Living North Reviews

I struggle to put into words how terrible working at Living North was. On my first day barely anyone dared to make eye contact. I realised very quickly that everyone's silence was because the young team were scared to open their mouths in fear of the co-owners. It soon became clear that the team were mostly post-grads with no real experience of office working. Despite the team being young it was clear that there was a lot of talent and dedication in all departments, however this didn't appear to matter to management who treated everyone poorly, apart from a couple of individuals who had been there a long time. On days when the co-owners were not in the office, these individuals would take on the role of manager and continue the tirade of nastiness towards the team. I saw countless members of the team leave within their first few days of starting at LN due to them being spoken to like dirt or shouted at in front of the rest of the office. It was truly a de-humanising experience working at this company and it's taken me a very long time to get over how myself and my colleagues were treated. Most of the team were on different salaries which was widely known and never amended. Other than making a couple of long term friendships from this role, I look back at my short time working there with regret and massive disappointment. My advice to anyone considering taking a role with this organisation is please don't do it, anything is better than working there.

As many other reviews have pointed out, the atmosphere in the office is mostly awful. Invariably, one or both of the editor and publisher, who are a couple, would be angry about something, and that unhappiness and tension spreads out into the office at large. There's solidarity among the low-paid, young workers, but most are afraid to admit that they feel out of their depth having been given no training or even, often, a basic explanation of what's expected of them. As other reviews state, new ideas are called for and then completely disregarded. I've not worked there for a while, but every time I see a copy now it's clear that the same 10 ideas are being wheeled out over and over and over again. The unwillingness to spend money on original photography, for instance, and the constant rounds of very slightly varied round-ups and visitor guides makes it feel very Groundhog Day. Universally, young, green writers are dropped in at the deep end and given far too much work to accomplish properly, and then eviscerated when they, inevitably, get something wrong. What's most disorientating is that all errors – a wrong phone number, a misspelled name, a write-up of a closed shop – are treated with the same gravity. It makes writers extremely anxious, leading to more mistakes and slower work, leading to more kick-offs, then more anxiety, and so on. I started on £14,000 – which, looking back, I'm not sure was completely kosher – which was bumped up a few months in to something more reasonable. But friends on the sales team told me that salaries were wildly unpredictable, and I've seen people brought into editorial who were summarily turfed out after a few days. It's no way to treat people. Sadly, they know that using young people straight out of uni is a way of ensuring a flow of people who a) don't know that an office isn't meant to be like this, and b) will work hard for very little. At one point I checked a list of phone extensions and discovered that fully half of the office had left within a nine-month period. I ended up having panic attacks in the office and being put on antidepressants and CBT because of the frequent public dressings-down handed out by the editor and publisher, and I know that I'm not the only person whose mental health was severely affected by working here.