In four weeks we have educated ourselves on different structures, types, financial models and success strategies of magazines. We have not only applied our knowledge to the planning of The Yorkie, but we have applied skills from feature writing workshops to create ideas for our features.

The feature

I focused on what I can write extensively and confidently about which would be travel, tourism, food and fashion. Firstly I pitched the idea to do street style of York for the fashion section as fashion is something I am passionate about and tend to incorporate into a lot of my academic work when possible. I proposed to photograph a range of people in different outfits which suggested something about their identity. As someone else had already been accepted to write a very similar idea, I had to use one of my other ideas.

Since I moved to York, I have been researching places to eat and drink. I still find other cities have a lot more instagram tags, articles, stronger websites for this than York. Over the two years of being here, I have made a conscious effort to explore independent places in York which I believe are underrated and therefore: ‘Hidden gems of York’. Since I have been blessed enough to uncover some great independent places, I wanted to do a feature on this and maybe uncover some more in the process.

Firstly I looked in my camera roll and decided on which I would include where I had already been, then I proceeded to email and call all the owners. Due to the managers not being present, all of the locations would not answer over the phone and requested me to email them instead. This took time; therefore, I acted upon something I had always been interested in and it is a really unusual restaurant named Skosh. I rang up and arranged to eat and take pictures and carry out an interview. The interview and images turned out well and whilst the other places replied via email I had this content to type up.

Something I always struggle with the most, is the unpredictability of journalism, I am still learning how small steps help fill time when waiting for replies from sources such as contacting other places just in case, chances are someone will reply. 

Following our feature writing workshops, I know the importance of a clear peg and angle. I decided to get feedback on the idea at this point as a piece with just interviews from some places and just a mention of the others which worked well as I included interviews and images from the places I have images from and not from the others.