george thwaites

by sam rhodes

From prospective lawyer, working journalist and now Head of PR, George Thwaites reflects on his career journey emphasising the positives of confidence, tenacity and good relationships.

After realising he wasn’t going to be a footballer, George believed becoming a lawyer, like his dad, was the path for him.

“My dad was a lawyer so I thought that might be the path that I take, but then I realised how hard he worked and the kind of work he did after I gained experience within his chambers. “I thought it’s not for me, not because of the work, but I believed I wanted to experience other things.

“It was at university that I was doing a lot of journalism because I was always curious about what’s going on in the world and I liked sport, the arts, film and theater so while I was at Bristol I joined a student newspaper and started writing for them on different cultural themes, “I sent loads of different letters around to newspapers and magazines while I was at university just begging to get work experience in different places and the first place I ended up on was Cosmopolitan magazine; for a 19-year-old bloke it isn’t really, perhaps, what you’d expect … but I went in and had a really nice couple of weeks.”

His next work experience came from the Telegraph with George focusing more on experience over his studies. For him, this was the right decision when he left Bristol he had made a good enough impression there that he was asked to start working there. Leaving university life on the Friday, by the following Monday he was working there and he knew this was what he wanted to do as he said: “It became very clear that I wanted to go into journalism because it offers so much variety when it comes to people who are just interested in life and what’s going on”

However, he has now moved into the world of PR where he is the Head of Corporate at Maltin PR. “A lot of people in PR, not all of them, but a lot of them may have been journalists themselves – it’s quite a familiar route not just for the money but because they want a slightly different way of working.

“Journalists and PR can coexist happily, but there is a bit of cynicism. “I don’t think it’s quite as bad as it used to be: journalists recognise the value of PR when it’s good, and PRs recognise the value of good journalists, and they can get along alongside each other and be very important to each other.

“I remember when I was a journalist, there were kind of handful of PR people who I would look forward to receiving their calls because I know they had something good – the important thing about being a PR is you don’t waste a journalist’s time because journalists now have even less time than they had before, and they’re more sort of short staffed and stretched.”

This route worked for George but isn’t for everyone as he has seen career journalists go into PR only last for “20 minutes” before returning to their papers as they are unable to deal with the change in working practice.

George does believe that confidence is the most important trait to have in whatever field you enter, “lots of people are winging it in life” but he says that doing the most you possibly can in as many areas as possible can lead to success. Specifically for journalists he emphasised the positives of fuelling your curiosity and experiencing and talking to as many people as possible even if it is outside your comfort zone.

The industry has been changing rapidly from when George first started as AI is a constant in the conversation regarding education and journalism but this isn’t something he sees as a negative on the industry. “I don’t think it will replace journalism as it can’t go out and chase stories, it can’t make
phone calls and it can’t do all the things that are important when it comes to journalistic investigations. It has its limits. I’ve seen with newspaper groups that there are ways of integrating AI, and that’s okay if it has to happen as technology will always develop at a pace, perhaps, that some people may not like”.

“It will improve our lives in some ways, and it will make our lives more difficult in other ways, but I think as long as it’s managed, there is still definitely a home for real journalism – it’s all about finding a way of working with it, rather than resisting it or pretending it isn’t going happen because it is.”

picture by ash hussain