first person


StartingOut


Helen Nugent left The Times for a new life in Manchester and set up cultural website Northern Soul


I


never intended to set up a website.


When I left The Times in 2010 after a decade


at Wapping, I was tired of London and tired of life as a reporter. Morale was at an all-time low at the paper of record; many of the more experienced journalists had left and low staffing levels meant I was juggling night shifts, day shifts and Sunday shifts at an increasingly frenetic pace. I was exhausted.


I moved back to Manchester and slept for a month. While I missed the buzz of the newsroom and the thrill of a breaking story, I shed no tears for the myriad of online deadlines, which meant I barely left the office. I was glad to leave the constant Press Association rewrites behind and happy to say goodbye to an increasingly toxic office environment where investigative journalism was deemed too expensive and unwarranted sackings were a weekly occurrence.


There were moments when I thought: what on earth have I done? I’d walked away from a staff job at the most famous newspaper in the world and I’d done this during a period of unprecedented upheaval in journalism. Was I mad? I reminded myself that I’d only stayed for the final year because of what it said on my business card, not because I was in love with the job or the product. So, what now? My initial plan was to freelance for the nationals as a regional reporter and pitch business stories to papers and magazines (I’d spent the first six years of my career as a financial writer). I found regular


20 | theJournalist


work with The Guardian and The Mail on Sunday and also with the Yorkshire Post. Then there was the BBC. MediaCityUK was freshly minted and there was employment to be had as a broadcast journalist, both on and off air. Everything was going swimmingly. But change was afoot. Newspaper budgets were under intense pressure and the type of so-called “quirky” stories I’d been pitching successfully were no longer gaining traction. Articles about crime and despair – great. Pieces about enterprise and creative endeavour – no thanks. In some ways, it was depressingly familiar. Part of the reason I’d left London and home news was to escape stories of death and destruction. Years of tramping the streets, following trails of blood and bothering bereaved families had done little for my mental equilibrium. I hadn’t moved more than 200 miles north to do the same.


T


hen I remembered a tatty yellow Post-It note buried beneath notebooks and press releases on my desk


at home. It read: “Do blog called Northern Soul.” This was an idea I’d been kicking around during my last few months in London. If I’m honest, I was dubious about the virtues of blogging, and I’d been away from the north for nearly 15 years. But I was keen to write about the things I’d always loved doing in my spare time (going to the theatre, reading books, watching films, visiting museums) and a blog seemed like a good way to achieve this. There were a few teething problems. I had no concept of how to set up a


website, few contacts in the arts and absolutely no idea if there was an audience for high-quality, long(ish) form journalism about northern culture and initiative.


T


his was back in April 2013. At the start, it was just me and my amazing IT guy, Simon Belt. I persuaded a


handful of journo friends into writing for the site with the promise of press tickets and went from there. The past few years have consisted of 15-hour days, seven days a week, all the while trying to keep my financial head above water with freelance work.


“ ”


Since the launch, readership has soared by more than 400 per cent. We are read across the world


Now Northern Soul is coming up to its third birthday. I have more than 60 contributors including, among others, a deputy editor, head photographer, Liverpool correspondent, north east correspondent, comedy editor, poetry correspondent and US correspondent. Since the launch, readership has soared by more than 400 per cent. We are read across the world, gain Twitter followers every day and our Facebook engagement has never been more active. In addition, I have recently appointed a sales and marketing manager who is in charge of monetising the site, and there are plans to launch a poetry prize. I began life as a digital editor by making it up as I went along. That’s pretty much still what I’m doing in 2016. Happily, it seems to be working.


@nugehelen @Northern_Soul_


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