed with people telling me stories, me creating stories from when I can remember. And I often talk about this, I know I've said about it in series one. I talked about the relationship I had with my mum. My mum instilled in me some great, you know, advis a need for stories and wanting to learn about other people and questions and all of that stuff, and learning how to listen to a good story but also tell a good story. So that was always in me, and and I learnt to read and write really early, so that by the time I got to primary school I was kind of ahead of quite a few of my classmates.

SPEAKER_03 7:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:03

So school going into secondary school was tough. I loved primary school most of the time, but wasn't sure about the first couple of years in in secondary school. But the one saviour, the saving place for me was the English lessons. I had a lovely teacher called Miss Jeffrey, Jeffrey with a J, and she was, how can I describe her? She was probably, I would imagine now, this sounds awful, but she was probably midlife, kind of early to mid-40s when I first met her, going into late 40s, bordering on scatty, but she always had this kind of wavy salt and pepper hair, and always had a cardigan on that was off shoulder all the time. She was always running around, and we had a her her class, which was, or my class, which was 3J, because it was after the letter of the teacher, so she was my film tutor, which I loved, but we were in a mobile classroom, so you'd see her whizzing across from the mobile classroom to the main buildings and stuff, and she was always running late, but she instilled in me again, she helped, she was quite like my mum in that respect. She could see that I loved story and that I loved writing, and she really gave me confidence, and that's where it started for me. She was an amazing lady, and I was always in the top two or three in the class for writing, and it was my favourite lesson, right? But she got it, and she taught us the power of story and how to create that and how to also to listen to other people's stories. So that was the beginning point for me, and it was then talked about a little bit about journalism. So, you know, a lot of it was creative, sounds like my Mrs.

SPEAKER_02 8:40

Hendrick.

SPEAKER_00 8:41

Does she? Okay.

SPEAKER_02 8:43

So she didn't always have a jumper off her cardio off her shoulder. Yeah. She was always really funky. She was this wonderful, vertically challenged.

SPEAKER_00 8:54

Nothing wrong with that. I love a Geordie accent. I love a Geordie accent.

SPEAKER_02 8:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:59

Isn't it amazing? You just find them if you find just that one person that takes you by the hand and says, you can do this.

SPEAKER_02 9:06

She saw something in the world.

SPEAKER_00 9:08

Yeah, yeah. And the other thing as well was she was great at just she was she was too probably too lenient. The kids used to know that, so some of the c the kids in the girls in our class took, you know, took advantage of that, shall we say? I can remember one particular time, turned up in the mobile classroom. There was absolute pandemonium, can't even say it.

SPEAKER_02 9:29

Pandemonium's.

SPEAKER_00 9:30

Yeah, I think it does. I think I've invented a new word, nebulous. Is there a word oh that makes me oh I've just touched I've just touched me furry mic then. Sorry about that. Stop it. We haven't even told people we've got a new fairy mic. I know, oh no, we haven't replaced fairy mic. He will always be part of me.

SPEAKER_02 9:44

These are the these are the the new mics we talked about last series, but this time they have what I believe is colloquially known as a dead cat clips to them.

SPEAKER_00 9:52

Do they? I think you like that. That takes me to not a nice place. Anyway.

SPEAKER_02 9:56

First the return of the mic.

SPEAKER_00 9:58

Yeah. So yeah, so she was so it was complete pandemonium in the classroom, and she just stood there in the middle of it all going, be quiet, girls, be quiet. So they would take advantage. But she was a great teacher for me, and she helped me just progress things with my writing and my writing style as well. And she encouraged me to read aloud, and that was the other thing, because any other lesson, whenever we had to read anything aloud, I dreaded it. But there was a safety and a comfort in that, and that stayed with me. And that oral storytelling, which of course we know is as old as the hills, she knew the power of that too, and she encouraged us to do that.

SPEAKER_02 10:35

So, how did you transition into journalism? Oh, yeah, sorry, that's a very old.

SPEAKER_00 10:38

Yeah, I forgot about the journalistic bit. So, okay, so it was first talked about when we were in secondary school in those first couple of years in secondary school, and I kind of inquired about it a little bit, but I thought I haven't got enough qualifications because at that point I was part of the kind of you know, 11 plus and everything else, you know, when there was that point in school where you took you took that moment, you didn't you either went to grammar school or you didn't.

SPEAKER_02 11:02

Well, yeah, I don't remember because of course I was in one of the first tranches of GCSEs. Tranches. Tranche, tranche tranches.

SPEAKER_00 11:12

That's my French blood coming out.

SPEAKER_02 11:13

I do have my god, look at those onions that suddenly appeared around your neck and you've got a striped t-shirt on and about.

SPEAKER_00 11:18

So offensive, Tuz. I'm so sorry for any French listeners. I didn't have a great squirrely moustache. A great grandparent that was. The car's transformed into a bicycle. Me, we so yeah, so where was I going, Tuz? I was going all over the place there. So I forgot.

SPEAKER_02 11:36

CSEs. You didn't think you'd have enough qualifications.

SPEAKER_00 11:38

Yeah, because mainly I did CSEs. Then I did O levels as well, and then I did some A levels. Let's not talk about that one. But English was always my saviour, so I thought, okay, I've got some qualifications now. So I started to pay more attention to my local paper, and my local paper was the Graves End Reported. It was at the time it was the Gravesend and Dartford Reporter, then before they had different editions.

SPEAKER_02 12:00

And that was the Colville, Ashby and Swaddling Coat Times.

