Girls Know Nothing - S2 Ep25: Catriona Innes | Cosmopolitan, Playboy Bunnies & Award Winning Journalism

Episode Date: July 26, 2023

GKN is a female-focused podcast hosted by  @SharonNJGaffka GKN Social Channels: Https://linktr.ee/girlsknownothing  Instagram: @girlsknownothingpod  Tiktok: @girlsknownothingpod TikTok: @girlsknownothing

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Valid through 618. While supplies last. Selection varies by location. They had one where there was a guy who was still carrying the fish that he'd bought for his wife's dinner on the way home. Hi, I'm Richard Karn. And you may have seen me on TV talking about the world's number one expandable garden hose. Well, the brand new Pocket Hose Copperhead with Pocket Pivot is here, and it's a total game changer. Old-fashioned hoses get kinks and creases at the spigot,

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kat is cosmopolitan uk's a multiple award-winning commissioning editor who has won bsme awards for both her long-form investigative journalist pieces, as well as for leading the Cosmopolitan Features Department. Alongside commissioning and editing the features section, both online and in print, Kat also regularly writes her own hard-hitting investigations, spending months researching some of the most pressing issues affecting young women today. She has spent time with undercover specialist police forces,

domestic abuse social workers, and even playboy bunnies to create articles that take readers to the heart of the story. Kat is also a published writer, poet, and volunteers with a number of organizations that directly help the homeless in London. When she's not in the Cosmopolitan office, you can find her challenging her weak ankles in towering heels through the streets of Soho. So welcome to the studio, Kat. If you'd asked 14-year-old me what I wanted to do, it would basically be your job now. So I want to know how you got into it because I didn't know anyone that did it.

So I'd never had anyone to ask how they did it. Well, that was the same. I grew up in kind of late 90s, early noughties and magazines were just my world. They were like my dream. I was obsessed with them. And then my mum was a feminist writer. She was kind of, she worked in newspapers and was kind of a little bit like down on magazines,

whereas I was very much like, you know, women's magazines, it's working in the media produced by women, and I just set my sights on it. I was like, and it was really hard because I'm from Edinburgh. Obviously, everything is down in London I studied journalism at Sheffield I used to even make like wee magazines for my friends like cut things out and gift them and like I was really focused I'd even go and like this is so sad I'd go and stand outside the cosmopolitan offices and cry because I wanted to work there like does that work badly no no it does not because I might try after we leave like

I got my job today um but breaking into it was really really difficult it was really hard um I worked for a hair magazine it's kind of the first the first job I could get most magazines it's not like this anymore but most magazines like Cosmo and Glamour I would expect you to have done a year's worth of unpaid work experience oh wow to even get in the door I that was completely unavailable to me so I eventually got this job in like a really outskirts of London hair magazine and just tried to talk to everyone I could it took about five years of working there and Weight Watchers magazine.

So kind of quite unglamorous titles to make it into magazines. I forgot that Weight Watchers even had a magazine until just then. But like, what was the biggest challenge of trying to get into working with like Cosmo? It was just probably the fact that they saw brands like Weight Watchers

and sound business is not kind of, and also the sheer number of people applying. It's not necessarily that like that's a bad thing they just they saw my experience it's not related to them so it would you'd have 100 to 150 people applying for a job um each time so essentially yeah that was the biggest thing to break into and break through and eventually I got after just talking to as many people as possible I got given one week's worth of holiday cover at look magazine which was a fashion weekly and I quit my job for one week's cover um but then once I was in the door I just was like I'm really good at this like um and tried to show that's a really big risk to like

quit your job oh my god i was terrified yeah i would i'm like terrified thinking about it like i'd be sweating yeah you would have to like you would have to put your all into it though if you knew you put so much on the line and i just knew i wanted it so badly so i was willing to do anything for it glue yourself like a mini protest yeah but like is it is competitive now like do you still get 100 150 will apply for a job it's not I wouldn't say it's as competitive now I think the industry has become a lot more accessible in terms of particularly at Hurston and Cosmo in terms of trying to make it more fair so we don't do the kind of year worth internships and things there's

