A former BBC Radio Scotland news producer who is the immediate past president of the National Union of Journalists is today covering the Trades Union Congress as one half of a new, trade union news reporting service.

Pete Murray left BBC Scotland a month ago to set up union-news.co.uk, with Tim Lezard, a fellow NUJ activist, also a former NUJ president, and a freelance writer.

The website has been funded by several trade unions, plus other donors. It will be also submitting stories, on a freelance basis, to other media outlets. 

Says Lezard: “There’s so much more to trade unions than strikes, and our coverage will reflect that. We’ll be reporting on issues and campaigns both inside and outside of the workplace. We are the active voice for trade unionists.”

Adds Murray, who will be working freelance in addition to working on union-news: “We’re both long-time union activists as well as journalists and that experience will inform all our reporting. We'll apply a maxim of 'investigate, collaborate, agitate' and we hope our work will help build on the wave of activism in the UK as well as simply report on it.”

Murray took a redundancy package from BBC Scotland, where he had been "on and off" since 1993.