Eight times award-winning Guardian journalist Paul Lewis, most famous for breaking the Ian Tomlinson story, spoke about what it takes to be a journalist and said he felt sorry for the family of Ian Tomlinson, who was killed during the 2009 G-20 Protest.
He explained that the story was more important than winning awards, "Award ceremonies are tedious events, it’s all a bit of a lottery and people turn up with silly black ties, they’re not that enjoyable as evenings go, it’s the stories that matter the most."
Paul won Best Use of Citizen Journalism award in 2010 and his latest award was for Best Twitter Feed during the riots last year. His outstanding work has been recognised almost every year and he won Journalist of the Year Award in 2011.
His view on journalism as a career is:
"It can be fun, bad, entertaining and it can also be boring, so all of those. It depends what your job in journalism is and who you are working for. Journalism has got worse, less entertaining, boring and less fun. People have less time to work on news stories. Thankfully, I don’t fall into this category.
"The Guardian doesn’t do too much of this but often lots of journalists find themselves very quickly turning around stories because we have less money in the industry and therefore we spend less time working on stories. Therefore people find themselves stuck behind a desk rewriting stories and press releases."
Paul’s great journalistic career started when he applied for a traineeship for young journalists seven years ago at The Guardian. He is now the special projects editor for The Guardian.
Paul lectures across Europe about the use of social media in journalism and teaches a master class in investigative reporting; in 2009 he received Bevin’s Prize for Outstanding Investigative Journalism.
Paul realised he wanted to become a journalist in his early twenties, he studied social and political science, and sociology at Cambridge university. After finishing university he decided to pursue a career in journalism. He was born and raised in Byfleet, Surrey.
Paul’s advice to a young journalist or someone who wants to pursue a career in journalism is "to get out there and freelance, we live in an era where people can easily get hold of a computer so self publishing is a good way to start as well".
The full audio interview with Paul Lewis will be featured at the FREEDOM exhibition, from 9 to 30 August 2012 at the Art Against Knives gallery in BOXPARK, Shoreditch.
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