also so many other things you can do there's so much freelancing you can do so it's not as competitive but probably still is as yeah it's kind of like one of those things that you always have if you know somebody they like can guide you and make it slightly easier because it's seen as intimidating as well magazines like I remember I was so scared I thought everyone was going to be like just full of bitches and horrible people and I just couldn't even imagine being in the corridors and then slowly you get to know people and particularly in features journalism everyone's just lovely and they're just interested in women's issues and I think well features journalism is really different to what you used to do with investigative journalism right like well like feature journalism it kind of encompasses so

much which is like obviously it's so different so Weight Watchers was really different because that was just interviewing it taught me so much skills though like I was I didn't realize at the time but talking to women who have gained weight for whatever reason they've gained weight um and they're wanting to lose it and they've always got a really interesting backstory and those are really sensitive topics that you have to kind of speak to them about so I learned quite a lot of really good kind of yeah interview skills from that that I could then transfer into my current job which is looking after all the long reads and things at Cosmo so so when you were like when you were doing more investigative journalism stuff like I've seen you've did so many really interesting pieces and I was talking to you about how you did a piece with Playboy yeah and I was like I want to know

everything about it like because that must have been such a wild experience to just be like let loose in the bunny house yeah so it was um it was basically it was around the time that I mean obviously there's so much more body positivity now but it was kind of when it was really breaking onto the scene and it was like let's try and test this and kind of the place that's had the most high beauty standards as historic historic historic how can I not speak high beauty standards and I'm a size 16 to 18 so we thought let's get me out on the floor and working in the casino so I was trained in how to do the cards I was trained in how to make the cocktails I was trained in I was given a costume specifically made for me

um and yeah I worked out there I worked in the club for like two days with all the bunnies who were just the nicest girls ever so like some of the things you were telling me about um that you had to learn to be able to like wear the costume and stuff like actually blew my mind it sounds really painful so the yeah you have to learn how to breathe from your chest only basically because you're so constricted because i was worried about what my body would look like yeah um but they just they this seamstress just creates the body for you with this corset it's so tight that yeah like everything kind of spills out the back so you have to wear your hair long um you have to breathe from your chest because you cannot really breathe from your

stomach you're you when i took the course off i had welts all up and down me i've got all these photos of just me it's like all hanging out with all these welts in um and you have to walk so straight you can't you cannot i mean they have this thing where they say bunnies don't sit and that's because bunnies can't sit so even to serve a drink you have to learn it's this thing called the bunny dip which is kind of like a squat you kind of squat and then you serve like that and And then you slowly move your hand back. What I thought was going to be the bunny house is so different to reality.

Because in the films, it looks so glamorous. Yeah, I know. You've just come in because this is the London casino. So it's, and it's so funny because you think, you go in and you kind of feel like you've stepped back in time because you've seen this beautiful woman in the bunny costumes and everything. And it's just all these gamblers not even looking up from their game just like completely they do not care i'd be like look at me this hurts because i thought

oh it's going to be someone's going to comment maybe someone might say like you're not as slim as the other bunnies like no there was loads of diversity on the bunny floor and the the people just didn't care that's really interesting because I thought it'd be the complete opposite yeah I thought there'd be a lot of like um I mean they're very well looked after there'd be a lot of sexual harassment etc but it was just quite a nice atmosphere with lots of lovely women so I didn't really manage to uncover much but I mean we were briefly talking as well when you were saying that when they were off like shift or walked away they would just sit they'd undo their courses and sit and I was liking it to how it is when you do beauty pageant now I'd unclip my bikini top and eat pringles yeah exactly it was just like like quickly getting the snacks in yeah like it always looks really

glamorous on the front but if you go to the backstage it's just not yeah um but you've done some really like I would call them quite scary investigative journalism pieces um and I want to know like what was like the biggest challenge of even going into some of these places so I mean because I'd say the biggest chat so the two biggest challenges I've done uh is one this one I was kind of more protected I mean you're protected entirely anyway you rarely go into kind of more protected i mean you're protected entirely anyway you rarely go into kind of like an undercover assignment without some sort of care beforehand without someone there kind of looking after you behind the scenes i've done that for other journalists i've got other journalists who do it for me or you're working

