This is the CV bit. You’re here because you want to know a bit more about my work credentials.
Prior to working full time on magazines I did a lot of weird and wonderful things to pay for my theatre habit. Washing blood out of butchers’ whites in an industrial dry-cleaners, calming down alcoholics on the front desk for the local council’s housing department and processing manuscripts for academic publisher Elsevier Science.
The highlights of the latter included being able to rifle through the discarded proofs in the recycling bins for copies of interesting articles, and helping a colleague deal with the flack when – thanks to the nascent art of email at the time – she’d managed to forward a senior professor of linguistics a message that was rather less than flattering.
After a two-year stint at a publisher of games magazines, I joined Future Publishing in 1999 working on a children’s technology mag. Despite some initial misgivings, it was possibly the most interesting job I’ve ever had, giving me the opportunity to interview British astronaut Michael Foale, visit the building site that became the Eden Project and write about volcanoes and robots, all in the same week.
I did have to wear an Elvis costume for the monthly photoshoot, but them’s the breaks.
I stayed at Future for seven years, working as a Production Editor for PC Gamer, Games and Hardware Editor for PC Format, Editor of Digital Camera Shopper – a remarkable 300+ page magazine with a staff of three, that had the dubious honour of being much better than it was supposed to be – and finally Editor of PC Format.
It was probably the best time ever to be working on a tech mag, watching all the acronyms and phrases we now couldn’t do without come into being: broadband, WiFi, VoIP, MP3, DX8-10, MP4, iPod, XP, OSX, blogging, IM, Linux, on demand publishing, Amazon and so on and so on. On top of that there were hundreds of brilliant games, all of which continue to shape culture today.
Throughout the period I also contributed to most of Future’s tech mags, including PC Answers, PC Plus, Computer Arts, Edge, Gamesmaster and more.
Since leaving Future in 2006 I’ve worked as a freelance writer, editor and journalist. Most of my day-to-day work is taken up with regular contributions of news stories, features and reviews for the B2B title Comms Dealer, PC Format, Stuff and Stuff.tv, along with most of the Future magazines I worked in-house for. I edit the hardware section of PC Gamer every month, and have written for The Sunday Times, Channel Business, Unwired, Connect, Digital Photographer, Digital Camera Buyer, The Official Vista Mag, the Musician’s Union magazine and more.
I also do some PR and marketing writing and blogging, for clients including Opal Telecom, UK:Telco, PC World and Asus. Rates for corporate work are available on request.
More recently I’ve begun to develop my ability to write about issues in international development, which was always my ambition but somehow got sidelined along the way as other opportunities presented themselves. I’ve finally got round to turning an area of what’s been an area of lifelong interest into something like a job, starting with a self-funded trip to Zambia with the UK charity LearnAsOne in May, from which I wrote several published articles and an avalanche of blog posts. As a direct result of that trip, I’m a finalist in the 2009 Guardian International Development Journalism Competition, and have recently returned from a trip to Kyrgyzstan investing the problems of vulnerable women in the country, and the programs to help them being run by the Kyrgyz Red Crescent.
You can get all the above information in a more easily digestible CV format by mailing me, along with samples of my work.
- Adam Oxford (96)