SPEAKER_00 12:04

Together with The Free Leader. Oh, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, I like it. There's always a free paper as well, wasn't it? So so we had so I knew about it and I started reading it a bit more, and then started writing to my local editor. So by this time I'm kind of 15, 16 writing, and I didn't get any response, and I wrote again, didn't get any response, and then I think on about the third attempt, they said come in for some work experience, you know, in in the summer holidays, I think it was. So I went in and did this and had a couple of weeks and did really well. And then I went back and I did it again, and then they paid me. I can always remember. Now, this is really gonna date it. Anybody that's old at my sort of age, nearer to 60, I got a pay packet. I always remember that first time when the woman came round from the department, accounts department, not it wouldn't be accounts, would it? I don't know, whatever the account the department is. I'd come round with your brown packet with your cash in it. It was I was paid in cash, and it was so exciting.

SPEAKER_02 13:01

How much was your first wave pump?

SPEAKER_00 13:02

Oh my god, it was something like, I don't know, it was 20 quid or something, something like that.

SPEAKER_02 13:07

How year would that have been?

SPEAKER_00 13:09

1960, hang on, 60. I'm working it out, 80 yeah, 86, 85, 84, 84, 5, something like that. I'm trying to I would have been 1617.

SPEAKER_02 13:23

Because I would have been about 1990, so it's six years different, so that would be about right.

SPEAKER_00 13:27

Yeah, okay, so whenever. I'm terrible at memory time.

SPEAKER_02 13:31

Might be less than that.

SPEAKER_00 13:32

I can't remember, but it was just it was just money in my hand that I'd earn. Yeah. And I also remember, and this still this made me cry at the time. I might have mentioned this in previous podcasts, but I always hold on to that. That when we were sorting my mum's house out, we found a copy of my first story that I'd written in the local paper that had gone to press. There it was, it was a picture caption, and I can still remember it. We found it in mum's bureau that she'd kept, and it was a school story about this school, and they were teaching about I don't know, world history or something, and they'd been gifted a great big globe from some uh local business or something, and the kids were all crowded round, and I'd written this story about it, and it was like it was like eight paragraphs. But my mum my mum still had it, and that I remember out of all the things I found after my mum passed away, I've still got tears thinking about it now, and we found it in a drawer, and there it was, and I was like, comes I didn't know she did that. But that's so that was one of the first things. So they started me off. I don't know about you, but they started me off with picture captions, really basic stuff, before you actually you uh worked your way towards a golden wedding.

SPEAKER_02 14:38

See, I remember that's just reminded me talking about how much we were paid back in those first roles. They started me off on a YTS, the old youth training schemes were first in.

SPEAKER_01 14:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 14:49

But they hadn't yet created a YTS training programme for journalism. Okay. So the nearest they could put me onto was an office and secretarial skills course. Yeah. So every Monday I'd have to instead of going to the newsroom, go to the college and learn about everything from filing to all kinds of other stuff I just didn't need to do. But my wages, I was paid weekly again in cash. I think I was weekly cash and it would have been that much then.

SPEAKER_00 15:15

It couldn't have been 30 quid, couldn't it? It would be less than that.

SPEAKER_02 15:17

Well, I don't know. On YTS, my wage packets were wait for it,£16.75 a week. And journalism was not a£9-5 job.

SPEAKER_00 15:30

No, not at all. Never. Never a£9-5 job.

SPEAKER_02 15:33

No. There's something wrong if it's a£9-5 job, really. Yeah. And that job, I stayed there for way more years. It was historically known as that that newspaper group was known as having the meanest newspaper job at the boss in the country.

SPEAKER_00 15:46

Wasn't it to do with the cars? Later on we'll talk about the c state of the cars, the company company cars. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:51

He actually they actually ended up running a feature on him in the National Union of Journalists magazine. Oh my god. That is this the meanest newspaper boss in the UK.

SPEAKER_00 16:01

Were they really in the NUJ J magazine?

SPEAKER_02 16:02

In the NUJ magazine. What was it called? The NUJ magazine. It's the journalist, wasn't it? Yeah, it was the journalist. Probably still. Probably still is. By the time I left, I'd worked my way up the ranks to news editor. I was news editor by the age of 20.

SPEAKER_00 16:17

That's unheard of. I mean, when you told me that, I was like, forgetting sake, that's ridiculous. I mean, crumbs, we didn't have anybody under 40 as a as a as a. You know what?

SPEAKER_02 16:26

Now I can look back at the ADHD brains. Yeah. That's why. Yeah, yeah. And I found one of my wage packets when I left at the age of 20, which would have been. How old would that have been? You mean what? 1994? Yeah, 94. 1994. Yeah. My annual pay was£16,750 a year. So think about it, the Mass Tara started out on£16.75 and I ended on£16,750 a year.

SPEAKER_01 17:03

That's really funny.

SPEAKER_02 17:04

For news editor.

SPEAKER_01 17:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:05

But I remember when I was first offered that job and I was like, well, I'm going to get£16.75 a week. I remember saying to my mum, I could get myself a new cassette tape every week.

SPEAKER_00 17:15

Good old Britannia music, that's what I used to get those monthly. You'd get another one.

SPEAKER_02 17:19

And my mum said, Well, if you're owning now, you're going to have to start paying rent. So I think it was something like, it was probably something like£10 a month. Yeah. But when you think about how much I was getting, yeah, I know. You know, my petrol had got to come out of that as well. Yeah. And my living I like, ugh. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:37

Amazing. Beer money, because of course every journalist needs to have beer money.

SPEAKER_00 17:40

Oh, crumbs, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:41

Gin.

SPEAKER_02 17:41

Anyway. We said we'd talk about the things that we learned. So, what were some of the first things you learned as a journalist? Yeah. That you know serve you now?

