09/03/2007

A substitute on the touchline stubs out his cigarette and pulls the collar of his shirt up. It's 10am on Hackney Marshes and the driving rain is in full force (yes, we've been doing colour writing for the past three weeks), but I was there to write a match report and feature to mark the 60th anniversary of the Hackney and Leyton league, the original grassroots of football.

Despite the abysmal weather and the cross-London trek, I had so much fun, quite literally, out in the field.

I don't have dreams of being a sports journalist as I don't have a wide enough sporting knowledge and penning the report avoiding footballing clichés was exhausting. But in local paper terms, the stories to write are obvious and I found managers, players and officials ready and willing to talk to me. I guess being a good sports writer is all about finding the less obvious scoops, though I did find a decent NIB about a midget-tossing league starting up in the borough.

Producing our short Hackney papers has taken up all week. As I was recruited by the sports team, though, and therefore had to work part of the weekend, most of my role was done and dusted. My sports editor was really on top of things, setting reasonable deadlines and gently chivvying us along. The production teams were understandably sweating a little more and the final pages came off two minutes before deadline. Having worked from home most of the week, I felt guilty swanning in on press day, red pen in hand, cutting out commas and changing intros. Most of our team had, however, by this stage got past being precious about copy.

Next week, I have nominated myself to be part of the subbing and production team. Slightly masochistic, as my layout skills aren't great, but I thought it would be good for me, character building. I'm a stickler for spelling and grammar but my relationship with Quark (described as a 'working knowledge' on my CV) could do with some work. Practice will make perfect – I may try
things out with some dummy copy, before the stories start flooding in.

Our deadline is Thursday 3.30pm so the earliest stories will be coming in on Tuesday. This will be the quietest time so I'd like to get some pages completely perfect before the in-folder starts to overflow. We've got a lot to live up to: this week's edition looked fantastic, a vision a local
paper might look like uninterrupted by advertising. There was even an online version! I make no promises, except that I will be putting in some late nights next week.

Laura x


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