with a charity who are kind of aware of you and really looking out for you but uh i did one with i was with the police uh who are called the group police but they're the tfl transport police whose job it is is to catch gropers in the london underground and essentially they have to catch them in the act so i spent a shift with them and that is it has to be during a rush hour because that is when unfortunately the gropers really really take advantage because they're trying to it's kind of like a specific breed of sexual predator where they're really trying to zone in and the fact that they're going to be really packed in on women and the women aren't going to want to speak out or might be embarrassed or might not even think that what they're feeling

bumped into yeah they might just think i mean i've i've had i've lived in capital cities all my life it's happened to me and you're kind of like, is that? Or is it an umbrella? Is it? And they capitalize on that. So the police force that I did that with, that was during the underground, they're amazing. They're like, they've got incredible eyes for photographic memory. So they're looking out for people, but they're also looking out for people behaving in a way that's different from a normal commuter.

So like a normal commuter is looking at the board. They're looking for the quiet areas. One of these men, they're looking for the busy areas. And you're having to actually run on and off. As soon as they had a target, you had to run on and off and chase them. So you're running on and off in London rush hour, having to push in. You can them so you're running on off in London rush hour having to push in you can't say you're undercover of course you have because you're meant to be a normal commuter yeah um so that was quite scary and it was quite because you're just in that very tense environment

and I was also really conscious of not wanting to mess up their investigation is kind of the main thing that scared me in that scenario which i did almost by making small talk with one of their marks um so he probably wanted to like to assault you right well apparently not so because they are later they're like you might have to come off because he'll have spotted you following him but then they were like he doesn't he's only got his mark in mind so um so they they don't just go around doing it to random people they just specifically yeah they're watching and then they'll follow people and then they see if a guy is going from say oxford circus back to less like doing a weird journey looking

out for women they had like all sorts of stories about like men they had one where it was a guy he was still carrying the fish that he'd bought for his wife's dinner on the way home then assaulted a woman and then they nicked him when he was just carrying this fish and he had to phone the wife and then she was like just give me the fish the fish is the least of your problems at this point right it's like your husband's just been nicked for doing this um so that one was quite like intimidating in terms of that and then the other one that was probably more intimidating was I spent time with um perpetrators of domestic abuse um so just sitting in the back of it was a

workshop for perpetrators of domestic abuse to kind of show them what they've done wrong but that is in a room full of quite intimidating like there was this one man who was just sitting in front of me just farting and staring and leering at me and then farting and then staring and leering at me again so it's kind of such bizarre behavior it's just very it was very kind of obviously trying to intimidate trying to scare me and it's just trying to kind of sit you're cool and I am quite a nervous person I'm not someone who is naturally very confident not someone's not like even doing this I find quite nerve-wracking um so it's just trying to harness that adrenaline in a way and I also just love throwing myself into things and seeing things

I think it enhances a story. So I always keep that in mind. I mean, another fun one I did, which was scary for completely different reasons, was I did a stand-up comedy set to get over my fear of my nerves. And no one in the audience knew that I was a brand new comic. So I just had to go and do five-minute comics. Oh, my God.

I actually think that would terrify, like, bravest people oh my god there was that so that was scary but not in terms of this kind of serious journalism side of it or what could happen to me just more I could make a complete fool of myself so how do you manage your nerves and then trying not to give away what you're doing so I mean mostly I think because I mean that's the tough thing is because I think sometimes I am, I just am such a chatty person. Like I say, I spoke to that guy that I wasn't meant to speak to. So as I was doing this one where I was helping the police with trying to get those undercover, trying to get the illegal vapes. So I was going into shops for them and trying to propose as a customer. And then they'd

