October 10, 2007

We need warm bodies

It's not often I use my blog for furthering my career, but if my boss were to peer over my shoulder at this moment, he'd see I'm going to write a post about getting your ideas for stories that we can fill our glorious newspaper with.

I write primarily for the Long Weekend and Indulgence sections of said glorious newspaper which come out on a Saturday, and we have regular coloumns we need to fill. One of those is called One of Us, and it's a brief but entertaining look at someone doing something kooky, or has kooky stuff about them, or is a kooky person living in a kooky place. You get the idea. In the past I've done stories on Julian Raphael - community musician who runs the whopping Wellington Community Choir; Heather Barnes - Craftwerk inventor; and my good pal Gus Firestone - artist who is trying to get an international art movement off the ground from his Brooklyn flat. They're the kind of people who don't ft into our other sections - entertainment, arts, home, travel etc, but deserve some column inches. And preferably from Wellington, the lower North Island, or the upper South Island which is our coverage area.

So if you know someone who makes strange model rabbits out of chicken bones or has a small business polishing bondage equipment or is running a campaign to ban the colour turquoise or something, let me know. It doesn't have to be anything weird - could be a person who looks after stray seabirds, or who hand-makes all their own clothes from scratch, or is just someone you could imagine starting a conversation with "I know this guy who ...". Would be *super* if you actually knew the person and could give me contacts rather than "I know this guy, don't know his name ..." etc which makes us journos sad.

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