Byline of duty

You edit a large publication. How did your journalism career start? I am executive editor and co-founder of Byline Times and Byline Festival.

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My journey to journalism is relatively recent. My background was mainly in advertising. I was marketing director for Saatchi and Saatchi across Europe, Middle East and Africa and then co-owned my own advertising agency, as well as producing TV, films and putting bands on in clubs.

Then in 2016 my friend Peter Jukes took over Byline, which was a crowdfunded site for journalists and asked me to help him. Google and Facebook had taken most of the advertising revenue out of newspapers, resulting in many investigative journalists being thrown out of work. Our crowdfunding site let people support them to continue their work. We were both determined to make Byline a success as we were determined to offer an alternative to papers run by billionaires for their own agendas. We wanted to make a greater impact, so very early on we decided to set up a festival in 2017, and this is now our eigth festival.

You have written a book recently, can you tell us about it please?

In 2000 I wrote a book, Punk, with Chris Sullivan. It looked back at punk after 25 years and was the first coffee table book about punk and traced the origins of punk to Andy Warhol's factory. Since then I have written a couple of other music-related books and then this year, Chris and I decided to take another look at punk, 50 years later. Punk The Last Word will be published by Omnibus on October 15. This time we trace punk back even further to the underground theatre and the Beat movement in Greenwich Village in the 1950s and 1960s

When and how did Byline Times start?