Freelance Pod

This episode's guest is ex-BBC journalist turned social media trainer and content strategist Sue Llewellyn of Ultra Social! 

Sue takes us on a whirlwind tour of how social media has changed work, and the world! Covering everything from training the England football team to use social, to making risky red carpet broadcast decisions, Sue's tales from her career are hilarious, and also completely on theme for the podcast - she's personally seen how the internet has totally transformed journalism.

It's International Women's Day 2019, and so I decided to celebrate all the amazing female guests who've been on the pod, plus tease you with a few voices from upcoming episodes.

Enjoy!

Anna Codrea-Rado is the author of the free First Aid for Freelancers e-book, The Professional Freelancer weekly newsletter and she's the brains behind the huge #FairPayForFreelancers campaign. In a climate where editorial jobs are less safe than ever, Anna has done a lot of work to help other freelancers feel equipped to deal with embarking on a different career path, and also to feel part of a community.

Isabelle Roughol is senior editor-at-large at LinkedIn. She joined the company in 2012 and built a global news team working in seven languages across Europe, Latin America, Asia and Australia. We talk about working in newspapers; what it takes to set up an international editorial team; and how us freelancers can use our LinkedIn profiles to tell the most compelling story of our unique careers.

"Just over 50% of journalists said they were 'overwhelmed' by information during their working day and wanted to 'explore solutions' to make it more manageable."

That's the headline finding from John Crowley's survey on digital journalism and burnout, for the European Journalism Centre's News Impact Network. 

John's now a freelance digital journalist and consultant, but his career began 20 years ago, as an editorial assistant on The Irish Post newspaper in London.

Graffiti artist in the 90s, now a street artist in the teenies, David Speed has just scored a major podcasting victory with his with his co-presenter Adam Brazier: Creative Rebels has been out for a month, and already shot to No.1 in Apple Podcasts' Business chart, and they're chilling out in New & Noteworthy, the best place for a podcast to get discovered.

Find the Creative Rebels podcast here: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/creative-rebels/id1448695774?mt=2

Digital strategist & journalist Laura Oliver (https://twitter.com/LauraOliver) is currently acting Head of Audience Growth at Vogue International, and was Head of Social and Community at The Guardian, until she went freelance two years ago, following voluntary redundancy.

Freelancing wasn't the plan after leaving The Guardian - Laura says she kind of fell into it - but once she'd made the decision, she made use of LinkedIn to get work, and she goes into detail on the episode on how she did that.

Producer Leona Fensome (https://twitter.com/leonafenzo) guests on the podcast to tell us about working on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour.

Leona gives us the inside track on working with Jane Garvey, how ticking a few diversity boxes as a journalist can work to your advantage and, of course, about the story she can't forget.

British freelance journalist Jennifer O'Mahony (Twitter: https://twitter.com/jaomahony) is now based in West Africa - mostly in Dakar, Senegal - and her job would be much harder without Whatsapp. However, it was a very different situation in the last place she reported from, Hong Kong.

On this episode, Jennifer talks us through the tech a foreign reporter needs these days to get the job done, and how this varies wildly from country to country.

I sat down with Charlie Brooker this week to profile him for New Statesman. The piece is called 'Black Mirror’s Charlie Brooker on using Bandersnatch for politics: “That’s the fantasy, isn’t it?”'

We talked about Bandersnatch, 80s music, how much his kids love the Alexa and Black Mirror Season 5. Well, I tried to get him to talk about the last one, and he did a good job of, well, you listen for yourself. Netflix have nothing to be concerned about, let me tell you.