always give they gave me some money to buy something from the shops and then I'd be going and chatting about milkshakes and stuff then I'd come back out and be like oh maybe I was too chatty there's no real I just figured that I just have to be as much myself as possible as close to myself as possible within the identity that I'm being or the person that I'm being because if you try and pretend to be someone you're not that's when you're more likely to trip up yeah well when talking about well not necessarily tripping up but in terms of investigative journalism when you're doing a piece how do you know when it's time to like pull out so we've always got we there's so much kind of um safeguarding beforehand and we've always got like uh as i say there's always someone on side or and we've also always

got uh once you've got the story or once you feel comfortable enough or even if any point you feel uncomfortable you pull yourself out um i'd say we once did a piece which was an undercover piece with one of my colleagues brilliant danielle scott and that was looking into there was a game called the blue whale game which was a suicide game that was online and they these men would target vulnerable young girls in facebook groups and lure them into this game uh where they'd have different challenges and there's 12 different challenges um and the final thing to win the game was suicide so it's really preying on incredibly vulnerable young girls and they'd pray on um self-harm forums they were so she created a fake profile and we had it but i was supervising her the whole time and we had a phone that we kept that she'd do it on I would take the

phone off her I'd always sit with her on the phone we'd lock the phone in the drawer um and we always said that once she reached level three um which we used via makeup which was kind of uh she had to do something I don't know if I can even say what she did because it wouldn't be uh we used makeup for it and then we had to then we pulled her out we're like okay we've said this is where we're going to go with this story and that's that's more important than anything else is making sure that the journalist at the heart of the story feels safe feels comfortable than the story itself if we have to scrap a story if we don't get a story we end it that's the most important thing yeah because I feel like sometimes if you're living alive or living a role for so long do you become fully invested or you fully believe what you're

doing I guess I mean because I've never gone that fully immersive okay you do get obsessed with kind of wanting particularly with this story it was kind of like we're like you wanted to keep going to kind of see to see how far this would take we were also reporting what was happening to the police so you we were working closely with the police on that story so it was like how you get involved and you want to protect you want to tell the right story but you also have to really be careful of the journalist at the heart of it yeah because i think the last investigative journalist piece i saw was on netflix and it was when a journalist was posing to be an i like a newly converted muslim trying to figure out how they recruited isis brides and like she kind of

went away from the people that were supposed to be safeguarding her she was so invested in because you get yeah exactly yeah and it ended up ruining her whole life oh my goodness i'll have to watch that yeah like i was like so into it and I thought it was a lie because you couldn't write what was happening but she had to like she ended up having to change her name and stuff so at what point do you know it's time to like end that side of your career so I mean for me it'll be what the moment that I find myself getting a bit numb to it all or getting a bit like forgetting that there's real people at the heart of all of these stories it's always been really important to me to make sure that I am not forgetting that these are real issues affecting real people and that's the reason why

I'm in the business it's not for ego it's not for anything but telling those stories so the moment I think if yeah I guess if I forgot or suddenly found I was being insensitive or just taking putting the story above anything else would be the moment I'd want to step away and think actually I need to take care of myself and I need to take care of why I got into this business in the first place so is that kind of why you stopped doing the investigative so he says I mean it's essentially just because I'm 38 now so I um I edit them all and I commission and I edit all of these pieces for Cosmo still so while we're sending writers to do various things it's just I'm not the target Cosmo audience anymore so I think it's harder for me to

go in and like like we sent um it was a while ago about back but there was a thing remember obviously with sugar daddies but there's all these guys posing as salt daddies oh my god yeah so it's so interesting they're like pretending they've got money to seduce uh the women wanting a salt uh wanting a sugar daddy yeah so josie who's another brilliant journalist she went on a date with one of them that's the sort of story that I couldn't do now because I just don't think a salt dad as sugar daddy or a salt daddy is after a 38 year old woman anymore sadly I'd really want to I need to read that piece because I'd actually want to know how you spot the difference between the two this was it she was like looking at his watch and she was kind of quizzing she's got funny stories though she had a pseudonym and then she realized she still had the g around her neck from her necklace it's just like oh god like that to be fair did they even

