In my career as a journalist and content specialist I have seen the world digital content take some interesting twists and turns and ultimately come full circle.

In the exuberant dot-com bubble of the early nineties, the old Internet service providers became the new content platforms. Traditionally trained journalists like myself and many of my peers jumped ship from press and radio. We were lured by the freshness and immediacy of dot-com and the glossy lifestyle and entertainment content channels, which became the first port of call for home subscribers with their shiny new PCs. During this hedonistic online heyday, dot-com business models were based on heavy investments in speculative markets, which inevitably lost their grounding and ran out of steam – the bubble burst. With every boom comes a crash. The office parties slowed down and so did content production and we were all left wondering what really works online.

Then came the frenzy of ‘everything interactive’. The theory was that content – in order to be valuable – had to make the user actually do something other than read to keep them online for longer. Everything had to be ‘sticky’. Online production budgets were spent on developing gadgetry. Quizzes, polls, timelines, games and animations kept design agencies busy in the hope that their hands-on content would go viral. Lengthy online journalistic features were sadly deemed indulgent and uneconomical and ditched in favour of Flash-driven and ‘dynamic content’. Web content was getting shorter.

In the early 2000s users were also finding their own voice online. Chatrooms, forums and message boards gained an opinion and momentum. Big providers like AOL and Yahoo thrived on the threads of communities. Users realised that they liked to share their own words, whether it be advice, experiences or simply their dirty laundry. These days it’s the niche internet communities that are invincible. Gaia Online the social gaming and anime website remains one of the world’s top forums with over 1.6 million unique views a month, while Netmums in the UK boasts a healthy eight million monthly uniques.

Then user-generated content got bolder. Word Press, Tumblr and Blogger and a whole host of publishing platforms made digital content generation available to all and short, snappy posts became longer ramblings. Blogging is an art form that has held its own as an engaging form of digital content. Just look at the power of The Huffington Post and Mashable and the rise to fame of individual columnists like Perez Hilton and The Daily Dish, to name a few.

But it was the mid-noughties that the face of digital content was really redefined with the advent of Facebook (2004) and Twitter (2006). Content found its feet again with these great receptacles for sharing, posting and liking and has since been joined by Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn and more. Digital content became all about real people connecting with real people. Businesses have also realised they can find their own highly responsive audience by divulging marketing materials – video, white papers, blogs, on-message features and photos. Users can make or break a product and content marketeers have their work cut out trying to please them.

Technology has certainly moved on from the user in the mid-nineties who was scrabbling around for a dial-up network internet connection, to savvy users who are constantly connected to their life support machine, or smartphone. Content has made its comeback and digital content providers have a captive audience once more.

I’ve just finished an intense ten-week creative written course with Oxford University Department of Continuing Education. The idea was to flex my creative writing muscles, shake off some of the ingrained writing habits of years of formulaic journalism and basically get as much feedback as possible on bits of my first novel. I realise now that it’s very much a work in progress and a total labour of love.

One of the best things about the course, apart from all the constructive feedback from polite strangers, is the fact that I have been able to concoct stories at liberty for ten weeks and make up people and characters. This skill has come worryingly easy to me. I also have found that I err on the side of sadness when I write, which is interesting for me as I’m a ‘glass half full’ kind of gal.

So, I’ve decided to bite the bullet and publish one of the (very) short stories I have written on my blog. Any feedback is welcome and, no, you don’t have to like it…

Paris
by Dawn Gay

Every morning I slowly help him get dressed before I guide him to his familiar, threadbare armchair. I flick through the TV channels to kill time while he sips his strong morning tea. Sometimes he remembers my name once or twice and we talk about his carefree school days at Westchurch but his memories never go beyond his time in the regiment.

As he drifts with the monotonous chatter on daytime TV, I slip off into my bedroom and get myself ready. I choose some aged coral Mary Quant lipstick, a dusting of rouge and lily of the valley today. The doorbell rings promptly at nine and Jess is barking. Hannah is here on cue.

Jess is panting and wagging her tail furiously as I walk down the dark hallway of the bungalow to the front door. As Hannah bundles in with the shopping bags, she is already making amplified small talk, which sends Jess to a frenzy of circles. I go and fetch her leather lead.

The thick salty air always hits me as I cross the iron railway bridge to the endless Wisleigh Marshes, a contrast to the stuffy, claustrophobic air of house confinement. Jess always drags me over here, she wants to run, cake her legs in mud and chase some cumbersome seagulls.

Then, somewhere along the footpath, I’ll hear the crunch of his heavy walking boots on the broken cockleshells. On a breezy day the strong waft of Gauloises precedes him. Henri appears and walks next to me. I let Jess off her lead and she bolts towards the distant shoreline.

