Meet the team: Our Wigan news reporter Gaynor Clarke

I first stepped into the newsroom when I was 14. I was a pupil at Lowton High School and I had a work experience placement at the Leigh Reporter, which was based on Railway Road. I was completely bitten by the news bug.

After that, I was determined to make my dream come true. After GCSEs and A-levels, I did a journalism degree at the University of Sheffield and spent my holidays on work experience placements. I learned as much as I could about finding information, carrying out interviews and turning all of that into stories that people would want to read. I couldn’t believe it when I wrote a story that made it onto the front page of a newspaper.

My hard work paid off and after graduating, I quickly secured some freelance work which turned into a full-time post as a trainee reporter. Every day I got to speak to people, listen to what they had to say and share what mattered to them. I was able to hold the people in power to account, report from court cases bringing people to justice and help charities to make a difference. I loved it.

I have covered so many different stories since then, from court cases that made news around the world and visits by Prime Ministers and celebrities, to the human interest stories and council decisions affecting people in our town.

More than 15 years later, so many things have changed in journalism but it’s still the job I love. We literally had to knock on a lot more doors back then to get the information we needed, as many people didn’t yet have mobile phones and certainly weren’t just a few clicks away on social media. We had to phone our stories over to the office to meet deadlines, as we couldn’t email them from wherever we were. Readers couldn’t wait to pick up the newspaper to find out what was happening in their town, as it wasn’t widely available to read on the internet.

A lot of things are still the same though. It’s still so important that people know what is happening around them, whether it’s a generous act by a volunteer who has made a real difference or questions about local authority spending. News articles provide a massive boost for businesses, charities and other organisations who want local people to know what they’re doing. Proud parents still love to see their children in the paper and grieving relatives are heartened by a moving tribute in our pages.

Journalists may sometimes have a bad reputation, but reporters from local newspapers are here day in, day out to find out what’s going on and make sure people know about it. Many people take the news for granted and in some ways it’s understandable, when it’s always so readily available, but our lives would be so different if journalists around the country and further afield didn’t keep us informed.

We need your support to allow us to keep doing this though. Please buy our newspapers and subscribe to our website so we can continue to make sure you know about everything that matters in Wigan.

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