pick up on those so he did actually it was my sister's name quick like okay thank god for that i was thinking i was like do men even notice these things so yeah the salt daddies do well i guess if they're trying to lure you in for something right did you ever well you talked a bit about feeling scared for like wanting to mess things up but were you ever scared for your own like personal safety not really because I say in terms of what we do particularly Cosmo I mean I could imagine if you're going deep in like a big you are you're so protected there's always someone there to kind of keep an eye on you there's always like a colleague or someone from a charity or yeah you kind of I'm completely protected so like if

you were commissioning a piece now what would be like the step before you even get to writing the piece or before the journalist writes the piece it would be well first of all just having lots of talks with them about what it involves uh setting out what we're going to do we then speak to our legal team we speak to our HR team I even speak to different uh kind of mental health charities just to or professionals to see if any risks that I personally can't foresee uh you're putting out a whole plan you're working together in a whole plan and then you're doing things where you're setting up so like i've gone on stories where uh jennifer savin is another amazing journalist that um works for cosmo she did a big investigation into sex for rent which

was when the these men were advertising for um they were advertising for free rooms in exchange for sex. So she went along to meet one of these landlords in a pub and then I sat back with my book, keeping an eye on her. And we'd spoken to her beforehand about what she felt comfortable with at multiple meetings. So it's kind of just constantly... I think it's important particularly when working

with a younger journalist to make sure that they know what they're getting what they're getting themselves in for discussing it and then seeing if they still want to do the story yeah because I think like if you were a new journalist and you really wanted to brush your boss you would probably push your own personal boundaries in order to get a story. Exactly. And at Cosmo in particular, we don't want that at all. So often we'll choose someone more experienced to do a story or have someone more experienced do it

or send someone. Because the thing is, there's ways that you can, all this undercover work, it's really, I say undercover, but we also do so much work shadowing where that's a way to really tell the story and see something for yourself without actually having to pretend to be someone else,

do anything like that. You can just go and work with a charity. So I worked with a charity doing shadowing on suicide hotlines for a couple of months. There's lots of different ways that you can do it, particularly for for young journalists where you're not having to put yourself into any real danger you're working with someone and you're still getting to live the life of yeah like and these amazing organizations and showcase the story i think because i was going to say like if i i could never go undercover because i think it would just be too obvious i did one night shift with the police and someone took a photo thinking I was getting arrested because I was getting in the back of the car but I was wearing like a big yellow high-vis so it kind

of gave it away but like I think and also I'm like you I'm like a nervous person and I'd forget what I'm doing and just get carried away with something else and then be like oh wait yeah what was I supposed to be doing have I accidentally just told you my name but like what would you say your biggest success is as like in your career so far so I mean we've done like we've I've won three awards um but uh for the and it's really been about putting those like long reads for because you don't necessarily think of cosmopolitan as the kind of place for this sort of journalism so getting those awards and being able to show to the wider world that uh this is the sort of work that we do is really important but ultimately i think it's just being able to take stories i think are less spoken about so one of the things

i was most proud of which i talked about at lunch was when I looked into a couple of years after the me too um a couple years after me too there was a story about James Dean who is an adult film star who'd been accused of sexually assaulting his um co-stars on set and we looked into that to see what implications it had for his career and actually it turned out it kind of boosted his career and there was a lot of stories I mean he's actually I should probably say he flat out denied all the claims which is in the piece but just for legal reasons you put in here too um but lots of these women so they interviewed these adult film stars for months about not their experiences with him,

but their experience with other stars and essentially how they just aren't believed at all when they speak out about this stuff because of the nature of their work, which most of the time they absolutely love. But even I spoke to a woman who said that when she called the police for a burglary, someone brought into the fact that what her career was

the police brought into this and it was like so it's kind of highlighting those stories that means a lot to me and then also my dad's transgender so I wrote a piece about my experiences and I still get messages today from other women with trans parents asking for advice and saying that it meant a lot to them so just bringing those issues to the forefront is always the thing that like I feel most proud of I guess it kind of like was the reason you got into your your job in the first place right um what would you say like what to any aspiring journalist I get a lot of dms from aspiring journalists that want help with like certain pieces or they have to interview somebody but I actually don't have I can't give them advice because it's not my place but what advice would you give to aspiring journalists I mean I always

