Hi, I'm Sam Fenwick and I've always had a passion for writing. After scandalising my English teachers with dystopian political satire and a rather racy story about vampires in my teenage years, it took a bit of a back seat when I studied Biochemistry at the University of Southampton. Afterwards, I took some time out to write my first (still unpublished) novel. It's about aliens that look like Christmas puddings invading Earth because they think we eat their young every Christmas and they've been driven nearly insane by our bad television.
A chance meeting while temping led me to work at Tradeship Publications (the publishers of International Cement Review). That launched my career in journalism, which culminated in a four year stint as the editor of Land Mobile (covering wireless communications for businesses) and Critical Communications Today – both of which focus on two-way radio. On one occasion, I had to give a speech to the UK's business radio industry, despite having been given about 10 minutes' notice. Fortunately, I can think on my feet and it was very well received.
One of the things I enjoyed about my time with these magazines was the graphics. I frequently provided our designer with a short-list of stock images to support the text for my articles, had a lot of say on the choice of front-cover image and also provided my own photos when covering events or doing in-person case studies. I have a keen eye for composition and negative space.
While writing marketing copy is not supposed to be the job of a magazine editor, the realities of working in the twilight era of B2B print journalism made it a necessity at times. I often got called in to help advertisers with their advertorials, sometimes writing them from scratch. Fortunately, due to a stint freelancing for Tube Tech International, I'd done this before. I got a real taste for writing a good case study, using the problem/solution format. I'm a big fan of talking about the snags that were encountered along the way rather than just implying that it was all smooth sailing. How a company works with you when things go wrong tells you far more about their attitude and reliability than anything else.
A serendipitous meeting led to me becoming an analyst at Opensignal, a network analytics company, for five and half years. During this time, I wrote reports and insights, mostly using the company's proprietary crowd-sourced data and attended industry events. It also massively honed my quantitative skills – mainly Excel, with some SQL and QGIS. I also developed an in-house reputation for my attention to detail and line-edited the majority of the other analysts' work.
Across my career, I've covered many different industries (cement, energy, sustainability, oil refining, two-way radio and mobile telecoms). I therefore have a knack for quickly getting up to speed with new beats and topics.
I left Opensignal in July 2025 as I felt the time was right for a new challenge. I'm currently looking for a new company to call home, while also working on my second novel which is about a civil servant in the UK with no sense of smell trying to stop a carnivorous plant, which has a scent that does strange things to the human brain.
Outside of my professional life, I spend my time walking my Samoyed dog, Merlin, and exploring cities and sampling good food with my wife. I'm a geek at heart, having far far too many toy soldiers (mainly Warhammer), which I paint to a decent tabletop standard. I'm also a huge Terry Pratchett fan, being rather envious of the way in which there's so much of himself in his work that he's effectively uploaded himself into the human 'cloud'.