During this hour we speak only in French and never talk of home. He compliments the dowdy floral frock he has seen hundreds of times in the way only a French man can. We laugh about my mischievous dog when the conversation falls silent. Before long I’m in Paris again. I’m ambling along the tree-lined Latin Quarter boulevard to my appartement humming Aznavour, my mouth dry from too many strong cafés and laughter.

As I turn the key in the front door Hannah is already there with her coat. “He’s been a good boy today!” Why do the young speak to us like children? I’m tired of having the same thoughts every day. I tiptoe into the drawing room and he is dozing in the chair. Exhausted Jess curls up and becomes a golden mass of fur sleeps at his feet. I pour myself a heady tipple of cheap sherry.

Ends

There’s no denying it – during my student days living in Oxford, I tried to be a hippy chick. I rode a rickety old bicycle (with no brakes) up and down the Cowley Road – affectionately nicknamed Cowley-fornia, wore an itchy yak-wool cardigan (often with clogs and a beret) like an impoverished Sarah Lund and was a ‘fairly’ strict vegetarian (after all Morrissey did sing Meat is Murder).

My draughty attic bedroom on Regent Street was piled high with flower power Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan cassettes and plastered with wacky Salvador Dali posters. And I loved John Lennon. They were happy days – but not without a care.

I had quite a heart warming flashback other day when circa 20 years on, living as a considerably better dressed carnivore in Ingatestone, a displaced but not unwelcome CND flyer landed on my doormat. As the red-ink headlines ‘Scrap Trident’ shouted out at me from the leaflet, I was transported back to a Camel Lights smoke-hazed era and it led me to realise how the world has – and hasn’t – changed.

During my student days under the Thatcher government I was an ardent supporter of CND – the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t know that they still existed until last week. I’m ashamed to admit that I thought CND had fizzled out with the Cold War and the peace sign had found a new home as a fashion logo on Top Shop t-shirts.

Back in the early nineties, we lived in the shadow of a Cold War when nuclear weapons were strategically tested and ‘super powers’ pointed them across the globe. The Iron Lady spent gazillions on Trident warheads and said: ‘A world without nuclear weapons would be less stable and more dangerous for all of us,’ which freaked us out. Headstrong women held fort at Greenham Common until the cruise missiles they so stridently opposed were removed in the early noughties. In short, we were all scared out of our wits by the ‘n’ word.

Years later we are much more comfortable with the word ‘nuclear’ and we accept its presence as energy sources dwindle with stations popping up around the UK. But CND  is still around and has a purpose. There are still plans to upgrade trident submarines and CND campaign against the loss of civilian life by armed drones. We were worried that Thatcher pushed the boundaries of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, but now India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea aren’t even in it. I suppose you can say the little flyer on my doormat did its job and made me think about CND past and present.

Just an aside – do you know how the CND peace sign with the three lines within a circle came about? British artist Gerald Holtom designed it in 1958. The lines are derived from semaphore flag signalling – two lines down at 45 degrees for ‘N’ and a straight line up and down for ‘D’ for nuclear disarmament.

March marks an important personal milestone for me – it’s two months since I gave up clothes shopping for a year. No rummages in TK Maxx, sprees at Braintree Freeport and binges at Bluewater. It’s divorce with Designers at Debenhams and a hiatus for House of Fraser. This girl has gone shopping cold turkey.

When I first announced my idea to girlfriends last December my proposed new year’s resolution was met with laughter, shock and disapproval. My shopaholic sister physically baulked with disbelief. One friend is so determined that I’ll fail that he has put money on it. I have to say I have had serious self-doubt and a near-wobble in the January sales. But two months on I feel quite virtuous and a little less poor.

It’s been a hard habit to break – I love clothes and I adore the High Street (Top Shop, Miss Selfridge, River Island and especially Reiss), not to mention the whole stratosphere of equestrian fashion. But years of clothes shopping have left me with a wardrobe (or three) packed with samey, badly finished garments – mostly black – and fads that have come and gone before you can say Victoria Beckham. Who really thought that bat wing jumpers and leggings would last? They were bad enough the first time around.

I’m hoping my year in denial is also helping me reflect on my post-forty fashion identity. Until now, I have been bloody-minded about visits to Top Shop. With sheer determination, I have continued taking trips to my favourite fashion Mecca regardless of age, squeezing myself into skinny jeans and forcing my size seven feet into tiny pumps like a possessed ugly sister.

But when I return from my retail fasting in a year’s time will I feel even older and get walked off the premises by the fashion police for being ‘over age’? The thought of stepping across the age-fashion threshold to Per Una and Next feels me with fear and dread. Classic cuts, slacks, frocks and pastels. No thanks!