think particularly if you're going to be into want to work in features or investigations it's kind of staying as curious as possible so many of the biggest stories that we've got are because something's happened to someone or they wanted to dig into something and then they've really kind of gone into and they've spent ages on forums and you kind of have to have that really if you're like a very I'm a nosy person if you're a nosy person you're willing to spend like I'll spend ages just on forums or like 10 pages back on google news or like i'll see like a tiny little nib in a newspaper and i'll start digging really deep into that and you can spend hours and you can get nowhere so i would say just kind of keep satisfying that curious side and then also look into what you can offer particularly for young journalists because as i say now our readership

is 20 to 35 um and we're the biggest like obviously young women's brand that also includes we really want to speak to our LGBTQ plus audience it's thinking about what issues that you can bring the editor who might not know so like there's different are there parties going on that people might not be aware of that hasn't hit the news. It's not just about finding new stories from the news itself. It's about thinking, actually, me and my friends are the news. What does this say and what can I bring an editorial team? So that and then also being able to condense a story into something that manages to convey it that's also shareable.

Because obviously like TikTok and Instagram are big news providers now. me being able to provide nuance and balance in journalism is so important so being able to if you can provide that kind of nuance fact checking strong journalistic skill but you can do it in a kind of bite-sized platform that's such a skill that like a lot of newsrooms don't have so it's kind of thinking about what you can bring rather than looking at I used to spend so much time just looking at people and being like why am I not there and why can I not write like that but one everything's gone through so many editing processes there's no point comparing your writing to something that's in a newspaper now because it'll have gone through multiple things but also

to you don't need to be like someone else you just have to be you and your interests and particularly in the Cosmo newsroom everyone's got their own interests and I love that like they've all got their own specialities like Jenny's really in like she really knows so much about what's going on with cyber abuse at the moment and she'll always be on the next story or like there's always just people have got their interests and hone in on that and stay curious i think as well like i mean i'm not a journalist but that's kind of how i navigate my career like with my publicist i'll have a random idea because there's something i've seen and i'll send it to her and i'll be like what can we do with this and if it doesn't stick it doesn't stick yeah but then i'll just be like well okay we'll send it to her and I'll be like, what can we do with this? And if it doesn't stick, it doesn't stick. But then I'll just be like, well, okay, we'll move on to the next thing.

Because if I sit and ponder about that, then I'll miss the next thing that comes through. So like, yeah, I think if I was like back at school and I had somebody to talk to about something like that, I probably could have, my career could have ended that way anyway. So yeah. Rather than, I mean,

would have been better than sitting in Westminster. So the news is anyway, but it would have been a lot more glamorous to be on the glossy side as opposed to like the non glamorous side. But I know you talk about how you mainly focus on women's issues when it comes to writing. I did talk on LinkedIn. I do that to a lot of people.

I've not updated my LinkedIn in ages. I mean, I wouldn't be able to tell you any difference. So it's okay. But I did see that you like um a part of the launch of the cosmopolitan and is it men's health yeah the sex education sex education yeah we did a sex education program which was a couple of years ago now it's actually pre-covid essentially obviously we know that there's big big problems with sex education at the moment which is not teachers fault at all they're really really time pressed so we wanted to create materials that were accessible that spoke directly and spoke

about the issues that weren't necessarily or being covered in schools uh like consent like to do with spotting signs of abuse and ultimately as with all of these conversations that we have to with feminism and women's issues it can't be a conversation you have alone um you have to bring young men and young boys in and men's health are a brilliant brand who are kind of the only brand that are talking directly and do a lot to do with men's mental health uh so we'd partnered with them so so what was the like i actually don't know what the readership of men's health is like so i don't know what kind of age demographic they tend to pick up. So, I mean, I probably can comment on that because I don't work directly with them,

