But I found it the most lonely confidence-breaking soul-destroying period and I

But I found it the most lonely, confidence-breaking, soul-destroying period, and I was desperate to get back into an office.Then a friend of mine at The Mirror said there were some shifts going there. It was basically just writing about flower shows and children's holiday activities, but there was a brilliant atmosphere, and I loved the whole British tabloid scene. I started to write a few bigger features, and then Mary Riddell, who was editing the Mirror Woman pages at the time, took me on as one of her writers and helped me to develop my skills. Eventually I became a staff feature writer, and had a brilliant time doing things like staking out flats during David Mellor's affair with Antonia de Sancha, and stealing the story of Noeline and Laurie from the Sylvania Waters TV series from a furious Sun.In 1993, after a big shake-up at The Mirror, I ended up being made women's editor. I really loved editing my own section, and it was then that I decided I really wanted to get into magazines.

I heard on the grapevine that there was a vacancy at Company, because Mandi Norwood was leaving to go to Cosmo, so I got my portfolio together and went to see the Nat Mags managing director, Terry Mansfield, saying: "Interview me!" He did, several times, and amazingly, in November 1995, I got the job.For the first year it was quite tricky, trying to understand the difference between magazines and newspapers. It took me a while to realise that the true value of magazines is in their intimacy; they talk to a targeted section of people. Doing Mirror Woman I was having to deal with everyone from nine to 90 but, for Company, 18 to 26-year-old single women are the focus.The title had been enormously successful before I arrived, but it needed to be taken on a bit. It had grown on shocking sex stories, which gave it its reputation, but by then the teen magazines were doing that, so we had to rethink our whole philosophy. We're now dealing more with relationships than with sex, and are building the fashion profile, and it seems to be working. We've had three periods of circulation increase - it's now just over 284,000 - and the big challenge now is to break through the 300,000 mark..

The consultants, the professionals, the companies themselves will all tell you that it's too competitive They'll say it can't be done. They'll tell you that 35,000 people are currently embarked upon media studies courses in the UK, working, waiting and watching for one thing and one thing only - their opportunity to make it into television. And they aren't all going to make it, you'll be told; most of them aren't even going to get close. But then many of these graduates want to be TV presenters really, golden girls and boys fronting their own light entertainment peak-time variety show. They want to be Anthea or Darren, but a little bit more dangerous and a whole lot younger and hungrier. Unfortunately, peak-time presenter isn't the sort of job that gets advertised.

Perhaps inevitably, then, media studies graduates gravitate towards the jobs that are. They find themselves looking at TV production and post-production opportunities, and reading only as far as the TV part. And, guess what, they find that these positions are just as sought after, just as competitive, and ultimately, if they are successful, just as rewarding as any in the rest of the TV business."TV production and post-production covers so many different jobs, so many specialities, that no employer is going to look twice at a CV that says simply how much they want to be in TV," says Diane Freeman, deputy chief executive of Pact, the independent producers' association. "But these are still the type of CVs that continue to flood in."The single most important thing for anyone wanting to work in the production industry is to decide what exactly it is they want to do - whether, for example, it's the management or the technical side that appeals to them, whether they would prefer to work on location or to be office bound - and then take a look at what skills they have, and exactly where those skills are deficient."That isn't necessarily going to make it any easier to break into the ranks, but it's not a bad place to start. Another good place is at Skillset, the industry training organisation for the whole of broadcast film and video, which produces the standard handbook for would-be entrants.