Working at home means I live in casual clothes (unless I have a Skype conference call or Google Hangout where I might smarten up my top half).  So, I don’t have the daily wardrobe dilemmas of an office girl and I have to admit there’s quite a smooth transition from jodhpurs to pyjamas some/most days. I don’t really need new clothes.

Thank you Sue Waymark for your inspiring idea – I’m afraid there’ll be no visits to Clarks Village Outlet this year for me.

At the moment politicians are flicking through the libel bill in Parliament and media controls are under the spotlight in a post Leveson frenzy. It could be a depressing time for journalists who are concerned about freedom of speech and state intervention on reporting.

But then came along the Pistorius case and media circus backed its metaphorical bags and headed to the Southern Hemisphere for some ‘no holds barred’ story telling.

The murder story aside, the hearing itself has provided prime cuts of news fodder. And I’m not talking about horse burgers any more. Here in the UK, contempt of court laws for a fair and balanced trial would quash any pre-verdict press speculation. With preliminary or committal hearings in a magistrate’s court only the skeletal facts can be reported. Even less under the Children and Young Persons Act and when a victim’s identification needs to be protected.

Over in Pretoria, it’s literally a different case. The scene during the bail hearing is a disorganised courtroom with family members mingling, camera crews fighting for space and reporters filing from their videophones. Where is the hammer? Order, ORDER! All the facts are reported making it an international ‘whodunnit’ case. The bail hearing is slowly becoming a courtroom drama.

The added twist to the tale is that it is the fall of a sporting legend – a super hero Paralympic icon to boot. Philandering footballers, match fixing cricketers, chemically enhanced cyclists – they all sell papers.

Back in 1995, the US televised OJ Simpson murder case, gave TV soap operas a run for their money with nearly a year of coverage of the case. In the same vein as the OJ case – guilty or not – Pistorius will hire a defence team who will be able to hold court for many months.

And how long before Hollywood hooks into this impending saga – Oscar Pistorius: The Movie…

A couple of years ago I was mingling at a wedding reception up in Yorkshire and I got chatting to a retired high court judge over a glass of bubbles.

We made the usual small talk about inconsequential stuff and the ex-judge asked where I was from. When I mentioned proudly that I was from Essex, my words were greeted with a rip-roaring belly laugh. I might as well have said that I was an alien from Mars. I was totally shocked and was made to feel very small. Luckily an embarrassed and apologetic relative shuffled me off quickly to the nearest tray of canapés.

The short incident left me thinking what the sentence would have been during his career for the ‘Essex boy or girl’ in the dock with such prejudice and snobbery – a slightly worrying thought. Imagine the harsh prison sentences for petty crimes by Essex offenders – ‘life’ for shoplifting!

After the wedding weekend, all thoughts of the conversation were erased when I went for a hack across the rolling Essex countryside in the sunshine my friend Collette. We were able to admire the beauty of the landscape that Constable chose to paint while I let off steam about my wedding encounter.

A few years on it looks like BBC Four are giving Essex some long-awaited positive press with a new documentary called The Joys of Essex. The programme explores the county’s rich culture, beautiful architecture and social history – rather than the usual spray tans and cosmetic surgery for which we have become renowned.

I hope it shows some of the glorious rural landscapes that I’ve had the pleasure of exploring on hacks with my horses and friends. And let’s hope Mr. Judgemental is watching!

I was listening out on BBC Essex for the snow forecast in the car this morning and stayed tuned in when I heard an interesting interview about Lance Armstrong’s recent confessions.

The Sunday Times sports correspondent on the phone line, David Walsh, was recounting how the paper was dragged through the libel mill by Armstrong who ‘as good as’ defeated the paper. They paid £300,000 in an out of court settlement and the same again for their own expenses after they referred to L.A. Confidentiel: Les Secrets de Lance Armstrong, the book he co-wrote with French sports journo.

The reporter had a hunch about Armstrong all along based on scepticism by French sports journalists who were in the know about cycling and ‘The Tour’ (read his excellent article: Lance Armstrong: Drugs, denials and me). His newspaper article headlines also included ‘Saddled with suspicion’ and ‘Paradise lost on tour’.

I think the recent Leveson Inquiry, that is based on well-founded horror about phone hacking, has also sadly made the public question the investigative work of good journalists who are there to uncover the truth.

Many brilliant reporters, like David Walsh, put themselves on the line for a cause and pursue years of research. It’s easy to forget that reporting is primarily ‘in the public interest’, not to cause public outrage.

In the Armstrong case this is the ‘interest’ of athletes and teams that have been through the gruelling regime of the Tour De France, only to miss out on the number one spot when he took the title seven times.