SPEAKER_00 17:51

Well, the first thing we learned was the power of a good intro. That's one of the first things about it in your stories, and that still applies even now, doesn't it? You've got a hook, a good hook for your in for one of the first things I think was that. And also, you know, getting to the point, the dropped intro was I can still do that, and I do that when I voice stuff. That's why for me it was a feature of your life. You're more of a feature artist.

SPEAKER_02 18:12

So longer film content, whereas I was more news.

SPEAKER_00 18:14

Yeah, but but that was one of the first things. And good old Joyce Taylor, who was my news editor, who was I've talked about her before, I think, as well, but for me, one of my Sheros, terrifying, absolutely terrifying Glaswegian lady who'd been and and worked in national newspapers all over the place and ended up in our in our newspaper. And across my late.

SPEAKER_02 18:36

Yeah, it's always one, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 18:39

Remember, yeah. Yeah. So so Joyce was she sit there as news editor, commanding all the junior reporters, so that included me. She'd sit there on her throne, but she'd be so effing and blinding every five seconds. In the days when you could smoke in the office, she didn't just smoke, she had a cigarette holder, which was a black one, that she'd put and she'd uh she'd be, you know, done up or whatever. She'd have a lippy and often have the lippy stone, she'd have an ashtray to stub out every you know half an hour. God knows how many she smoked. She'd smoke in the office. Goodness me, and she'd just be barking at you and shouting at you. But she taught me so much about how to interview, how to get the best out of your interviewee, how to be writing to time on deadline. I mean, crumbs, she if she was around now, I wouldn't survive five minutes in the newsroom now, I don't think. In terms of the way I work compared to how I did then. And that and finding the story in something really banal, something that looked really boring on the surface, but as you dig in a bit deeper, she was really good at that. She and she instinctively knew when there was a story there to be had, it just wasn't on the surface. You just had to you had to dig in a bit more to find it. And she was brilliant at that. So I learned so much from her, but I can always remember I went off one of my colleagues, they met in the newspaper and they got married. And they got married because her father was the mayor of our town, right? It meant they could have a reception at the House of Commons. Okay. So we went to the House of Commons and Joyce Taylor went with me. Oh well, I met I met them there, and we were on the terrace at the House of Commons. Yeah. Absolutely blotto'd. I mean, really out of it. And she just kept applying me because she could hold a drink. She could really hold a drink. And she'd still be looking for stories, even though she was half cut. She'd still be saying, that's a really good story, you need to get on that. And when we get back to the office, you need to write that one up.

SPEAKER_02 20:31

Why is there rule ways of drunk in an usher? They're all well. So in my in my first one again, it was the owner's wife who used to drink quite a lot. She'd often be quite jolly, shall we say. Yeah. And there was a famous story, I'm never sure if it was an urban myth, about her sliding down the wall at a party, farting right, farting loudly and saying, That was a good one, wasn't it? I do remember being at one of the country shows once and uh literally sliding underneath the table on the stand. Yeah. There's always a drunk in it, usually.

SPEAKER_00 21:03

Yeah. But you know, Jigsaw, but I can remember coming out there, we can't I was going back and she said, Oh, I'll walk back with you. And anyway, she went off to another pub and I had to find my way back to Charing Cross and how I did it. I can remember standing on the edge of the Chandor Chandos. Is it the Chandos? I don't know. Just off you know, London. Anyway, so I can remember there thinking, I don't think I'm gonna be able to get to the station, I can't walk. And I got on the train, luckily got on the right one, got home, my goodness me, the next day I had the biggest hangover.

SPEAKER_02 21:31

But I mean from hangover was commonplaces, weren't they? But if you haven't got a pickled liver by the end of your stage, exactly you've not done it properly.

SPEAKER_00 21:38

But she taught me so much, she was a brilliant, absolutely brilliant teacher, but bloody terrifying at the same time, and so much respect for her because she'd done all the big stories. She'd been on a lot of the big new, you know, in the big news rooms, in nationals and things, and and you know, what she hadn't written about. And she could tell if you weren't if you wrote something, she'd just throw it back at you. Yeah, because in the days when we had I you know I learnt on typewriters. So in the days when you had you know blacks, so you you copied it, that was the the copy.

SPEAKER_02 22:08

You still have blacks. When I first went in, we were on I think they were Amstrads, I'm not sure.

SPEAKER_00 22:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 22:12

But they were black screen screen with green type. Okay, but I mean as in you'd have a copy of it, you know, but then when we moved over onto computer, it was called blacks, wasn't it? You had it automatically did a copy of what you originally wrote that was kept in a filing system. Oh I didn't know, was it? Yeah. Okay. And that was called Blacks, Blacks Drive. But but that was so that you had a you could prove what you'd written as opposed to how it had been editing for D2.

SPEAKER_00 22:37

Oh god, I don't remember that at all. Interesting. Well, the other thing that I was gonna say with that when we went onto computers was that we had the these little tandy 200s, which were the first kind of laptops, really. That was a big thing, but I remember the green screens a lot. We had green screens.

SPEAKER_02 22:53

Green screens or black screens with green text?

SPEAKER_00 22:55

Oh, perhaps it was that way, it was that way round. It would have been, you're right, I don't know. Because there's six years' difference with us, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 23:01

There are, there is.

SPEAKER_00 23:02

But yeah, lots of memories. But yes, teacher, she was a great teacher. Mick Taylor, who, if he listens to this podcast, he's still his friends with me on Facebook. A fantastic I think you need to tag him into some of your programs. I do, fantastic chief reporter, news editor, sub-editor, amazing guy who taught me a lot too, fantastic person to work with. So many people that you know that I was really quite shy. But when I got into the newsroom and I got onto a story, I was good. And I found my my thing was always going to be features.

