I’ve been in the wordsmithing trade for some time. In August 1983 I sat in front of an ‘Atex’ terminal at the Cape Times and fell into an editing and typesetting rabbit hole, mentored by the best editors in the business. A character-forming adventure as co-founder of City Late, a Capetonian Time Out wannabe followed. Eleven issues later, so did bankruptcy. On to production editor at Black Enterprise magazine, then to the new Topcar magazine, where I built the first motoring magazine website worldwide in 1995. I was approached by Fox Strategic in 1996 to establish an internet division, working with high-end corporate clients. I spent a post-dot-com-crash year in the UK in 2001 developing ‘change management’ strategies for local government, and returned as webmaster to authors Ken Follett and Wilbur Smith. In 2002, I was invited by colleague and partner Chantal Smuts of the Creative Store to work on the City of Cape Town’s staff newspaper, Contact. It sparked an enduring passion for communicating the complexities and technicalities of local government to a lay audience. Contact was honoured as the SA Publication Forum’s Best Corporate Publication four times, and Best Corporate Newspaper 12 times during our tenure. Over the past two decades we also produced various City publications, including CityNews, the Organisational Realignment Programme and 2010 Soccer World Cup communication, and numerous statutory publications.