ALEX WIJERATNA

Periodical Senior Director at Mighty Earth

By Alex Berry

If you could sum up your experience at City in three words, what would they be? Brilliant, intense, life-changing.

Is there a period of your career that you are proudest of?

I worked as a restaurant critic for Fodor’s, one of the top travel guides in the world, for 23 years. My favourite restaurant that I’ve visited has to be one in Spain which is called El Bulli.

If you could interview anyone, dead or alive, who would it be?

I’d really like to interview my father, when he was younger, before he had mental illness. I only knew him after he had very bad manic depression, so I really would like to have met him when he was young so I could have seen what he was like. My mum said that the man that I knew wasn’t a tenth of the man he was when he was young, so that would be really nice to go back and meet him then.

When he died in 2016, The Observer published the full article. It’s one of my most cherished life moments and reminds me how privileged I am to be a journalist.

What was What was the module you liked the least?

Virtually everyone on the magazine course hated Off-Diary. We’d be sent out onto the streets to fnd stories by door-knocking, approaching random people and trying to be observant. Most of us returned empty-headed and empty-handed, spending the next hour trying to polish a random remark or rain-flled pothole into a shiny news story. We’d generally get a roasting for our dismal efforts, although someone from the newspaper course always nailed it.

Have you ever experienced sexism in your career?

One early experience that springs to mind is when a male manager announced that the three women on the team had to mark on the wall calendar when we had our periods so everyone knew in advance when we might be moody. I was outraged and challenged anyone in the team to identify my menstrual cycle. I think the manager was genuinely shocked by my response.

What is the most embarrassing moment or mistake of your career?

Another Top of the Pops story – somehow we failed to spot an F-bomb in the top line of our wordsearch puzzle for the bumper Christmas issue. We were a kids magazine selling over half a million monthly copies, and the BBC owned us. An outraged mum contacted The Sun but it was in the days before social sharing.

What advice would you give to new journalists?

Follow your passion. It’s undoubtedly that, and you’ve got to make your own luck. For example, I went out to Indonesia and started freelancing from there shortly after leaving City, and I was very lucky. Literally, the day after I landed, news broke about four Cambridge University students being kidnapped. And that was a four-and-a-half-month running story. I went straight into The Guardian, and two and a half years later, they asked me to run South-east Asia for them. If I hadn’t decided to go there, I wouldn’t have had that break. Be brave and develop a unique selling point for yourself that differentiates you from the crowd..

What’s been the highlight of your career?

It probably has to be my time in South-east Asia. Now, I love being at the Financial Times; it is an amazing workplace. The standards are extremely high, so you’re expected to produce good journalism daily, which is great.

What was an embarrassing moment for you?

I was a trainee on my local paper in Carlisle, and I thought I’d put a woman on hold when passing her over to a colleague, and I hadn’t. I said, “Oh, Steve, it’s your cat woman on the phone.” She heard and got very upset. I still stress about it, and that was in 1995 – 30 years later, and the Carlisle cat woman still haunts me.

Any self-care tips?

You can’t be married to the job. I have an allotment which I love, and that’s a great way of relaxing if you’re thinking about mental health. I’m going to be planting snap peas this weekend.