SPEAKER_02 23:32

I could do news, but but I worry about learning about those hooks because I know that even while when I was writing regularly and regularly getting stories in print, I always used to feel a little bit demoralised because they'd always have to rewrite the first part of the story. Right. It took me a long time to get the hook thing, the intros. Yeah. And then I remember one day putting a story through, and in the subs department, the editor, the deputy editor, the sports editor all started cheering. We were like, what's going on? What's going on? And they were like, it's the first one of Tamsin's stories where we haven't had to rewrite the intros.

SPEAKER_00 24:03

Yay! Amazing, amazing. Yeah. Well, for me, a hook is, you know, you've got to look at your stuff. I think you can teach it to an extent, but I think some people have got a natural ability to be able to do it. Yeah. Who were you talking about recently? A f a famous in the same way, okay. So there's certain when you're having a conversation with somebody and something stands out, you know, we always used to use the old pub analogy, didn't we? So we'd say, if you were going into a pub with your mates and something had happened, and you had like 30 seconds to tell them what had happened in one in you know, in that time, exactly what had happened, what would you say? That's your intro. That's what we would say. I was taught with that, you know, who, what, where, when, and how.

SPEAKER_03 24:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:46

But what's the the one part of that story that stands out that's make gonna make people go, Wow, yeah, I need to read that.

SPEAKER_02 24:54

But today it's something that stops people scrolling and makes them on the content. Yes. In the back in the day, the back in the day, we showed her back in the day, the most important stories were the ones that appeared above the fold.

SPEAKER_00 25:05

Oh, yeah, above the fold. Can you explain what that means?

SPEAKER_02 25:07

So, what that means above the fold is if you think about the in the olden days when newspapers used to be news agents are folded in half so you could see the the bit that appeared literally above the fold, that's what had to make you want to pick up and buy that newspaper in the same way that we need to stop people scrolling. So the important stuff on the front cover had to be above the fold. Yeah. Yeah. So on the bit of the newspaper that you would see that would be visible when it was folding over folded over in a stack of pile of newspapers. Yeah. What else? So we learned about intros, we learned about the importance of creating content that made people actually want to read it. Yep. What about this interviewing people? Ah. Because sometimes you and I still do interview people in our roles. You know, I sometimes do an interview series on, like the Taz Talks series it did on mental health during lockdown. Yeah, and I'll be interview people for their books that they're writing.

SPEAKER_00 26:04

And also for National Pet Month. Also for National Pet. That's coming up as we record this in April, and I'll be doing a series of NPM live shows.

SPEAKER_02 26:11

Okay, and as as this podcast grows, occasionally having guests on will be there'll there'll be an element of it of interviewing there. But all but what what did you learn about the art of interviewing? Because I think if we look at that in a different way, that's what taught us how to flex our style and how to get the best from people, how to be able to communicate with people at a deeper level. I think that's where it started.

SPEAKER_00 26:41

Yeah, okay, sorry. I'm just working out where I am on the roundabout.

SPEAKER_02 26:45

What did that teach you, actually, interviewing skills?

SPEAKER_00 26:48

Oh my goodness, me, so much about for me, one of the most important things is the power of silence, which sounds a weird thing to say, but having the courage to let somebody speak and actually to sit, to sit, to ask the question, just sit, sit back and wait for what comes. Yeah. Don't interrupt, don't, which is quite challenging, particularly if you're ADHD folks, you know, if you're because it can be very tempting to try and add to it to get people talking, and it can feel uncomfortable. Yeah. But from my experience, if you can get people, if you can allow people to just have that point to breathe, you will get a much fuller response potentially.

SPEAKER_02 27:28

Psychologically, people love to fill the gap. They hate a gap in so and it's the same with coaching. One of the most powerful coaching moves you can make is to just sit in the silence. Yeah. Do resist the urge to fill that silence because they will say more.

SPEAKER_01 27:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 27:43

Just sit in the silence, and that's often where you'd get the best stories. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 27:46

Because people would need to fill the gap and they'd blurt it out, and you'd be like, gotcha. In the same way that often the best quotes would come after you put the notebook away. Put the notebook down, put the pen down, and then it's like I mean, in the days we have to say here as well, because there's been a lot of changes in technology, obviously, since we learned as journalists. Because in the days when, yes, we did have dictaphones, good old dictaphones, remember those? We didn't have smartphones where we had a voice voice notes on our phones.

SPEAKER_02 28:11

We never used dictaphones.

SPEAKER_00 28:12

No, and we didn't. We learnt the old-fashioned way shorthand, good old shorthand, Pittman's for me.

SPEAKER_02 28:17

It was for you it was It was Pittman's for me, but a different type of Pittman. Yeah, Pittman's. I was Pittman's fast, you were Pittman's New Era, I think ironically. Was it New Era? I can't remember. Anyway. But we can't read one another's shorthand. We can't read shorthand notes for one another because we learnt different forms of shorthand. But in the days Can you still do it and do you still use it?

SPEAKER_00 28:35

I do still use it, yeah. I mean again, my shorthand teacher would be going, for goodness sake, that's not very that's not very neat. But it's my version of it, so you know, part of me goes, Well, what does it matter?

SPEAKER_02 28:45

Every now and then if I'm making notes in a business meeting, somebody will say to me, Are you using shorthand? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's it's a lost art now, isn't it? Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:58

The trick is can you read it back though?

SPEAKER_02 29:00

That's the thing.

SPEAKER_00 29:02

Yeah. So so okay, so where were we?