but they have done a lot to do with, they've gone into school speaking to young boys on their mental health. They had like a huge, like an amazing special a couple of years ago, which is directly speaking about mental health and the impact and what young boys are facing so they were yeah the natural brand for us to partner with so I was going to say a lot obviously now I mean it's obviously post-covid times now we're seeing a lot of that stuff kind of appearing online so I was going to ask if the program was like still running and yeah I mean it is it's because it's these booklets so there's we gave them out and they can't remember how many schools are probably should have looked up but they're still being taught in the schools and it's always

something that we'd be interested to bring back and do more of it's just we would need because you need the cost for the booklets so i was always wondering like do you did ever people question why you were doing it because if you're a female writer for cosmo were they always like was there ever a question mark as to why you were doing it I mean because we worked with the men's health brands they we worked so closely with all of them so they were kind of working on the content for the boys we were working on the content for the girls and we worked together to create this amazing booklet so I mean um what would be kind of like your next goal as a writer like what would be your next thing that you could that if you could do anything oh gosh I should have thought of something I probably should have

warned you that would have been a question I don't know I guess it's just keeping on I mean I personally like I'm writing my second book I also write fiction and I also write poetry and I've got a newsletter to do with grief. So I like telling those kinds of personal stories. So yeah, I think it's just kind of carry on spotlighting. I want to keep doing more first persons, more interviewing people who have been at the heart of different stories and have got a different perspective and voice on the stories that are out there. I actually found your first book.

And it was when I saw it about how old school dating minus dating apps and I was like does anyone even remember when that was a thing because I definitely don't oh yeah like um but I think that was the one that was one of the books I was like I need to read that so it's not on my reading list but um what kind of I actually wanted to ask you like what kind of inspired you to want to write your fiction book in the first place basically so it's called the matchmaker and it's about a matchmaker who kind of sells her services based on her perfect marriage but she's kind of hiding this secret to do with it and it's because I've obviously I interview a lot of experts in my

life in in my journalistic life so and I've always wondered sex experts you can't be amazing at sex all the time like matchmakers do you have like amazing like oh do you know when you watch like a married at first sight and they're all sitting offering advice and it's like you must sometimes be a bit of a dick in an argument come on so like I wanted to kind of have that story and base it on an expert who was kind of not as smart or clued up in her love life as she was selling her services on but then my main thing was there's a there's a big undercurrent to do with grief in the book and then also I really really wanted to do a kind of rom-com book that didn't center I mean it looks like it's centering romance as the kind of

main thing but actually centers female friendships and short-lived romance and how we've all got this idea about what the one should look like and what romance should look like when actually we're surrounded by romance some of my best friends are some of the most romantic relationships I've got in my life and that was something that I just really wanted to do I wanted to kind of trick people into reading this book that looked like a kind of fluffy romance book but had like a lot more depth to it yeah I was reading people's reviews and stuff and I was like because I romance novels aren't really my thing I love reading stuff that's like really nitty-gritty and when I saw the reviews and stuff I was like yeah actually this would be something I'd want to read a little bit um yeah I mean

anything to get away from like swiping yeah it's meant to be quite people say that it kind of they get lost in it which yeah I mean um so is your second book going to be on a similar theme or is it going to be completely completely different so it's going to be it's about two uh it's about grandmother and granddaughter relationship and it's loosely based on my own relationship I have with my grandma and it's kind of thinking about the generational divides and the things that we our grandparents had to deal with that we perhaps in our modern society completely cannot understand so she basically finds out that her grandma was having a secret love affair through the scrub and they were having they were sending each other messages through the scrabble board um so it's got that kind of romance to it but then the kind of heart is looking into the generational divide and yeah grandma

granddaughter relationships I was so close to my grandma I don't think they're spoken about enough yeah I think actually it would probably be like they always talk about how there's loneliness and like the divide between young and old people but yeah it's never really spoken about we just have so much to learn from older people and I think it's very easy to kind of think like oh they're so backwards or they're they don't see the world in the same way we do but they had so much to contend with and I find that so interesting I think arguably we some not not that we see things backwards but we like we have a very like it need for instant gratification that they that they don't

