Merry Christmas!

Christmas greetings from Sound Screen! No doubt you’ll be enjoying the presents, alcohol and food associated with Big J’s birthday, and some of you may also feel the need to celebrate the original reasons behind the festive holiday. Whatever the case, enjoying quality time with family and friends is the big thing on most people’s minds and that’s what matters the most in this day and age.

We’re quite the family ourselves here at Sound Screen. However, in recent months, due to a number of reasons and personal commitments, we’ve struggled to deliver the same consistent articles. That’s why we want you to join the family here.

In the New Year, we’re changing our approach and hopefully our website design will follow suit. The real thing we’re looking for is features. While we also believe that music and film news sites are ten-a-penny, we don’t really have the staff or time to daily dedicate ourselves to delivering the latest gossip. We still want to do our gig/album/film reviews, though again, new releases happen so often that it’s hard to keep track of them at even a basic level, especially with skeleton staff in full-time jobs away from Sound Screen. If you want to do these? We’d love to put them up! We’ll even do the occasional ones ourselves.

Features-wise, Sound Screen has this year created Spotify Sundays, One Hit Wonderland, Album and Artist Retrospectives and Stop Me If You’ve Heard These Ones Before. The movie side of the site will follow suit, of course. Still, we want – no, need – more input from people passionate about music and film. We have a strong editing team and we do this all for free, and our only priority is to entertain. Sadly, we also need to earn money in the real world. Yeah,we know… it sucks.

Nonetheless, while we can’t really promise you fame and fortune, we can certainly help you improve your writing skills through constant contact, while work here can also being a cracking addition to the CV of anyone trying to break the notoriously tough and competitive field of journalism (we’ll even give you a reference, if you help us and get to know us well enough!).

If you want to get involved, get yourself to our contact page and get in touch with our editors. The most successful way would be to copy all emails into the box, just to make sure.

We don’t want a huge commitment – we’re not going to demand a dozen articles a week, for example – and we certainly won’t pester you unless you give us good reason to. Even then, it’ll be friendly enough. Just let us know and we’ll give you all the support and knowledge we have to help you develop your skills.

Anyway, to wish you well on your holidays, here’s a true Sound Screen special: the best Christmas song from the best Christmas film. That’s right, you guessed it! It’s ‘Christmas in Hollis’ by Run DMC from the epic Die Hard. Have a good one.

By Matt Gardner