I’ve always seem myself as a writer first and a journalist second. Over the years, I’ve used my writing skills to produce features, news, press releases, advertising copy, blurb, reports, web text and a dozen books.

I can understand that some journalists don’t want to venture out into the much larger and diverse writing world.
But if you’re versatile, it makes it not only makes it easier to pay the bills but, as you say, it can also improve your writing skills.

But while photography, subbing, feature writing etc IS journalism as much as news reporting is journalism, writing marketing copy isn’t. It’s a valid, interesting, rewarding career, but it’s not in any sense journalism.

And so my point was simply if you’re asking journalist how they’ve survived the recession, and they say they’ve survived it but only by doing things other than journalism – well, they haven’t really survived the recession as a journalist.