What Makes A Good Reporter?

Owen Jones, Head of Content at the North Devon Journal explained why determination and perseverance makes a good reporter.

“A good reporter needs to be able to talk to people and empathise with them, to be able to see both sides of an argument and report them fairly and accurately” he continues.

Owen, 44, has been working as a journalist for 26 years, since he finished his A-Levels.

His first job was on his local paper, the Exmouth Journal, and he has since worked on the Plymouth Herald, the Gloucestershire Echo, and the Essex Chronicle.

Although he has had a successful career so far, he admits that shorthand held him back at the beginning.

“I had enormous trouble learning shorthand and difficulty reaching the 100 words per minute, so I’d advise to keep on practising those outlines!”

Owen admits that working on bigger publications were fun, but he currently enjoys his role as Head of Content.

“I’ve worked on bigger titles and they are great fun too – but a good story is a good story wherever you are working.”

Starting as an assistant editor at the North Devon Journal, Owen worked his way up through the paper to the position of production editor, and then to his current position.

Owen is currently living in Chapelton in North Devon, where he continues to work on Journal.

In My Day....(Jean Steven's Earliest Memory)

Jean Stevens, a Christchurch resident, talks about the day her favourite doll suffered a horrific head transplant.

Jean, aged 84, can still remember the day she got her very first doll’s pram for her 3^rd birthday. She smiles in the afternoon sunshine as she tells me about it. “It was brown, and of course very old fashioned, as they were in those days” she laughs.

Although she had many dolls, Jean explained that it was her favourite one that got the most rides in the beautiful new pram.

Unfortunately, tragedy struck one day when the doll’s china face broke. “Luckily in those days we had doll menders,” Jean tells me, “So my mother and I took it to be repaired”.

The next two weeks were an anxious wait, but when the time finally came to collect her favourite doll, there was a horrible surprise in store for Jean.

The doll maker had not been able to replace the china face, and had done so instead with a paper-mache type material. “I cried and cried when I saw it” Jean recounts, but told me she eventually warmed to the doll again.

She still took her doll for many walks in the beautiful new pram. “We walked a lot in those days” Jean added. “Most people didn’t have cars.”

Jean, who worked in London as a Private Secretary for 40 years, moved to Christchurch with her second husband, James Stevens. She is now sadly widowed, but enjoys her afternoons sitting in the sunshine in Bournemouth.