SPEAKER_02 29:05

Yeah, what we I was talking about the fact that interviewing teaches you to read between the lines and to learn from different types of communication. It teaches you to flex your style, to be able to read between the lines more, see what intuitively what's going on, to tr to tune in, and it teaches you to be able to communicate with different types of people.

SPEAKER_00 29:28

Yeah, it does. And that's so important, isn't it? Being able to, because we did get, and I think that's the beauty of our of our work, you know, that we work when you work on a regional. I know our good friend Fiona Scott talks about it in her book. Yeah, about what regional journalism training gives you as a regional journalist, is you get such a variety of stories to work with, and so that gave us, and I don't think I ever lost that love of variety.

SPEAKER_02 29:54

I love it, because as we've driven, as we're driving now, and we're talking about that period in time, there's an old-style X cort XR3i that's just driven past us.

SPEAKER_00 30:04

Thank you for that memory. Wow, fantastic, yeah. So, yes, and I think that was the beauty of it. We were we were given that, you know, gift, if you like, of having all this variety to to work with. We could work with so many different people on so many different topics, and it would be it was so it was so much fun to do because you never knew what was coming. You know, there was you could never get bored because it would always be something new to learn and different topics to work with. So I love that, you know. So, and the same way that kind of we talk about that later on, but you know, progressed into when we went into PR. I wanted to be a generalist, not a specialist, because I love the variety, that's what makes every day different, right?

SPEAKER_02 30:45

What about confidence? So it teaches us how to communicate with people because of course one day we could be being sent to the roughest uh suburb.

SPEAKER_00 30:53

Crumbs, I've had a few of those where I think I thought, is my car gonna be on bricks when I come back?

SPEAKER_02 30:57

Am I gonna get back?

SPEAKER_00 30:58

Yeah, well, stuff like that as well.

SPEAKER_02 31:00

Death threats as journalists, not usual. And the other thing, let me just say actually, about journalism. When we trained in journalism, it was not what you see of what's called journalism today. We were actively trained to not impart any opinion into those pieces.

SPEAKER_00 31:16

Opinion was an opinion piece only.

SPEAKER_02 31:17

Was an opinion piece only. We were taught to not inject any opinion, to be absolutely impartial, and to equally present all sides of a story so that the reader could make up their mind.

SPEAKER_00 31:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 31:30

That for me is still what journalism is all about.

SPEAKER_00 31:32

Yeah, me too. Good journalism. Yeah, exactly. We should be completely impartial. We were we were taught that way, and that's the way it should have stayed. And I think unfortunately, maybe that's part of the downsides of social now that ever or everybody now has to have an opinion. Every paper has to have an opinion.

SPEAKER_02 31:47

Well, again, I think that's because the advent of social media, think about it, when we were journalists, there was massive pressure on us to break the stories first. Before the other local newspapers, and definitely before the nationals. If a local story for our interview appeared in a national before we'd got it, there'd be hell to play. Yeah. Because we should have our noses to the ground and we should know. Yeah. But then, of course, when social media came out, it got to the point where there was the right of citizen journalists, and newspapers could no longer be the first to break a story. Because it was always somebody sharing it on social. First thing about I remember that's how I first learned about Michael Jackson's death before anything had appeared in the press.

SPEAKER_01 32:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 32:29

It was on Twitter back in the day before we got folks. Wow, yeah. So I think that's why more news outlets have had to go more and more opinion-led. It's now stopped being news and it's become kind of partisan, politically motivated rhetoric that feeds into somebody's own bubble and own belief system, which actually polarizes the community more and more. Because people will say, Well, it must be true because I read it in X, I read it in the Daily Fascist or the Daily Liberal.

SPEAKER_01 33:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 33:02

You know, and it's yeah, neither of those are going to be entirely true because they're all going to have too much opinion, too much weighted opinion. Yeah. Even if they're displayed.

SPEAKER_00 33:08

There's no balance in the end of the year.

SPEAKER_02 33:10

They will display as being balanced than it never is.

SPEAKER_00 33:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 33:13

Anyway, where were we going? I can't remember now. Sorry, it was what else did we learn? We were talking about being able to communicate with people from all walks of life because, of course, one day we could be again being sent out to the roughest place, to something like, I don't know, a murder or a siege, or the places where you'd think, Am I actually going to get back in one piece?

SPEAKER_00 33:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 33:35

Or to courts to report on the proceedings there.

SPEAKER_00 33:38

And then getting a load of abuse from the people that were in the court or something.

SPEAKER_02 33:40

We got followed back to the newsroom by somebody swearing at me and threatening my life on more than one occasion.

unknown 33:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 33:46

But but the next day we could be out there interviewing a member of the royal family. Yeah. So it really was being able to flex your style. Yeah. And learn that again, I keep saying it, but to communicate with people from all walks of life. Yeah. Because you had to be able to flex, you had to be able to adapt.

SPEAKER_01 34:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 34:02

Yeah, it's not like today where you could go in with a really strong opinion and just shout somebody down. You could ask leading questions, you could put an opinion out there and ask that point of view on it, but you still had to report things factually and in a balanced way.

SPEAKER_00 34:18

Yeah, definitely. And then you had to, of course, get that story past the subs, the sub-editors. And that was always, you know, our hardest taskmasters in many ways, as well, along with the news editors as they should be. They were there paid to make sure that it was everything was correct, you know, that it was everything was spelt correctly before we had spell checks and everything else on our all our tech. You know, that had to be done manually and it was and it was queried. If a story wasn't balanced, if we felt there wasn't there should have been a response from somebody to make sure the story was balanced, then you had to go back to the story and try again and try again. And you'd obviously got a deadline within which time you've got to be.

