Susan Grossman

Ex BBC journalist @ILM-UK certified #Coach. Career goals, job progression, interviews. Visiting Lecturer @citylit @WestminsterUni @CityStGeorges

[Reuters News Agency @ReutersAgency]

Join the Digital News Report 2026 Regional Webinar Series to explore the trends shaping the future of journalism, and what they mean for your organisation. From young audiences to platform shifts, get actionable insights by region. Secure your place: https://t.co/gqoOBiraWK

[Susan Grossman @wordsallowed]

My fast track interviewing skills for journalists is coming up @citylit June 24 and 25th 10.30-13.00 remote. See you there? @CityLitWriting
https://t.co/w4COOOEELx

[Index on Censorship @IndexCensorship]

Index on Censorship is hiring!

We are looking for a journalist who is passionate about freedom of expression to join our editorial team as our new senior editor.

Deadline to apply: Friday 19 June.

Learn more: https://t.co/s0ERJoctQx

[Sally Hayden @sallyhayd]

Channel 4 hiring a researcher for the Dispatches investigations unit. #journojobs https://t.co/P49cq4qyDs

[Olivia-Anne Cleary @OliviaACleary]

Keen to add experienced freelancers who specialise in U.K. politics to my pool.
If that’s you, and you’re available for assignments, feel free to send your CV over to [email protected].
#journorequest

[JournoJobs @PressPlugsJobs]

NEW SCIENTIST! Is looking for Health and Medical Science News Reporter. Learn more below 👇 https://t.co/EnYitrpf6c #JournoJobs #Journalists #Freelance

[JournoJobs @PressPlugsJobs]

SLATE MAGAZINE! Is looking for narrative feature pitches. Learn more below 👇 https://t.co/jOmf5ViQ1S #JournoJobs #Journalists #Freelance

[Em P @ThisIsEmPx]

Still cannot get over these two cash machine engineers cash trapping in Chelmsford last week. Straight off the bus from Wethersfield and straight to work.

[Gabriel Pogrund @Gabriel_Pogrund]

Final 24 hours to apply for the deputy role in the Sunday Times Insight Team
https://t.co/lLRe9DD7T2

[NUJ London Freelance @NUJ_LFB]

Freelance Fees Guide - freshly updated - and not all bad news! 🤑

We need your help. Please tell us about your best rates - in strict confidence and anonymity. It helps freelancers negotiate better.

#RateForTheJob #FreelanceJournalism

Submit here: https://t.co/y4yF1BdlSe

[JournoJobs @PressPlugsJobs]

THE TELEGRAPH! Is looking for an editor and a deputy to lead a brand new team - Real Life. Find out more below 👇 https://t.co/mfrPGqAK3M #Journalists #JournoJobs #Freelance

[IPSO (Independent Press Standards Organisation) @IpsoNews]

Why journalists knock on people’s doors and how is it regulated? How does #doorstepping serve the #publicinterest and what are the challenges? Read more here: https://t.co/nVLthcI1Wg #Doorknocking #IPSORegulated #LookfortheIPSOMark

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Audrey van der Meer.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.

The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.

Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.

Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.

The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.

Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.

Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.

Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.

Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.

Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.

Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.

The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.

The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.

That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.

Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.

Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.

You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.

The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.

Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

[JournoJobs @PressPlugsJobs]

ICONIC MEDIA! Is launching a major hiring drive that will create 50 new journalism roles. For more details, click below 👇 https://t.co/Fag8t5KoOG #Journalism #Journalists #Freelance #JournoJobs

[John Cleese @JohnCleese]

I hope the Republicans will read this

Or at least get someone to read it to them

[Susan Grossman @wordsallowed]

Not enough people, apparently #BBCVerify

[S Sebag Montefiore @simonmontefiore]

BBC quietly shelves Verify blog as it learns truth about who reads it

https://t.co/Cs0gtIaZM9

[Patrick Caldwell @patcaldwell]

I’ve got another opening on my team! Come work for the Washington Post as a Political Enterprise Reporter. We're looking for an “investigative-minded reporter to cover politics, someone who can report authoritatively and write the definitive stories of our political era.” 1/4

[Hannah Summers @hansummers]

Just catching up on this brilliant reporting from @louisetickle who took on the MoD after the government attempted to ban her from reporting that an abusive father was a member of the special forces. https://t.co/YtM6NnbcSv

[Rachel Bradley @RachBradleyITV]

Come and work with us! A rare and exciting opportunity to become a Political Correspondent in the award winning ITV News political team.
Apply below 👇
https://t.co/E9Jd5lPxNy

[Committee to Protect Journalists @pressfreedom]

Join our team! CPJ is #hiring a remote communications associate to develop and implement communications strategies to maximize the impact of CPJ’s work in defense of press freedom worldwide.

🗓️ Deadline is May 18, 2026.

Apply today: https://t.co/erPXYQ1n0u