Linda Harrison celebrates her home city, a centre of commerce since Viking days


walks led through the city under cover of darkness. And then there are the cosy pubs. At this point I should confess that I am a little biased – York


is my home city. But I’m not the only journalist who loves it. Freelance Mandy Appleyard writes for national newspapers


and magazines, including the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, Red and Grazia. “York is a wonderful place to live and work,” she says. “It’s a small and manageable city, fairly central in terms of getting to anywhere I need to go, and I can be in London on the train direct in two hours, which makes it easy to be there on the occasions when I have to be. “I have worked as a freelance for many years, the last four from here, mostly for national newspapers and magazines, and happily the fact that I am in York is generally no hindrance to my career.” Newsquest is the biggest newspaper


employer in York, publishing the city’s daily newspaper The Press. Like most local papers, The Press (which was previously called the Yorkshire Evening Press) has suffered editorial redundancies in recent years. Other Newsquest titles include The Press’ sister paper, the Gazette & Herald, a weekly covering the nearby rural area of Ryedale, free monthly


lifestyle magazine Yorkshire Living and the York & Selby Star. The BBC’s Radio York studios are also in the city while the


main commercial radio station is Minster FM. York generates plenty of news and one of the biggest recent


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f York were a person, she’d be beautiful, busy, friendly and very northern. York is a spectacular place to live, full of history – from the medieval city walls you can still stroll around to the towering spires of


York Minister. But these are pretty young additions in terms of the city’s history. You need to dig deeper below the cobbled streets for the really old stuff. The Vikings left plenty of evidence of their lives in York (then known as Jorvik) – some of which was unearthed a few decades ago and is today on show at the city’s Jorvik Viking Centre. And the remains of a Roman fortress can be viewed at the Minster. It’s beautiful to walk along the banks of the River Ouse in summer but it’s winter when York really comes into its own, with its atmospheric streets whited over and the many ghost


events was the Tour de France, which passed through the city last year. Thousands of people lined the streets to cheer on the riders. “There was a real buzz around York – and the rest of


Yorkshire – around the Tour de France,” says Victoria Prest, political reporter at The Press. “After writing about it from the very first announcement that Yorkshire had won the bid in 2012, covering the race day was definitely one of my favourite ever jobs.” A number of local magazines and websites also operate in the city. Your Local Link Media Group, which is based in nearby Haxby, publishes free local magazines Your Local Link and What’s On, a guide to what’s happening in the city. It also creates the Best Pages magazine for East Yorkshire and the Yorkshire coast plus the Scarborough Review newspaper.


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