SPEAKER_02 34:57

Now, this is why blacks come in handy. Because I've got to say, on one particular occasion, the editor was away, and the deputy editor and the news editor at the time got together. One of them stood over my shoulder and made me rewrite something that was not what I wanted to say.

SPEAKER_01 35:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 35:14

And even then, where I said I'm not prepared to fudge that anymore, they rewrote the story after I'd gone and turned it into something that was potentially libeless.

SPEAKER_01 35:23

Goodness, right.

SPEAKER_02 35:24

And that is where the blacks came in with me. Because something that night before I went home told me, print out your blacks copy before you leave. Yeah. And I did. I took a copy of my blacks article before it had been edited.

SPEAKER_01 35:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 35:41

And then by the time the editor came back and complaints started coming in, that story disappeared from Blacks.

SPEAKER_00 35:47

Uh oh.

SPEAKER_02 35:48

It had been double deleted out of the Blacks.

SPEAKER_00 35:50

Oh goodness.

SPEAKER_02 35:51

But I still have to do that. Yeah. Yeah. You got the original copy. So I still got hauled over the course, but it's like, come on, I'm a junior reporter. I've got the deputy editor and the news editor standing over my shoulder telling me to delete that bit and write that and write that and write that.

SPEAKER_00 36:06

Oh, that's really.

SPEAKER_02 36:07

And it didn't matter how much I protested, and then they rewrote it some more after I'd gone. Yeah. And I was really glad that I'd printed out that copy from Blacks. That's what saved me. I still got hauled over the coals for being persuaded. But I think there was also an understanding that I probably did as much as I could that day.

SPEAKER_01 36:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 36:29

I prided myself on never misquoting anyone. But that once one case on one late press day when they were desperate and common sense had gone out of the window. It all went a bit tits up.

SPEAKER_00 36:42

But that's the power of comments, isn't it? Of getting those those comments correct. And again, that's where your your training, so your training with your shorthand, for instance, enabled you to be able to go back and check things, check them again.

SPEAKER_02 36:55

Yeah. And you had to keep your notebooks for three years, wasn't it? Three years, I think it was. Your notebooks for three years because shorthand would often be referred to in court if I didn't.

SPEAKER_00 37:02

Yeah, definitely. You had to, yeah, you had to back it all up. So it was, yeah, in the days when shorthand was our absolute godson, wasn't it, for us? And we we we worked with it all the time. And of course you developed your own version of it over a longer term time, but as long as you could read it. Some people did a mix of both long hand and shorthand, sometimes I did. And certainly as I went into features, I did more of that. I did, you know, but I never really I don't think I ever used only when I got into B2B publishing did I ever start using. I think I used a dictaphone once or twice when I had a big project to do, yeah, which was interviewing like among you know loads of different people from a particular business, and it was the annual piece that we put out. I say piece, it was a supplement which was like 40 pages long or something. Um but that I did just because it was just it had to be done on a tight deadline.

SPEAKER_02 37:51

Where of course now I know a few times when I've been interviewed since it's isn't it weird actually when you step out of that you're on your own business and on those occasions where you get interviewed by a journalist? It's really weird.

SPEAKER_00 38:02

Oh yeah, so it's quite uncomfortable.

SPEAKER_02 38:04

But of course, now they'll flip it onto something like Zoom, record the conversation, and they get a transcript. Yeah. How much easier would our lives have been about that?

SPEAKER_00 38:12

Well, how many times did we get people saying, Can I see a copy of it, please? And you couldn't because it wasn't policy to do that. You weren't allowed to do that. No, sorry, I'm not allowed to do that. What? Yes, but you might have misquoted me. Well You either trust me or you don't.

SPEAKER_02 38:24

Yeah. Now, confidence standing your ground.

SPEAKER_00 38:27

Oh.

SPEAKER_02 38:29

What did you learn about confidence as standing your ground as a local journalist?

SPEAKER_00 38:33

Oh my goodness me. Well, again, just what I've said. That I had that thrown at me loads of times when I had to say, I'm really sorry, I can't give you a copy of the article before we go to press. Yeah. I can tell you what's in it and the some of the angle I can no. I wasn't even allowed to give a read through.

SPEAKER_02 38:48

I wasn't allowed to give read throughs, but there were a couple of times where it was a more sensitive article and I would give them a read-through on the QT.

SPEAKER_00 38:54

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So you could do that without saying anything. But you'd say, Right, okay, so this is what I'm doing. I'm not telling you this, but and I did also do that. Because I did a lot of a lot of the stories where I did do news stories were very emotive. I was known as, you know, because I went to- You were the death knock queen, weren't you?

SPEAKER_02 39:12

I was. Do you want to explain what a death knock is for those who don't know?

SPEAKER_00 39:15

So a death knock is when you hear about somebody dying in either in terms it could be a it could be a murder, it could be an accident, and you go out and you speak to the relatives of the person that's dying.

SPEAKER_02 39:27

You literally turn up and you knock on the door. Yeah. And I do high on.

SPEAKER_00 39:31

And you know, when I say it, there's a lot of shame around that.

SPEAKER_02 39:34

I used to hate being sent on, don't you?

SPEAKER_00 39:36

I must have done I don't know, 30, 40 of them easily, I should think.

SPEAKER_02 39:42

Why did you end up being sent?

SPEAKER_00 39:46

I think I was the sort of person I wouldn't put a toe in the door. If somebody told me to, I'm gonna swear now, fuck off. And I only ever had that, I think I had that once, maybe twice in all the times I did them. Yeah, I would fuck off.

