Network for the creative industry’s working-class members launches

Jed Hallam, head of Mediabrands Content Studio, has created a network for people who are working-class or from a working-class background in the creative industries.

Common People is open to people in publishing, music, gaming, advertising, TV and film, theatre, art and design, and start-ups, and one area Hallam will look at is encouraging industries to reduce barriers to entry.

“I’ve got friends in fashion who had to be unpaid runners for three years. That’s totally available for someone from a working-class background,” he told The Bookseller. “Even the fact that there are jobs like runners or publishing assistants doesn’t come up in working-class conversations.”

A second focus of the group is advancement and helping people progress in their career once they gain a foothold in their chosen profession, and a third is encouraging successful people from working-class backgrounds to share their stories.

Hallam is from an ex-mining village in Derbyshire and was told to carry on with his job at Sainsbury’s when he spoke to a careers advisor in school about going to Sixth Form.

“I’ve had lots of conversations about this over the past few years and on Sunday someone sent me a link to an Instagram thread about class discrimination. I thought, enough is enough,” he said. “I wondered if I could set up a WhatsApp group and expected maybe 30 or 40 members, but it took off like a bottle rocket. Within 24 hours we had to move out of WhatsApp and launch a Slack group.

“People are having conversations saying things like, ‘I’ve worked in my industry for 20 years but I didn’t feel like I fit, but now I do because I’ve found my people’. That was very emotional for me.”

Common People currently has 340 people in the Slack group, with good representation across publishing, fashion, gaming, music and advertising, but there are still gaps when it comes to other industries.

Hallam will run the network with Emma Hopkins, creative solutions UK lead at Spotify; Lisa Thompson, planning director at Wavemaker North; Louise Richardson, director of marketing (Europe) at Pinterest; Sarah Sutton, global media director at Oatly; and Tom Armstrong, founder and editor of The Move. Anyone who wishes to get involved can contact him via Twitter.