As a digital company working across three countries, online communication wasn’t new. Tech has always connected us. We were equipped for lockdown before it happened.

But we missed the personal connection that comes with a coffee break and a team lunch. What’s your favourite sandwich? The answer says a lot about a person. As does knowing their morning routine and guilty pleasure.

We got through it with daily Zoom huddles in which everything from work to wedding plans was discussed. As a team, we’re closer than ever.

Covid may have physically drifted us apart, but tech brought us back together.

Producing a mindfulness magazine amid the most anxiety-ridden year I have ever lived through was beautifully ironic. We gave a digital magazine to the world at a time when nobody felt calm or secure. 

Writing words of encouragement felt like quite the challenge, yet nothing gave me peace like having the luxury of working from my garden during a heatwave and seeing our tiny team over Zoom calls, stretching across the UK and even as far as Estonia.  

The power of words and the resilience of magazine makers are unstoppable in any climate; our storytelling remains a necessity. 

During lockdown, I hustled.

I never really had to do that before and it was fun – just pitching was wonderful. Rejection and no replies don’t bother me, so I found my love of journalism intensified and purified.

While I work in the film industry as well, it’s still a thrill pounding out an article to deadline and seeing what a great editor does with my words. There are always new places to write – Limbo is a case in point.

I love print but online is faster and easier.

Either way, journalism is and always has been a challenging, mutable industry.

I was editing a heap of things before [THE C WORD] hit; a seriously over-produced print magazine (fluoro cover stock, matt UV, double hit of black on the coverlines, specially commissioned infographics – you know the drill); a set of reports; four quarterly newspapers; all sorts of other stuff.

Now? Digital. Which is fine. Really. But somehow lacks nuance, pace, depth and glamour.

I’ve just heard that a publication I founded nearly 20 years ago has ‘gone fully digital’. Which used to be a synonym for ‘closing’. Maybe it still is.

But I have a plan. It may involve print…

With our tourism magazines such a big part of what we do, the last few months have been challenging commercially, but reader appetite has never been higher.

We knew we had to meet the demand for advice alongside the escapism. In fact, the content has been some of our best and we’re working hard to support our sectors, banging the drum as loud as we can. We need them and they need us.

Adapting to remote working went well and solutions to long-standing problems were solved – because we had to. Now, hard work and innovation is the only way forward.