SPEAKER_03 39:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 39:58

Because if somebody turned up my door when I'd got had tra had tragedy in that way, I would tell them to fuck off. Yeah. It's a private moment, no thank you. So I think I was really good at reading the room, reading where somebody was.

SPEAKER_02 40:14

Nine times out of ten, you've got the story.

SPEAKER_00 40:16

And also I would spend a lot of time with them. So, you know, I had a few times when my news editor would say, Where's you know, it was Alison then. Where's Alison gone? Where's she gone? You know, is she not back yet? You know, because you you're on a deadline. But you know, how how are you gonna get that written up? You know, where are you? Because I'd be sitting with the person who I was interviewing and making them a cup of tea.

SPEAKER_02 40:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 40:39

And not to get the story just to make sure they were okay before I left.

SPEAKER_02 40:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 40:45

So, yeah, so I think my empathy, maybe, my openness, my ability to listen, and then to say to them, Are you okay if I use that? And very often I wouldn't. What I'd do is I'd go away, I'd have loads of notes, and then I'd go back, and then I would possibly I would sometimes that would happen on the death knock, I would then speak to the the family and say, Let me read through what I've written.

SPEAKER_02 41:08

Just to make sure you're comfortable with yourself. Which again broke the rules, but Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 41:12

But I did, and I went out on the lock them, and every time I walked up that path, knocked on the door, rang the doorbell, and waited. Sometimes there'd be a dog barking thing, I'm gonna get, you know, they're gonna send the dog after me. And I'd just I'd be pry actually praying, saying, Please be out, please be out, please be out, and then somebody turn up at the time.

SPEAKER_02 41:33

Otherwise you'll have to go back. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You'd have to go back and get back to the back of the back of the back.

SPEAKER_00 41:36

Yeah, but I might not be there at the time somebody else would get sent out to do it. But yeah, but I did, I was very s successful with them. That sounds awful because it sounds like I'm but that was my job. And if I didn't do that, I wouldn't have had a job.

SPEAKER_02 41:48

I think the other elements where confidence comes out, and also back then are values. Yeah. I remember doing spending a lot of time researching and digging, doing the investigative bit, yeah, in terms of things where it was obvious that some cash had passed passed behind backs in order to get, I don't know, some kind of planning approved, or there were things that were wrong that later impacted people. And I'd do an awful lot of digging, yeah, and I would ask the difficult questions.

SPEAKER_01 42:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 42:20

So that really taught me how to go and get the truth of a situation. Yeah. And the other thing it taught me again, in terms of standing my ground, because it was drilled into us so deeply that we must never misquote them, we almost always report fairly. Yeah. What would often some not often, but sometimes somebody would give you all the quotes, you'd have all the proof, they definitely said it, and then it would appear in print, and they would think, Oh shit, I shouldn't have said that.

SPEAKER_00 42:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 42:48

And they'd say, I've been misquoted.

SPEAKER_00 42:50

Yeah, but you could go back to you know to say, Well, actually, you you did say that.

SPEAKER_02 42:53

So whenever there was a complaint in the newsroom, it would always get past to me to handle the company. I didn't realise that was the go. And and the rest of the newsroom would go quiet because they were they were waiting for for the lines that when they knew I'd got them on the back foot, which would always start with all due respect.

SPEAKER_00 43:12

Uh yeah, me too. Whenever you knew there was somebody on the line that wasn't happy, done it.

SPEAKER_02 43:17

Oh, I didn't know I was going to be quoted. And the amount of times I said something along the lines of with all due respect, that was the quote. A reporter does not phone you up to talk about the weather. And nine times out of ten, they would apologise to me before they got off the phone.

SPEAKER_00 43:34

Yeah. That's funny, that certain phrases actually, weren't there? In the newsroom, when you heard that, that was the one.

SPEAKER_02 43:39

With all due respect, that was the one.

SPEAKER_00 43:41

And you thought, right, oh, we've got to listen in now. What's going to come out of this conversation? Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 43:48

I think interestingly, that's why I sometimes find myself getting so passionately caught up and feeling so feeling the levels of injustice that I often feel when. I can see that narratives are being twisted. Yeah. Online and off, particularly in the online community. And particularly in the online coaching space with the kind of guru cliques. Yeah. The amount of times that narratives are twisted and that people end up being demonised unfairly. And I think because of our background as investigative journalists, I will still sometimes go into research mode and I'll find all the previous posts and find all the previous articles and mentions.

SPEAKER_00 44:31

I'll take it as read just because it's out there, or indeed if it's in a particular newspaper, that's going to have a slant and angle, there's going to be an angle on that, and it's going to be portrayed in a certain way. If you go to another newspaper, you're going to get a very different version of that.

SPEAKER_02 44:44

And it's the same with history books, the way we're taught history. If you're passionate about a particular point in history, also take into account things like, well, what was the political situation at the time? Who were the ruling group? So if you think about going way back to something like, I don't know, late Bronze Age, Early Iron Age, if we think about something like Boudicca, the story we're told, of course, is that she poisoned herself. We'll never really know. No. Because the only teachings we have at the time come from Taphetus, who was very much on the Roman side of things, and you had a Roman-influenced reporting of what happened at the time. Yeah. So we've got to apply that in always, there's always been political sway, and in order to be balanced and to give ourselves properly informed opinions, we have to look at the entire situation, which is why when it gets onto politics, I don't give a rat's ass who you vote for, as long as number one, you do vote, because it does matter and it does count. Yeah. And number two, you have investigated the policies of every party you're considering voting for.

