ALAN MARTIN
Freelance writer, editor, reviewer and journalist
ABOUT ME
Hello. I'm Alan and I'm a freelance writer in London. To my knowledge, I'm the only person in the Venn diagram of people who've written for both The New Statesman and Nuts. My LinkedIn profile contains a false qualification, but it was for a feature exposing something silly about the site, so I think it's basically okay?
Elsewhere, I have bylines in Wired, CNET, Gizmodo UK (RIP), ShortList, NME TechRadar, The Independent, The Evening Standard, City Metric, Macworld, Pocket Gamer, Expert Reviews, Coach, The Inquirer (RIP), Rock Paper Shotgun, Tom's Guide, T3, PC Pro, IT Pro, Stuff, Wareable and Trusted Reviews amongst others. Some of my words have also been syndicated by The Mirror, Business Insider, Ars Technica, Metro and MSN. I'm also no stranger to commercial work and have created content for brands such as Microsoft, OnePlus, Currys, Tesco, Merrell, Red Bull, ESET, LG and Timberland.
Between 2015 and 2018, I worked exclusively for Alphr at Dennis Publishing, working on over 1,800 articles – first as Science Editor, then News Editor, Deputy Editor and finally Acting Editor. (Important note: Alphr was disappointingly abandoned and eventually sold off to another publisher after I left - so if you visit the site now, it doesn't bear much relation to my time in charge. In the most diplomatic way possible: don't judge me.)
News stories with personality and wit; consumer product reviews; interesting and memorable interviews; funny, viral or serious lists; in-depth analysis or long-form features. Whatever you need a freelance writer for, drop me a line – I'd love to hear from you.
FREELANCE WRITING AND EDITING SERVICES
News coverage
I was promoted to news editor at Alphr because of my speed and accuracy with news stories.
Editing
I've been a senior editor, news editor, science editor, deputy editor and acting editor. In other words, I'm very comfortable editing.
Copywriting
Starting out my career in copywriting, I know how to use language in a compelling way to advance brands.
Reviews
I've reviewed phones, games, music, tablets, laptops, drones, wearables, running watches and various gadgets.
Interviews
Over numerous features I've interviewed numerous industry figures, academics and celebrities for interesting quotes and expert insight.
SEO-friendly content
I've been practicing SEO techniques since my very first job when you still had to worry about Yahoo and Ask Jeeves...
FREELANCE WRITING SAMPLES
Professor Richard Susskind has bad news for your children. “We’re training young people to be good at what machines are already good at,” he says during a discussion with Emma Barnett at FutureFest. In Susskind’s latest book, co-authored with his son, he explores the very real possibility that future experts will lose their jobs to artificial...READ MORE
Say what you like about Nick Clegg (and history suggests you will in the comments), he's certainly persistent. Despite approval ratings plummeting by over 100 points in five years, the Lib Dem leader...READ MORE
In space, no one can hear you scream, as the poster for Alien helpfully reminded us. That’s bad enough in a movie, but worse if you’re a colonist on Mars, the thing you’re screaming is “Help, I think my leg is broken”, and the nearest hospital is some 34m miles away back on Earth. READ MORE
Board games are going through something of a renaissance. You wouldn’t know it by grabbing the nearest Argos catalogue, where the lineup seems to have barely changed since the 80s. Yes, you can still buy Cluedo, Monopoly and Risk, but for the love of God don’t....READ MORE
When Iain Duncan Smith visited Glasgow's Easterhouse Estate in 2002, it was easy to be cynical about motives. But the event has gone down in parliamentary folklore as the 'Easterhouse Epiphany' -- a day that completely changed the MP for Chingford and Woodford Green's outlook on welfare and...READ MORE
“We work with the smartest,” the website of Catapult Sports proudly proclaims, before rattling off the digested highlights of 1,500 teams across 30 different sports. I find that mildly reassuring as I strap on the tracker for a journalists’ five-a-side tournament – after all, nobody thought Leicester City were...READ MORE
Over the past few years, mobile devices and wearables have been passively or actively tracking a huge amount of personal data about us. Equipped with sensors from heart-rate tracking to GPS, they routinely capture all kinds of metrics and store them...READ MORE
What if the reason social media seems to cause so many problems is that our brains just haven’t evolved to cope? That’s the contention of evolutionary anthropologist Dr Anna Machin...READ MORE
I think it was around the two-hour mark where I lost the will to live. I’d set out to find out how people are selling smartphones on shopping channels in an era where internet shopping is everywhere... READ MORE
Back in 2016 I attended the launch of the Samsung Galaxy Note 7. I remember it because I was pulled out of the queue, frisked and had my bag searched. It’s something of an irony that while there were no explosives about my person, there were about 30 on the show floor just 50 yards away....READ MORE
Thanks to various reviews and the fact that Amazon bundles Echo Dots like they're toys in packets of breakfast cereal, I've amassed quite a few smart speakers. Amazon is listening to everything I do, but any concern I might have about privacy issues is always quietly reassured by one thing: Alexa isn't very smart, is it?
There was a time when 'fake news' wasn’t part of the internet lexicon. As Google Trends shows, that changed on November 8 2016 when Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, and it has been part of our collective vocabulary ever since.READ MORE
International eSports is becoming serious business, and with serious business comes serious money: last year the biggest prize pot ever of $1.42m went to a Swedish Dota 2 team.But with this explosion of interest comes a cautionary tale of ..READ MORE
Relax, Huawei fans: you haven’t just slept through a decade. Rather than following up the rather excellent Huawei P10 with the P11 through P19, the Chinese giant has instead opted to cut to the chase and just bring out the P20 and P20 Pro. In the case of the P20 Pro, the jump in numbers is completely...READ MORE
A set of graphs doing the rounds on Twitter recently purported to show the changes in how heterosexual and homosexual couples meet. While categories such as "through friends", "in a bar", and "at school/work" were either declining or holding steady, one category has exploded in the last decade: "met online". According to these... READ MORE