Newsroom Team
Surf PR’s ‘newsroom’ features a content team of talented journalists and copywriters, all of whom are travel specialists with online expertise.
Anna Melville-James
Anna believes that travel broadens the mind. She’s ridden a stallion under a smouldering volcano in Papua New Guinea, landed a hot air balloon on a main road in Virginia (and made the local news), and flirted with Warren Beatty in Palm Springs. But after eleven years of freelance travel writing she’s still waiting for someone to send her on a beach holiday…
Along the way, she’s written for The Independent on Sunday, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, OK!, The Mail on Sunday, Daily Mail, Zest and many other publications, picked up two travel writing awards and drunk enough feverish deadline coffee to sink the Titanic.
She also has an enduring love of the Internet – both for travel writing (in 2000 she was part of the editorial start-up team for the Daily Mail’s travel website This Is Travel) and for the networking potential of sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. She’s SEO savvy, knows how to write copy for clicks but wishes someone would bring back steam trains, monogrammed trunks and hats.
Steve Davey
Steve is a writer and photographer based in London. specialising in travel, location and editorial styles. His work has taken him to some 82 countries in the last 20 somewhat frenetic years. He has published two BBC books – Unforgettable Places To See Before You Die and Unforgettable Islands To Escape To Before You Die- which have sold over 500,000 copies and been translated into 30 languages. Most recently Steve has published Footprint Travel Photography, a 320 page book that covers just about anything that anyone could hope to know about travel photography.
Steve’s writing ability means that he is able to research and illustrate a wide range of features, saving the expense of sending a writer and a photographer. Steve is particularly experienced in conceiving and organising trips himself, researching, planning travel arrangements and coming back with creative images and stories, even in the most physically demanding conditions. He is able to keep to budgets and tight timescales and has experience in working with TV crews.
Steve is as happy shooting food, bars and interiors as he is photographing people, festivals and landscapes. He has hung out of planes, snow-mobiled in the Arctic and even dived with sharks all in the pursuit of the perfect image. A technically accomplished photographer he can use a full lighting kit, or make the most of available light. He has the full equipment to send pictures instantly from just about anywhere and has fully calibrated post-production facilities. A portfolio of images can be seen on http://www.stevedavey.com/galleries/folio.html
Bob Maddams
Freelance Travel Journalist
Bob’s career in travel journalism didn’t exactly get off to a flying start. On his first assignment he was pick-pocketed by a glamorous hooker in Times Square at 3 o’clock in the morning. However, the experience didn’t completely put him off.
Ten years later he is now an established, award-winning, freelance travel journalist who has written for the Times, the Guardian, the Observer, the Independent, the Sunday Telegraph, the Sun, the Daily Express various in-flight magazines and Wanderlust.
Prior to his misadventures in New York, Bob worked for many years as a copywriter at a number of London advertising agencies. This experience has equipped him to also specialise in writing SEO copy for travel websites.
Bob is also a documentary film-maker and lived in Ethiopia for many years where he taught in a community film-school.
Now based in Brighton, Bob writes about all aspects of travel but specialises in the developing world where tourism can play a valuable role in supporting sustainable development.
He doesn’t know what became of the hooker.