Just over a month ago when the world’s press were keeping themselves titillated by topless pictures of royals, I volunteered to do some bare modelling of my own for charity.

It was a bright Saturday afternoon at my mare Eve’s stables in Roxwell, Essex, when yard manager Andrea popped her head over the stable door and asked if Nick and I would like to be snapped in a calendar photo shoot.

We volunteered without hesitation when we found out that every penny of the project goes to cancer charities Cancer Research UK, Macmillan Cancer Support and Farleigh Hospice.

We were introduced to the photographer, Kelly Bond, who flicked through the days’ shoot on her digital camera to reveal reels of naked bods with precariously placed stripy Newmarket rugs, flashing farriers and rosettes hiding wobbly bits. It was then that the penny dropped that we had volunteered to star in a rustic retake of Calendar Girls.

So, with no time to think or back out, I was down to my Bridget Jones-style granny pants and in front of the lens with Eve’s enormous long face expertly placed in front of my modesty.

Nick was a natural naturist posing with two black Labradors on the steps of the Old Piggery. A few clicks, a packet of Polo mints (to placate Eve) and some expert airbrushing of granny pants later – Mr and Mrs January have made their modelling debut. We have even had our photograph sponsored by generous local electrical firm, Smart Merchants Ltd.

Last week the new calendar – All for the Love of Life – was launched after lots of dedication and hard work by Andrea and her team in memory of loved ones lost through this heartbreaking illness. And sorry, no sneak previews, you’ll have to buy it to ogle!

Hopefully you are now poised to buy a copy and celebrate life – and the odd bit of cellulite – with us. Find out more on Facebook at facebook.com/CharityCalender [sic], donate on Just Giving and keep an eye out for the new All for the Love of Life website where you’ll soon be able to order online. It’s £5.99 and all proceeds go towards putting an end to cancer.

Somebody contacted me today via dawngay.com asking for freelance equestrian writer services and it dawned on me, literally, that in a three week’s time I’ll be in the full throttle of my freelance world again.

It’s been an exciting nine months working at the Lords, writing news from the chamber and helping them launch a new Lords section on parliament.uk. I’ve enjoyed hopping into London, making new friends and learning more about such a grandfather institution.

Meanwhile there’s been a notable absence of my blogs (and tweets). Partly because a) I’ve been working on a full-time contract in the Westminster village and ran out of the extra writing steam that you need for an entertaining blog b) I’m politically impartial at the moment and have proudly been so through monarch visits and welfare reform and c) Have been my juggling superstar new horse with London full time. There’ll be much more on him later.

Watch this web space…

On Sunday, Nick ran his first big 10k race after months of achilles injuries and I was honoured to step behind the scenes into a ‘runner’s world’ for a change.

I have dragged my long suffering husband out of bed on many a weekend morning to support me at dressage shows with Eve and Rokke. He has spent hours in the freezing cold, wrapped in smelly horse rugs at the side of the collecting ring and endured the disappointment and euphoria that comes with the results. Someone I know once summed dressage up as ‘five hours for five minutes’ when talking about the preparation to actually test riding ratio. They were spot on.

And I’ve always had great respect for people that use their own legs in a competition; I can just about run 4kms and will invariably get a terrible stitch (how do you stop that?) and red, throbbing earlobes. It’s not unusual for Nick to nip out for a sly half marathon run at the weekend only to seem fairly bright and breezy on his return and then whiz around Sainsbury’s or mow the lawn.

On Sunday morning there we were in the local community centre in a sea of Lycra (some smaller coverings than others) signing in for the annual Billericay 10k, breathing in the intoxicating, heady stench of Deep Heat muscle rub.

What struck me more than anything, is how running has caught on in recent years and people are embracing the cardio and health benefits as well as the fact that pounds drop off. Nick is never alone on the Embankment when he hops out for a lunchtime jog. We are not just talking about a walk in the park – this is 10 undulating kilometres of course around flat Essex’s hillier town.

There’s something ‘feel good’ about being a spectator too. As I hung around along the final stretch, I couldn’t help feeling that Chariots of Fire urge to blub as runners surge towards the finish line and the digital clock, desperate to knock off a second from a personal best. Or the smug ‘girl power’ as the first female runner strides across the post beating most of the men.

Then there’s the mixed bag of ages, from whippersnapper to grey whiskers. On that chilly Sunday morning in the middle of suburbia, there was a real sense of community and equality. I like the runners’ world.

So, I take off my beagler hat to runners, especially my speedy husband who has burst back from injury to beat his personal best and get into the sub-43-minute league. The amazing thing is that we were back at home in the warm drinking tea for elevenses. No lorries to unpack, muck to shovel or horses to unplait.