"A Nose for News"

Night News Editor of the Daily Star explains just what it takes to become a successful reporter.
You “must be able to sort the wheat from the chaff, you have to know that the snippet of conversation you overheard is newsworthy and be able to turn it into a story”.

Tom Savage began his career as a journalist at City University in London, where he earned a BA in Journalism.
By 2000 he was writing and editing for an advice Website on weekdays and sub-editing for the Sunday Times Sports section on Saturday’s.

After three years Tom joined the Daily Express trainee scheme and on day one, was lent to the Daily Star “for an initial three months, and never left”.

The thirty-one-year-old has learned that contacts are the key to becoming a good reporter “-lots of them- and ones who will talk to you. Just having their phone numbers isn’t enough”.
He believes that a good reporter is also “accurate in what they write and tenacious enough to be able to stick to their guns even when the whole world is telling them that they’re wrong.”

Speaking to a variety of people on a daily basis, communication skills are a must have quality for any reporter, the ability to talk easily “to the Prime Minister one day and to a single mum on a council estate the next”.

Having faced many challenges in his career, Tom has needed a thick skin; there is “no point doing the job if you take offence when people want to rip you to shreds”.
There are also times when he has had to leave his morals “at the door”, especially on tabloids, where the subject matter may “not always be palatable”. Tom’s development from student to professional news reporter has given him a number of journalistic qualities and having been at the Daily Star for five years he remains content in the job that has earned him around £35,000 a year.

It's funny, the things you remember"

Standing in his mother's flower trough, three year-old Ken Dennis posed for a photograph before his Aunt was due to leave a life in Middlesex, for a future in America.

The retired journalist, now 79 recalls his earliest memory and expresses his growth from flower trough to Fleet Street.
Stepping out of the photograph and into the ink, Press Association was where Ken Dennis took his first steps into the career that would mark a future of challenges and memorable experiences.

Now pointing the camera in the other direction, Ken could not have imagined the little boy that he was could become, one of the first men allowed to explore the nuclear explosion in Chernobyl, Russia in 1986.

The Financial Times and the Daily Mail are just two newspapers that Ken has worked for throughout his years as a journalist: photographs continuing to capture memorable events in both his life and others.

The protesting young boy, who found little satisfaction in posing in a flower trough, has certainly experienced more peculiar surroundings in life as a journalist. Instead of objecting he has come to embrace them.

Ken’s life has prospered throughout and a transformation has been made from the cheeky three year-old that he remembers to a man of wise words and immense character.

Taking pleasure in his retirement, Ken Dennis has had the chance to reflect on his past, now placing the photographs in their frames. Swapping print in the newspaper for prints in the sand and the walk up Fleet Street for strolls up the beach.