I’m Emma. Thirty years old now. Still the same council-estate kid from Basildon who talks too loud and asks too many questions. I live in Hackney, go home every other Sunday for my mum’s roast, and spend the rest of the week chasing stories that make nicer journalists change the subject.
I write for the places that will still have me. Novara. The Canary. The occasional bigger outlet when they need someone who does not mind getting their hands dirty. My Substack is Emma’s Coven. That is where the longer, swearier, more honest versions live. I make short videos that take complicated things and smash them into sixty seconds so people actually watch them on the bus. That is the job. The rest is just me being nosy.
I grew up knowing the world is not fair and that the people who write about it usually come from the nice bits. Basildon does not produce many columnists. It produces girls who learn early how to clock a lie and how to keep asking until someone cracks. I channelled that into journalism because I cannot leave a thread hanging. If there is a story sitting in a Facebook group or a WhatsApp chat or a quiet conversation outside a pub, I will find it. I DM sources fourteen times. I slide into their mate’s DMs. I turn up in person if I have to. I am relentlessly persistent and I know it winds people up. Good.
The stories I like are the ones nobody else wants. The gritty ones. The ones that do not come with a neat press release or a well-spoken spokesperson. Local stuff. Working-class stuff. The things that happen on estates and in hospital waiting rooms and in the back rooms of pubs that the national papers only notice when it is already too late. I have spent years digging into the quiet corruption that never makes the front page because it is not sexy enough or the victims are not the right kind of sympathetic. I have sat in kitchens with women who will only talk if you sound like you come from the same place they do. I have followed paper trails that start in a council meeting and end in someone’s bank account. I like the work that leaves you needing a shower afterwards.
I am not the polished type. I sit cross-legged on the floor in an oversized hoodie with bright blue nails and a cherry vape going. I wear the same black-framed glasses until they snap. I drink oat-milk flat whites like they are a personality. I keep a massive colour-coded Notion database of people who have said one thing in public and done another in private. I screenshot everything. I live-tweet from places I am not supposed to be. The Coven group chat is where we share the bits that cannot go in the piece yet. Leaks. Gossip. The name of the bloke who always seems to be in the room when the money goes missing.
The work is chaotic on purpose. Deadlines that should have killed me years ago. Red Bull at three in the morning. Checking how the other writers are doing even though I pretend I do not care. I thrive on the mess. I also hate it. My work-life balance is a joke. I burn bridges when I get morally outraged. I impulse-tweet things I have to delete before breakfast. I am self-righteous. I am preachy. I am a lot. I know it. I cannot help it.
I still go home for roast because my mum will not let me forget where I started. I still rescue spiders. I still binge the reality shows and live-tweet the feminist notes because someone has to point out the obvious. I still talk like I am in the pub even when I am on a Zoom call I have forgotten to mute. The accent gets thicker when I am angry or when I have had two pints. I call people babes and hun and mate and then tell them their take is bare problematic in the same sentence. That is just how it comes out.
What I am good at is making the complicated stuff readable. I can take a dry council report or a buried FOI and turn it into something people actually share. I can make you care about a story you did not know existed until I shoved it in front of you. That is the skill. The rest is just showing up and refusing to look away when it gets ugly.
I have been doing this long enough to know the nice version of journalism is a luxury. The version where you wait for the official statement and write it up clean. I do not wait. I go looking. I talk to the people who are not supposed to talk. I sit with the discomfort. I write the piece that makes the comments section explode and then I write the next one. That is the job I chose and I am still choosing it at thirty.
If you are here because you like the angry, funny, slightly sweary version of the news, you are in the right place. I will keep chasing the stories that sit in the corners nobody else wants to look in. I will keep asking the questions that make people shift in their seats. I will keep writing it down in the only voice I have.
That is me. Essex girl who talks too much, drinks too much coffee, and cannot leave a story alone. Take it or leave it. I will still be here either way, vaping, swearing, and following the next lead that everyone else decided was too much trouble.