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Frazzle's big break

Writer's picture: Fraser AllenFraser Allen

Updated: Nov 1, 2024


More than 32 years ago, I landed my first media job. Based in central London, I was to be a trainee reporter on Convenience Store, ‘the fortnightly for neighbourhood retailers’. It was a genuinely thrilling and supportive introduction to the industry – and one that recently led me to reflect on the much tougher challenges faced by today's young media stars.

Email? The internet? Those were different times. During my 18 months on Convenience Store, we didn't even have computers. My time was either spent on the telephone interviewing the movers and shakers of the grocery world, or bashing away on a manual typewriter. When each story was finished, I passed my typed sheets to the production editor, and slammed a carbon copy down on the sharp metal spike mounted on my desk. Health and safety? It hadn't really caught on in 1988.


As well as interviewing and typing, I learnt how to trim galley copy, size pics and comprehend the dialect of Basildon-based typesetters. But if that sounds a little backwards, it didn’t feel like that at the time. The magazine publishing industry was far more confident and wealthy then – and my employers, William Reed Business Media, nurtured this fresh-faced tyro exceptionally well. As soon as I started, they paid for me to attend a foundation course at the London College of Printing, down at the Elephant & Castle. And after six months they gave me a company car and a Shell card, with the understanding that I could use the car for personal expeditions. I took them up on their offer. A little too enthusiastically perhaps. Anyone fancy Scotland at the weekend?


Pints of Brakspear

Then there was press day, which came around every second Friday. With the job usually done by noon, the Editor Tony Hurren would take us to The George on Borough High Street and buy us congratulatory drinks. A wonderful man, he would then return to the office to "man the fort" while the rest of us would spend the afternoon scooping pints of Brakspear and having a thoroughly hilarious time, usually at my (well-deserved) expense. We were often joined by colleagues from The Grocer, including the lovely Paul Gorman, who has gone on to establish a great career as an author and cultural commentator.


Nicknamed ‘Frazzle’, I was very much the junior member of the team, fondly lampooned for my clumsy performances for the company football team (captained by Paul) and my doe-eyed infatuation with Karine, a punk-haired French barmaid with a haughty manner and a magnificently shaped nose, who worked in the nearby Southwark Tavern.


But besides all the frivolity, what really stuck in my head was the way the team developed me as a journalist. Tony, Deputy Editor Jac Roper and Production Manager Pat Morgan were incredibly patient and encouraging. Rapidly, they turned me from a helpless fop spouting university essay-style features into a capable writer who could be entrusted with interviewing some big names in the retail sector – Spar annual conference in Majorca here I come, oh yeah!


Will Self & Karine's nose

It was a warm, supportive and laughter-filled environment. The author Will Self briefly worked in the room next door and allowed our bonhomie to crack his curmudgeonly facade from time to time. He even bought a cassette of me singing and playing songs on my guitar. The self penned collection was entitled Oops, My Leg Has Just Fallen Off; and the stand-out track was called Karine’s Nose. It was pretty much as bad as you would expect.


My only regret from those days was that I didn’t fully appreciate how lucky I was to be there. I naively assumed that all magazines were run the same way. It was a delusion that would swiftly be crushed when, after a fantastic stint working as a journalist in Istanbul, I returned –to London to join the now defunct Morgan-Grampian in Woolwich, which was a very different kettle of fish. I missed the environment at William Reed, I missed the people and I felt bad about the way I had rushed off to Turkey a little ungratefully.


Conversation & laughter

As a result, the memories of Tony, Jac and Pat stuck with me when, 13 years later, I set up White Light Media with my business partner Alan Lennon. We both wanted to run White Light in the same kind of spirit. We wanted to encourage our staff, and build a positive environment that enabled talent to blossom and voices to be heard. We wanted them to create great work, not work crazy hours. I also wanted conversation and laughter to punctuate the day, rather than a culture of ‘noses to the grindstone’. And most of all, I wanted to provide opportunities for young stars to develop their talent in the way that I had been able to at William Reed.


As we grew, we began providing students and graduates with internships – not of the ‘make the coffee and do some filing’ variety but proper paid-for work guided by one of the team. Having a steady stream of enthusiastic interns in the office was good for the atmosphere and created a valuable pipeline for discovering talent – several people who joined us as interns were then awarded full-time jobs, and have gone on to do great things.


I moved on from White Light in December 2019 and a lot has changed since then. We’re all operating in a very different environment, and remote working has made it harder to nurture young talent. And while marketing agencies will continue to be in demand, many projects in the publishing sector have gone the way of my old typewriter and been chucked in a skip.


Yet when I feel jaded, I sometimes think back to 1988. Karine might have got my head in a spin but it was nothing to the warm glow I experienced when Tony Hurren would occasionally stride out of his office with my copy in his hand shouting: "Brilliant, Frazzle, brilliant."


Let’s hope that, as we embrace the so-called 'new normal' there will be a concerted effort to create similar opportunities for young people across the creative sectors. It’s not so much a case of them needing us – we need them.


Posing with a Convenience Store colleague for a story about fluffy PRs and impressionable young journalists


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