From news & features, to reviews & interviews, my 15-year career has it all. So grab a beverage, sit back & allow me you take you on a trip through the various forms of writing.

Let’s start with the basics: news writing. I broke the news on Elon’s flamethrower in the Middle East, which amassed a fair amount of eyeballs & trended as a top story on the day, making it to Gulf News’ homepage.

🔥, yeah? Yep, I think so too.

Besides news, I do enjoy descriptive, helpful & informative content. For example, before Guns N’ Roses’ epic return to Dubai, we put together this neat listicle for the audience to brush up on the band’s history prior to the gig. 🤘🏼

Having been the Editor of Guides at Gulf News, our content was conceptualised based on analytics, we wrote about what our audience wanted to read. At the time of leaving, Guides saw over 2 million-page views per month 🎉 (2018).

Being an astronomy geek, and possessing supreme Editorial power over my brand, one of my favourite pieces at the time was a guide to the Supermoon. Here’s a picture of said moon, for a reading break & to ensure I don’t bore you with chunks of text.

📸: HH Sheikh Hamdan Bin Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum

Onward and forward!

Our next stop focuses on one of the most creative forms of journalism: Feature Writing. Having spent 3 years as a features writer, I’ve written – gosh – close to 500 feature articles. Hand’s down, this period was the favourite part of my career. I got to travel the world from South Korea to Las Vegas and every city in between, interviewing C-Suite Executives from the leading consumer technology brands.

I even spotted Mark Zuckerberg jogging around Barcelona during MWC2016, while I gently nursed my morning coffee… trying to remember Telegram’s party the previous night… partying with Mark Ronson and David Blaine…

Let’s move on to interviews now.

I’ve also had the privilege of interviewing phenomenal motorsport athletes where I got a taste in the visual aspect of packaging content, having conceptualised, sourced cars, talent & art directed the cover shoot and photoshoot at Abu Dhabi’s Yas Marina Circuit.

One of my favourite interviews however, was with Dave Swenson, the Audio Director at Sledgehammer Games, the studio behind Call Of Duty. Here’s a quick snippet of the interview:

G: “And now touching on your speciality. One of the coolest parts of your job was to get out on choppers and fighter jets to record audio, how did you manage it for this game? I’m guessing Second World War planes, tanks and weapons were not as easily accessible to you?”

“They weren’t accessible, you’re right! For Advanced Warfare we looked at a more modern-day scenario and I was able to go to a military base and ride helicopters. So that made it easier. With this it was important to get everything right and accurate. Fortunately a lot of the vehicles and weapons still exist. There isn’t a lot of them and not all are working, not all the tanks and planes and jeeps are still driveable so it took some work and some effort to dig out and find where they were. Fortunately Martin Morgan knows people and in addition, he actually owns a lot of the weapons himself. So we went to his home in Louisiana with my whole audio team, set up all our mics and I actually got to fire every Second World War weapon with the microphones recording it.” – DAVE SWENSON, AUDIO DIRECTOR AT SLEDGEHAMMER GAMES

However it all wasn’t fun & (video) games.

To date, one of my best performing articles was on cyber security. Where I spoke to a white hat hacker (aka an ethical hacker) & listed out how easy it is to hack a smartphone. While it’s easily possible and would set you back approx €115, however the aim was to educate our more unsuspecting readers to be more cautious.

🎶 Cue sad music 🎶

Whether it’s life imitating art, or the other way around, I went through a break up 🥹. My editor at the time channeled my heartbreak into, well… content. This resulted in another one of my fave pieces: “The truth about heartbreak” where I interviewed a cardiologist in a very interesting article on broken heart syndrome, or as the medical world call it: Takotsubo cardiomyopathy.

I made a flawless recovery though, spending a weekend in Abu Dhabi, which also serves as a good segue to plug in an example of a creative review of the Park Inn by Radisson on Yas Island. 😏

Before we end my time at Gulf News, I should mention my Op-Ed which was a personal response to the #MeToo movement. An open letter to young boys, titled “We see your #MeToo, and pledge to raise you a: #HowIWillChange”

Post my journalism stint, I joined another publishing house to overhaul their digital content, as the Group’s Digital Content Strategist, migrating their print publications online & on social media.

And then I sold out & joined an agency

What follows are a few of my many literary contributions at Publicis Groupe for their client Majid Al Futtaim, the leading shopping mall, communities, retail and leisure pioneer across the Middle East, Africa and Asia. The digital & social content included thought leadership posts for the CEO & its previous CEO. Including this lil’ “urgent” number which I pulled up along the side of a highway to draft.

🥹 #Dedication

Besides posts such as the above, our team created long-form articles on a range of topics, my favourite being this on the company’s “women in coding” initiative. While C-Suite content was predominantly B2B focused, our team did have fun flexing their B2C copywriting fingertips, while the production studio preferred to flex their grip around my neck for the over-the-top concepts briefed into them by your’s truly.

Let’s wrap up this section with a few examples on social copywriting in easy-to-read bullet points.

• – Tropic like it’s hot🌴 @aloftdubai
• – Falling for fall 🍁
• – Those curves 👀
• – Lights will guide you home ✨
• – Just add floaties. 🦩

Bonus content:

Since you reached the end of this page: I’ll leave you with my most comprehensive piece piece of writing – that was printed & distributed to over 100,000 readers – my tech review of the iPad mini.