AddThis SmartLayers

Journalist leaves daily for PR role after 40 years

A journalist who has worked on the same daily paper for 40 years is leaving to take up a new role in PR.

Jacqui Morley, 57, began her newspaper career as a junior reporter on the Blackpool Gazette in 1974 and has worked under 10 editors over the last four decades.

She is currently the daily’s chief feature writer but is moving into a PR role where she will be providing press releases and media training for charities, start up businesses and other organisations.

Recalling her early newsroom experiences, Jacqui remembers questioning if she should come into the office for her first day on a bank holiday Monday.

“The legend that was Len Whiteside barked a laugh. ‘Bank holiday, bud? Does news take a bank holiday? Does news sleep?’. He was still chuckling, in a deeply unsettling manner when he slammed the phone down,” she told HTFP.

“I’ve had four decades of news editors chuckling in deeply unsettling manners – all cut from the same cloth. If anything the job is tougher today than it ever was back in the broadsheet multi edition days – because there  are far fewer  reporters fulfilling far more roles… we now wear enough hats (researchers, headline writers, photographers, video shooters, tweeters) to open a milliners.

Jacqui gets to grips with Mr Blobby in the 1990s

“Blackpool is a great news beat – high in social deprivation, low on central Government support, but with a sense of fun and fighting spirit and a heritage and an energy which never fails to inspire.

“The job has helped me spread the word about good news and bad and given me the sort of perspective on people that only journalists acquire.”

Jacqui says she will miss working at the Gazette but has plenty of memories from the last four decades.

“The memories are there – Iceland by trawler, Falklands by Hercules, wearing a burka for five days over Ramadan and having my view of the world changed for all time, interviewing Thatcher, Foot, Brown, Kinnock and more, taking Alfred Gregory, one of the heroes who conquered Everest, on the Avalanche at the Pleasure Beach, taking the helm of a lifeboat and so on,” she added.

Jacqui, pictured in the Falklands, a year after the war.

“I’ve been a news reporter, consumer writer, feature writer, now chief feature writer, have written about travel, reviewed food, including as Good Food Guide inspector, and written the weekly labour of love, the weekly wine column, for years having realised I could bluff my way through a bottle with the best of ’em.”

She will continue her blog about wine at www.janarchypr.blogspot.com but her priority will be her new role in PR and more information can be found at www.janarchy.co.uk.

Jacqui is the second long-serving Blackpool Gazette journalist to leave in the last week after Craig Fleming also announced his retirement as reported by HTFP.