Champagne moments at The Journal

My working day got off to a good start today when I arrived at my desk to find that there was a bottle of champagne sitting there.

The champers was a gift from ncjmedia to mark my 10 years' service to The Journal - a milestone that had rather slipped my mind. I was reminded of a quote that the late, great John Peel once gave about his long career at the BBC: "You could see it as selfless dedication to the cause of public-service broadcasting or a shocking lack of ambition. It's been kind of both, really."

It's certainly been enjoyable 10 years. In my first week here I got a story about a factory in Sudan that had been bombed by the Americans on the premise that it was producing chemical weapons, but in fact was doing nothing of the sort. We got the story thanks to a bloke from Hexham who called in to say that he was pretty sure it couldn't produce chemical weapons because, well, he built it.

The story was picked up by just about every newspaper and TV news channel in the world. The argument in the office that day was whether we should bill it as an exclusive or a "world exclusive". (We went for the former in the end on the grounds that it's either an exclusive or it's not.)

Things could only go downhill from there, but I'm still proud of a lot of the stories I've done since then: exposing a convicted sex offender who'd been working in a number of schools in the North East, a series of articles about low flying RAF jets that probably led to safety improvements at Newcastle Airport and articles on the work of WaterAid in Malawi that helped raise a lot of money for the charity.

My top 10 moments:
1. Spending a day at worked dressed up in a penguin costume to win a bet.
2. A former news editor getting so frustrated that he picked up his computer, threw it onto the ground and then kicked the hell out of it.
3. Our old editor coming out of his office, looking at the big screen TVs we had just installed to keep track of rolling news channels and saying: "Can someone tell me why the Chronicle is watching News 24 and we've got Scooby f****** Doo on?"
4. The same editor going slightly mental when he spent lots of money to send a reporter to Rhodes to cover a court case and it was then adjourned straight away.
5. Walking through the Bigg Market and shouting "Why the hell should I have to go and interview Paul bloody Boateng" only for the then Cabinet Minister to come round the corner and look all embarrassed.
6. An overly keen reporter getting told off for running across the Metro lines at Jarrow while doing a vox pop. (His explanation - "he was getting away" - didn't really cut it.)
7. Perfecting my best Oscar-loser face when I got beaten to four separate prizes - count 'em! - at last year's North East Press Awards.
8. Listening to Tony Henderson's stories.
9. Picking up the phone to have someone say: "Hello Graeme, it's John Prescott here." (It was too. I interviewed for him for about 20 minutes then looked back over my notes and found I barely had a full sentence in my notebook.)
10. Getting Gary Barlow to look sheepish when I asked him what he knew about Hospice Week 1998. His answer was that he didn't know very much at all, which was unfortunate as he was supposed to be its patron.

(I've also written a fair amount of forgettable rubbish and probably made quite a few mistakes over the years, but such is life.)

The question I'm asking myself now is whether I'll still be here in another 10 years. There's not many people left at The Journal from when I started and I sometimes feel like the Chief in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest: I don't know whether I could survive in the real world.

It's not even beyond the realms of possibility that there won't be a Journal for me to work at in 2018. These are bad times for newspapers as the economic slow-down hits advertising and circulation of just about every newspaper continues to fall. There's lots of reasons for that - mostly the proliferation of other media changing the way people get their news - but the end result is that some newspapers are closing, others are reducing their number of editions and quite a few are laying off staff.

I happen to think that The Journal will survive and that, whatever happens, people will still need news in some form. One of the things we and most other newspapers are doing to cope with the changing media world is to put more resources into our online products and my involvement in that has been pretty exciting.

And I am going home with a bottle of champagne in my bag tonight, so things can't be all that bad...

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