Tell us more about the sports desk and your role at the South China Morning Post.
I am the Acting News Editor on the Post's Sports Desk, a role I have only recently started. The desk has undergone some fairly major changes over the past 6 months, but we are building a team equipped for the dual demands of local and international news.
Relatively speaking, we're quite a small operation, and as in many places reporters and editors have to be able to do a bit of everything, while also having their own specialist areas.
My job is essentially that of sports editor, and so responsibility for the smooth running of the desk, helping our reporters be the best they can, and ensuring we maintain and raise the standards expected falls to me.

You have worked at various media outlets as a Sports Journalist. Why are you so passionate about the industry? How did you get into journalism?
I don't think I had a choice really. My parents were both journalists in the UK. My father was a well-known sports writer and my mother dodged bullets while working in television. I spent a lot of time at press conferences and in press boxes or TV studios growing up, it gets into your blood, no matter how much you try to deny it.
I've worked in news and sport throughout my career, but sport is where I started, and what I always come back to. Like the job, it seeps into your soul. Sports journalism is sometimes looked down upon, but you'd be hard-pressed to find the passion, drama, human success and failure, and the range of emotions sport engenders in other areas.
Plus, outside of a music festival, there is nothing as spine-tingling as the sound of 80,000 people all roaring or singing in a stadium as two teams go at it. And I have yet to find a better high in this job than the pressure of filing 750 words the moment an event ends.

What is the most memorable opinion piece you've written?
This actually had nothing to do with sport. I was working for the Birmingham Post, which was a daily newspaper at the time, and there was a general election coming up.
I did an opinion/sketch piece on the sheer sycophancy and pointlessness of Prime Minister's Questions in Parliament, and why we might as well all vote for none of the above for all the good it would do.
I'm not sure it was the best one I ever wrote, but it's one I'm proud of.

How has journalism changed since you first started?
Let me count the ways. Obviously the basics of the job remain the same. Be curious, learn shorthand, ask questions, get the story, tell it, and hit your deadlines. Now we just have to do it on multiple platforms, multiple times of the day and night.
When I first started covering football in the UK, I had to call a copy taker and read my match report to them over the phone so they could input it for that evening's paper. Then I had to call again with a rewrite for the Sunday paper with quotes.
Now I can do it all on my phone if I had to. I'm not sure this is for the better; I liked the human interaction. For me, telling someone what had just happened made it more powerful than pressing a button and sending my story out into the ether.

The 24hr news cycle and the unrelenting need to feed the online beast have created new challenges across the industry. Journalism is more than churning out clickbait and promoting the vacuous and the light-hearted, and while there is a place for both things, we as an industry need to keep ourselves accountable for our motives and methods in producing stories. It comes down to mission: our team is focused on serving readers with informative and entertaining news, so we keep high editorial standards at the core of what we produce.

But our role hasn't changed. We must still ask questions, challenge authority, tell the stories people want to tell, or, more importantly in some cases, the ones they want hidden, while retaining that healthy dose of cynicism that makes us good journalists.