Sunday Thoughts: One Year

The other day mynameisblair reminded me of this article that I wrote after just one month as staff. I’d completely forgotten about it if I’m honest, I may not put out huge volumes of content but I’ve written enough that I can’t remember every article. Whilst this isn’t exactly a year on (it’s more like a year and a month), it does seem that a follow up to the article is in order.

I’ll start with me personally. Obviously TSA has grown a lot over a year, but allow me to be slightly egotistical for a moment. If you don’t really care about how I’m doing then skip on a paragraph or two. From starting out as a staff writer I’ve certainly moved up the chain within TSA. After being purely a writer for about six months or so I insanely volunteered for the role of Lunchtime Discussion manager.

I love writing discussions, they’re relatively quick and easy to write, and you guys in the community drive some great debate around the topic. The problem with them is that my imagination isn’t infinite, it progressively gets harder and harder to come up with new topics that are actually interesting. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing though, I get more input from other members of staff and from the community itself on what would be a good topic. I’ll admit I’ve had topics that have totally tanked, but with the community feeding me ideas for what you’d like to see me write about it’s much easier to get a sense of what might work.

On from managing those discussions Peter decided to put some faith in me and pushed me to take on more responsibility. I still don’t really know why but he gave me the role of Content Manager, attempting to manage the scheduling of the features on TSA and making sure there’s always a relatively good flow of content. That was a fairly brief stay before I took the big leap up to an editor, where I sit now.

Being Features Editor is probably one of the hardest things I’ve done. Keeping track of who’s doing what, editing articles, keeping features to a schedule and slotting in stuff when the rest of the site is quiet takes up a lot of my time. So much so that I don’t really write as much as I’d like to, hopefully something I’ll resolve soon.

Talking of writing what I write has changed a lot. When I started out I was just writing news about the 360 really. Now I write previews, review games, spark discussions and talk about how TSA feels like a second family. I feel like I’ve grown and hopefully that’ll carry on.

As for me outside of TSA? Well when I talked about my first month as a writer I revealed that just a day after starting for TSA I also got a job. I left that job after about six months, a time that was actually pretty enjoyable at a fun company. Since then I’ve done some freelance coding and right now I’m doing some work experience at the BBC. All of that is a lot of fun, but isn’t really anything to do with TSA or my time here.

In a year I’ve seen TSA grow so much. Sure it’s nice to know that our readership is going up, but what really feels important is to see the community growing. We’ve still got most of the core community members who were here when I started reading the site, but we’ve also gained a lot more people and that’s something I love to see. On top of that it really feels nice to go to events and have the site recognised. When I went to play Halo: Reach I introduced myself to the guy sitting next to me. He was a magazine writer – I can’t remember which one (sorry if you’re reading this) – and the smile that came to my face when he said “Oh sure I read you guys” couldn’t be hidden.

The peak of our recognition by the rest of the industry probably came when Peter was flown out to San Francisco to go see Microsoft’s newest offerings. Getting that kind of access to new games is important if we want to provide the best content we can, although we’ll never drop our integrity for it. Even if we’re flown somewhere or given an exclusive we’ll always call it how we see it. What’s the point in getting to play a game ahead of time if the condition of playing is that we’re positive?

So that’s my thoughts on TSA, on me and on things in general after just over a year as a writer here. What’s next? Who knows. Hopefully I’ll continue to get better, TSA will continue to grow and maybe we’ll get big enough that we can move past being a volunteer site. It’s a big step up, but one I’d love to see us take and one I think we deserve. Whatever happens next, I expect it’ll be fun.

One final thing before I sign off for today. I want to say thank you. Thank you to Alex and Peter for taking me on and for always having faith in me and always being there, I love you both like brothers and can never thank you enough for everything you’ve done. One day I’ll take you both for a drink. Thank you to all the staff who work so tirelessly to put out the best content possible. Thank you to the developers, publishers and PR companies who give us stuff to write about and continue to make our lives interesting. Even thank you to Bobby Kottick for continuing to push gaming to be big business, even if we don’t always like the way he does it.

Finally thank you to all of you readers. Thank you for accepting me as the start of the site’s turn from Playstation only to multiplatform. Thank you for reading the words I put hours into writing. Thank you for commenting, discussing and making articles feel more than just words. Thank you for being supportive whenever I needed a break from writing, and for welcoming me back with open arms. Thank you for making this a fun place to be and for saving me from the sheer insanity of some other sites.

Thank you.