About

The current deal

On December 1st 2010 I left London and began 4 months of travelling; Canada, Australia, India, a week in the UK and then back to Canada again where the plan is to find work and set the North American digital publishing world alight.

I expect this blog will only be of interest to my family and one or two friends but perhaps if anyone else is making a similar move they might find something useful here.

Where it all started

I was born in Scotland and grew up on a farm near Strathaven in Lanarkshire.  It was a proper rural idyll – looking after horses, bottle-feeding lambs and building castles out of hay bales.

I went to school in Glasgow until I finished my Highers at 16.  I spent the next two years studying for my A-Levels at a boarding school on the north east coast near the town of Elgin.

Between school and university I spent a few months on the Isle of Wight learning to sail and got a job on a boat based in Monaco.  For three years I studied English at UCL, returning to the Med every summer as part of the crew of Nel Blu.

I spent a year after uni not really knowing what to do until I heard about an MA degree called ‘Electronic Communications and Publishing’. Despite applying late I somehow got on to the course and discovered that I wasn’t the total technophobe my family and friends suspected.

From there I secured a placement at the MailOnline working on the migration of the old travelmail.co.uk site to the freshly relaunched dailymail.co.uk.  And as that project came to an end the opportunity of newly created SEO position presented itself.  I spent a year or so in this role learning as much as I could and gradually discovering where my true strengths and interests lay.

As time went by I started to spend more and more time on the editorial floor establishing the role of SEO content manager.  It was a tough but incredibly rewarding experience and one that allowed me to combine a love of newspapers and journalism with a passion for all things digital.  Toes were stepped on and lines were crossed but ultimately I think we were successful in establishing a mutually beneficial relationship between the equally formidable, enigmatic and inscrutable twin gods of Google and Editorial.

So why Canada?

This is, unsurprisingly, something I get asked about a lot.

I was fortunate enough to be invited on a couple of press trips to Canada on behalf of TravelMail.  The first was a sort-of eco-tourism thing taking the Rocky Mountaineer from Vancouver to Whistler and through the Rockies to Jasper, Banff and Lake Louise.  The second was in the summer of 2010 organised by Tourisme Montreal to promote the city’s first ever circus festival Montréal Complètement Cirque.

Needless to say I fell completely in love with the place and so, when JM and I started to think that we might like to pack in the London grind and were trying to choose somewhere to settle that wasn’t the UK or Australia (where he is from but where I had never even visited), and when he revealed that he’d never been to Canada but already had a Visa to work there for two years, well – Montreal just seemed like the natural choice.

How you can get in touch

As I said right at the beginning, I’m assuming this blog will only be of interest to a small minority – all of whom probably know how to reach me directly already.  However, I would delighted to read thoughts or comments that anyone reading this might have.

Please feel free to leave comments below or drop me an email at carly@carlywilkiesteven.com – I’d love to hear from you.