I travelled to Orkney last summer to research this, though of course it’s up to date with all the latest news developments. The article looks two main types of alternative energy – the research and development of marine energy (wave and tidal power) and the community-owned wind turbines on the smaller islands.

BusinessWeek is my first US client in journalism. (In the blogging space, I also write for EcoSalon). Talk about starting at the top! I hope to write more for BusinessWeek soon.

The faculty included brilliant writers such as Tim Cahill and photographers and also editors and agents. The access was superb. The conference was quite intimate – we had 75 students and over 30 faculty members – and since we were there for four days, there were plenty of formal and informal opportunities to meet people.

For me it was a nice blend between networking and working on craft. I took Larry Habegger and Henry Shukman’s personal essay and memoir workshop in the mornings, which I very much enjoyed. I also took inspiration from the readings and talks from published writers and photographers – and from the many book-filled shelves in the enormous and wonderful Book Passage store.

I want to get more serious about travel writing as I enjoy both the travel and the creative style of writing. I’m also very much looking for new markets now that I’m based in the US. This is particularly true since Anyway magazine, which commissioned a lot of my foreign reportage, is on hiatus.

I arrived here yesterday and I’m focusing first on getting settled in my new home and sorting out the paperwork to be allowed to work here in the US. Hopefully this won’t take too long because I’m keen to start writing for some US publications and also to report from the West Coast for British and Australian publications. There is plenty to write about, whether in my specialist fields of media, social reportage and the environment, or as a travel writer exploring California and the Pacific North-West.

I interviewed some of Wade’s current and former colleagues at News International, including her former editor at the News of the World, Phil Hall.

The full story is in The Australian’s Media section today and online.

The main conference and exhibition was in Old Billingsgate, former fish markets in the City of London, with the opening party at Kensington Palace and the closing party at the Saatchi Gallery on King’s Road.

The conference had a live website, fipplive09.com. I was hired to write breaking news stories for the website, along with other people who would be writing blog posts and uploading photographs and video. I was also asked to write Twitter updates in real time from the conference sessions and the parties.

I was particularly pleased with how the Twitter coverage worked out. I pitched the idea to the PPA back in January and they were keen. We talked about options but I encouraged them to set up a dedicated account rather than piggy-backing off my personal account so that only people who were interested in receiving a high volume of conference coverage would see the tweets.

By the end of the two days we had 571 followers to the @fipp2009 account and dozens of people interacting by retweeting or replying to my tweets and even translating them into Portugese!

The great thing was that extended the reach of the conference to an audience that couldn’t be there in person. It also provided content for the website because we set up a feed to pull the tweets on to fipplive09.com. We used the #fipp09 hashtag to make it easier for people to search for related content on Twitter, though I saw that others had used #fipp as well.

I think Twitter can work really well for conferences but I think a dedicated account is definitely the way to go (or live-blogging if you are doing it unofficially). It can get very tedious when someone’s feed is suddenly full of conference reportage when it’s not what their followers have signed on for. Twitter is an open medium and anyone can do it but if you are wanting to do it professionally on behalf of a conference you need to find the right person – someone who can touch type and has the skill to condense concepts and quotes to 140 characters.

Meanwhile, for a bit of fun do check out the photos from the Saatchi Gallery closing party – that’s me and my man in the Finnish bubble chair.

Please read my post on my travel site Roaming Tales, to see why I’m qualified and how you can help me get the job.

Thank you.

The story is largely based on an one-on-one interview I did with Hunt – one of only two she gave in the months after taking the job last year (the other was to Britain’s Daily Telegraph).

Hunt is arguably the second most powerful woman in British television – after Jana Bennett, the director of BBC Vision. She is also an Australian by birth.

Read the Jay Hunt profile here.