yeah exactly yeah um so like i always took that away from my grandparents and my ability to make random food yeah like jam which i re-learned during lockdown so that was like well that was the connection to my grandparents yeah um obviously you probably won't be talking about jam making in your book but i might um like did you ever find as a as a young woman wanting to be a writer that people were like you can't really do this it's not really your career for you i got so actually when i was in journalism school journal journalism school um university it wasn't journalism school that sounds so quaint um i had a tutor who kind of he was like you're too sensitive for this you're too emotional uh to go in to do these hard-hitting stories all the words stereotypically associated

with women right um and I really object to it like I think I was too young to properly think about the time and I kind of thought oh maybe I do need to harden up maybe this isn't for me um maybe I should just do something kind of more softer maybe I do need to harden up maybe this isn't for me maybe I should just do something kind of more softer but actually now I'm like those skills are so important I think empathy is so important in journalism in your interviewing I think actually like I said reminding yourself why you're doing the story and the real people at the heart of it and not just like particularly at Cosmo making sure that the people we are interviewing the stories we're telling feel happy with those stories and feel comfortable that means so much to me and

those sensitive qualities actually I think have been have helped me tell the stories and helped people open up in a way that is both important for the world to hear that story but also important for them in terms of a healing process because they feel comfortable with the journalists so yeah I think it comes across in pieces when you can tell that the contributor feels comfortable and like as a journalist or like as a reader you don't really gain anything from like upsetting someone or crossing someone else's boundaries like if they've told you something yeah it just it's just not I would hate it I had one mistake very early on in my career where the girl that I interviewed wasn't happy with it and

it was about I wrote about it quite recently because because it was about 12 years ago and it still plays on my mind uh that mistake and it was basically just me running with a story that she told me because my editor asked me to run with it and not considering her feelings in in of that and it's been one of my biggest regrets I've never wanted to do it again I think it's so important to remember I've said it about a million times yeah this is a real person uh rather than a statistic there's always so many negative connotations when you talk about journalists like uh there was when I was younger it's like oh always be careful when I worked in civil service always be careful of journalists if you tell them one thing they'll

literally just print it yeah so like to actually hear from a journalist who has empathy so and doesn't just want to just take any story they physically can yeah and I mean lots I think a lot of the people that I work with are very very similar mindset but yeah we do have a bad reputation or I'll be at dinner party and someone be like oh you're not gonna write about me are you and I'm like you're not interesting enough I've definitely said that I've definitely asked people that question you're interesting honestly I'll be with someone that's talking they're telling me the most boring story and they're like oh actually better stop and I'm like yeah stop because it's boring I have to stop myself telling you stuff because it will be interesting and it will get printed

so I don't want that but no I I'm definitely guilty of saying that sentence I'm really sorry um what would like I always kind of end my episodes on a similar question so I always want to know what would you say to people that doubted well especially to your university professor that doubted your ability to be a successful journalist based on the fact that you're a woman would i say i guess i would say i actually i think that one of the things that upsets me most in so many conversations you would like you know like remove qualifiers from your email stop saying please and thank you you're making yourself be so feminine it's like let's start championing feminine traits let's start championing those skills in the workplace more because they're so valuable

let's stop trying to make women act more like men let's start making the other making it the other way around or bringing those that kind of empathy in because those skills that you're often taught are soft or silly or naive can often be the kind of strongest things that you can bring into it I think especially if you're in a people in a people role yeah and you have to manage people i've always like teams that have been managed by women i always feel like i feel more comfortable so yeah because there is there is some element of empathy so i would agree with that sentiment though i am one of those really harsh email people so i'm half and half i mean i need to I do I'm very like oh would you mind I need to peel back a

little bit but I think in person I'm like that but then across an email I'm very like straight up it's because I'm usually doing something else at the same time but no honestly I loved hearing about all of your stuff and like I find your career so aspirational and I know that there's so many people out there that were that will have asked me questions about journalism and be so interested to hear your stories. And I'm actually going to go and find certain articles now because I didn't know that you had a transparent. So I'd actually be really interested to read that.

I love all the work you're doing too. So hopefully we can work together on a story in the future too. I love having guests. They fill my ego massively. No, yeah. Thank you so much. Thank you. You just realized your business needed to hire someone yesterday.

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