Tales of a Backwater Journalist

Tales of a Backwater Journalist

£18.00

Fiona Scott never thought she’d lose her dream job in television. Since childhood, she’d been writing and telling stories. She was a born journalist, naturally nosey and genuinely interested in people. From a working-class background, she stumbled through A levels, fell into a degree in English & History and then trained to be a teacher – and hated it. She finally made it on to a traineeship with a local newspaper.

A career in print journalism followed, alongside volunteering for Hospital Radio and within local tv until she became a researcher in regional television at the age of 29. Her dream job had arrived, she loved it and she never wanted it to end. She went from researcher to series producers and made 100s of tv programmes in regional current affairs based in the Southwest. The team she worked with won multiple awards over the years.

Imagine her horror when in 2008, her employer, ITV, decided to cut 1,000 jobs across the UK leaving only a handful of opportunities left, including the job she was already doing. Everyone had to apply for the few jobs left and Fiona applied for her own job and didn’t get it. She was deemed not good enough. Her professional world simply fell apart in a moment.

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Description

Teenager Fiona Bune was walking through her home town of Radstock in Somerset when she saw a tv camera crew filming in the middle of the street. As she watched and listened, creeping as close as she could, she realised they were recording a story about the closure of the railway line in this former coal mining community. It was then she had a quiet epiphany.  

This was what she wanted to do with her life. Not to be a secretary or a nurse as the careers adviser at school had suggested.  

She wanted to be that journalist, the person who finds and tells the story, sheds the light allowing others to have their moment in the sun, shines the light to expose those who thrive in darkness.   

She went home and told her mum she wanted to be a reporter. Mum said that was a ridiculous thought, she was far too sensitive and it would never work for her.  

Being a sensitive teenager, Fiona believed that and set off on a path of trying to be a teacher. Teaching was a safe and secure role of the future, enabling her to study and teach her favourite subject English Literature and Language. A future of more than 40 years framed by school buildings and structures. The safety of rules, processes and predictability.  

Fiona began her journey to that utopia by becoming the first person in her working class family to go into higher education taking a degree in English & History at Bath Spa University (then Bath College of Higher Education). She then went on to do a post graduate in secondary school teaching at the University of Bath – a year that she hated with a passion from the first day. This Somerset teenager lost the plot.  

Throwing caution to the wind, Fiona dismantled her carefully laid life plans and her world imploded. She threw aside teaching, finished with her fiance, cancelled her wedding and struck out to find a job as a journalist. She gave up everything to step into the unknown.  

This book shares some of that unknown, the failures and the successes in her professional and  private life which were all intertwined. It shares some of the incredible stories she found and told along the way and those stories which became part of her own DNA. She’s still telling stories today.. 

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