SPEAKER_01 45:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 45:53

Instead of just taking the spin from newspapers as read. Yeah. Because you have to look at the facts, and of course, they can go and change their policies, we know that. But you have to be factually informed as much as possible instead of just listening to news outlets that have political sway. Yeah, exactly. So it's like that guy who, I think he's from the TUC, I'm not sure, who every now and then goes out into Clacton and interviews people there about the policies, and they'll be saying things like, Well, how do you feel about zero-hour contracts? No, no, they're really bad, they're really bad. How do you feel about offshore tax havens so that people don't need to pay as much tax in the U. No, no, they're bad. And they're like, Well, who do you think is in favour of those things? How what do you think about the NHS should be privatised, shouldn't it? Oh no, no, we need to keep the NHS. Right, so who has voted in favour of or spoken out in favour of zero hour contracts, anti-NHS, and what was the other thing I said? Oh, off your tax havens. Yeah. You're your MP, no, you're Farage, and they go Farage, and they'll go, What? But I thought it was more for the people. But that's the trouble, isn't it? And I think that's and it will be the same from the other side.

SPEAKER_01 47:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 47:01

I think that's such a beautiful display to show that now particularly our attention spans are shorter, and human beings tend to just believe the sound bites they're given instead of doing their research. So whatever you're being told, whether it's something to do with a political party, whether it's something to do with some kind of frac ar there's a good line, online. That's a lovely spelling as well. It is. Be like a journalist and actually go and do your research. Be brave enough to read something that's that's written from a point of view that you wouldn't necessarily agree with. Read between the lines and try and find the truth before you form any opinion.

SPEAKER_00 47:44

That's what makes me laugh, though. You know, today one of the most popular phrases is The truth is, and yet But why? Why do we have to say that?

SPEAKER_02 47:55

It's just a way of embedding and telling people actually, well, the truth is I'm going to tell you the truth because it's just it's more bullshit. The second somebody says the truth is my red flags go up. Yeah. Danger world in me.

SPEAKER_00 48:08

My journalist in me is going, for goodness sake. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 48:11

Everybody carries spin, and you've got to get good at unpicking it.

SPEAKER_00 48:15

Yeah. So we've learned quite a lot from our journalistic days.

SPEAKER_02 48:18

We have, and it's been quite useful that we can take into business. Yeah, there's so much we could take into business there. And again, I think it's also about you know what, I was gonna start talking about individual stories, but I think we'll do it. I think it's for another day. In our future episodes, maybe at some point this season or next, we'll we're gonna go out on location to some of the stories that we worked on or that we broke. Yeah. Because we both worked on some big stories.

SPEAKER_01 48:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 48:43

So I worked on the Stephen Lawrence case, I worked on the creation of the Millennium Dome. You know, I never went to the Millennium Dome after it opened, but the amount of times I walked around that came by the time when it was in in production.

SPEAKER_00 48:57

And I've never been, so maybe we should go.

SPEAKER_02 48:59

And you know, you've worked on some really big stories as well, haven't you? Yeah, lots of yeah, murder trials and stuff. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so I think in future episodes we'll take you backstage into some of those actual cases we covered, or the ones we broke, and how we did that, and what we can learn from it today. So I hope you've got loads from today's episode. I hope this has been a good season started for you. I hope there's been lots of little gems that you can take into your own lives and businesses from this. Asher, anything you'd like to say? Well, we're gonna start doing something differently this series, won't we? But so at the end of every episode, one thing I've been thinking about this week is what would it be for you?

SPEAKER_00 49:36

Well, we're only on Sunday, Tad, so am I?

SPEAKER_02 49:39

So that gives us the week until the fourth previous Sunday, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_00 49:43

One thing, uh well, one thing I've been thinking about this week is about writing styles. We all got our unique styles, and my worry is that we can lose that if we depend on AI a bit too much. I think that's one of the things, but also the variety of writing styles, which I love, and this week has been a great example. I've had three or four different book clients that I'm working with, they've all got very distinct writing styles, all equally beautiful, but I've loved looking at those and seeing how you know descriptions of things that are in common with one another, so similar description, you know, but are so described so differently. And I love that. I love the different writing styles that are there. So what I would say to people mainly is that please don't rely on AI so you lose your writing style. And if you don't know what your writing style is yet, then I can help with that. So come and have a chat.

SPEAKER_02 50:33

But that's a really good thinking point.

SPEAKER_00 50:35

It is, it's a ri it's really important. We all have our unique writing styles, and that's the beauty of being able to share that in the world that we live in today, that we have all this tech behind us that can help us, but it never replaces us.

SPEAKER_02 50:47

Yeah. And one of the things I've been thinking about today, and it comes back to this thing about filling the silences, do not fall into somebody else's drama. If somebody, for whatever reason, has an issue with you and you can tell that it's far more of an issue than an ish me. Thank you to Fiona Scott and her to her kids for that one. If you've already responded politely and they're trying to give you the silent treatment, leave the gap. Do not be pulled into the thing where you have to start going back and back and back just to try and close the loop. Because I know, particularly for ADHDs, we hate loose ends, we hate the idea that somebody doesn't like us or that somebody's upset with us. But there have been a few situations where I've been coaching people through this and indeed dealing with it myself a little bit this past few weeks. So reply politely, reply succinctly, but do not be pulled into somebody else's drama and do not start filling the gap. If they want to leave a gap, if you've left the ball in their court, you've left the ball in their court. Don't climb over the wall and go pick that ball up.

SPEAKER_01 51:51

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 51:52

Okay, so hope that's been lots of food for thought. Until next time, we will see you next Tuesday. You've been listening to Awesomely Off Topic. If you've enjoyed this, hit follow and subscribe. And if you want more, come and find Autumnly Off Topic on social media. That's where all the extra bits live. Stay awesome, stay off topic, and we'll see you next time.