Image courtesy of Better Buses for Greater Manchester's Twitter feed
It's late April and, amidst working my day job as a Teaching Assistant and revising for GCSE Maths, I am - not for the first time - sitting down in front of my laptop to read and try and make sense of the Bus Services Act 2017.
Not the most well known piece of recent England and Wales legislation (Scotland has it's own legislation: The Transport (Scotland) Act 2019), this slice of legislation is important because it's what allowed Greater Manchester's Mayor, Andy Burnham, to announce on the 25th March 2021 that he was planning to take the regions buses back into public control. As such, it's very important when writing about the Mayor's actions, and the Better Buses for Greater Manchester campaign of the past three years, to ensure that I definitely understand what the law does and does not allow, and how the Mayor intends to use it. As I remarked on Twitter at the time, tricksy though the legislation is, it's still much easier for me to get my head around than the GCSE Maths syllabus for 2020/21.
I love writing about bus re-regulation campaigns.
I probably love writing about bus re-regulation campaigns even more than I love writing about music.
Partly this is because the people I want to speak to about bus re-regulation want to talk to me (not often the case where music is concerned) but also because they are so joyously enthusiastic about their campaigns and I find their enthusiasm infectious and inspiring. As someone very interested in buses and bus re-regulation myself, and who has been involved with the Better Buses for Greater Manchester campaign, it's always nice to be in the company of people who are geeky about buses and re-regulation and who believe in the social good of buses, which is not always a given.
My latest piece is a blog post for the Act Build Change site, which discusses the tactics used by the Better Buses for Greater Manchester campaign as well as talking to the legendary Ellie Harrison about Bus Regulation: The Musical! and to activists from BB4GM's sibling, Better Buses for Yorkshire. You can read it here.
Recently, I have been dabbling in what I like to think of as 'proper' journalism.
To explain, there is a certain snobbery within the world of journalism vis a vis music journalists; a sense that we aren't 'proper' writers and we aren't deploying journalistic skills and training. Which, given the high standards of research and quality of writing that you see in a lot of long form music and cultural commentary, feels very unfair.
It goes without saying that there's an equal amount of snobbery and scorn directed at bloggers by journalists in general (including music journalists): We write for free! Without editors! We have no training or discipline! Which, admittedly, is hard to argue with at times. That said, just because you write for free, without an editor, with no training doesn't mean you can't write. Sometimes it does, but not always. I'd also say, on the financial renumeration point, that platforms like Medium as well as crowdfunding platforms like KoFi and Patreon are muddying the waters so far as the 'unpaid' aspect of it goes.
Personally, I'd say that I occupy a weird hinterland that I'd like to call 'Semi professional journalist/blogger', meaning that I do write for free, but I also get paid for my work sometimes. I've also written for free in an academic context, but because it's in an academic context it's fine and not shameful. Which is a bit of a headfuck it has to be said. Ultimately, I would like to be a fully professional writer, but (for various reasons) it just isn't happening at the moment.
There was no byzantine recruitment process, no weird unwritten rules to somehow know by osmosis and comply with... I simply pitched the veg boxes and Brexit idea to them, they liked my pitch, read my stuff on Medium and concluded that I had the right tone of voice for their publication, and that was it: I was commissioned, I was in. I'd like to say that this happens a lot, but it doesn't: My pitches have a success rate only marginally above the proverbial snowball in hell.
Anyway, back to those buses...
As with most of the UK (London is the exception) the buses in Greater Manchester were de-regulated in 1986 and it's been chaos ever since. It's long been a source of disappointment to me that there seem to be so few people in the UK who care about bus travel, who want to change it for the better, who are willing to stand up and make a fuss about it and agitate for a better deal. After all, commuter groups have been doing just that with trains pretty much ever since the trains were privatised in 1994.
Then, I heard about Better Buses For Greater Manchester. I met Pascale Robinson, saw the campaigners in action, and the rest they say is history.
I have learnt a lot about journalism while writing for FourGoods, and it's also taught me a lot about pitching I think as well. Particularly about not pitching too soon, before you've worked the idea out properly, which I know I've done in the past.
I am looking forward to writing for them again at some point.
