Alan McGuinness

I am a 21-year-old trainee reporter at the Medway Messenger. I recently finished a degree in journalism at the University of Kent’s Centre for Journalism.

I have also had work published in the national media (see the Portfolio section).

I have wanted to be a journalist since I was about 12 – coincidentally right around the time I realised I would never make it as a professional footballer. I had a letter printed in a Playstation magazine and since then I have known I wanted to be a hack.

Much of my youth was spent huddled in front of a TV with an Xbox controller in my hand so it was only natural that much of my early work was in the sphere of video games journalism. From 2005-2008 I wrote news and reviews for Britxbox, an Xbox fansite.

In July 2009 I spent a month at Sky News as part of the inaugural Bob Friend Memorial Scholarship which I won earlier that year. In April I spent two weeks at Kent Online and produced text, video and audio content for their website.

A large degree of my early work was about one of my passions: football. I was a Chelsea Featured Columnist at Bleacher Report, where I was also the Co-Leader of the Chelsea community from September 2008 to December 2009.  I wrote match reports, news articles and live commentaries for Goal.com, and also for the Shed End. In addition my work has been featured on GNR Daily, a Guns N’ Roses blog.