Callum Carson
Callum Carson is a sports journalist whose work is built around local club sport and the communities that gather around it. He has spent around a decade covering Livingston FC and wider West Lothian sport, and now writes across Scottish local titles while keeping regional football as the core of his reporting.
Livingston FC and West Lothian sport
Carson’s longest-running strand of work centres on Livingston FC and the broader sporting scene in West Lothian. During his years with the West Lothian Courier he focused on the club and “sport in the area,” a brief he later carried into his own West Lothian Sport project when he launched it to continue dedicated coverage of the local scene. That outlet is framed explicitly as a way to get back to reporting on Livingston FC and area sport, underlining how closely his journalism is tied to the fortunes of the club and its surrounding competitions.
His coverage in this space treats football and other local sport as part of the same ecosystem, with club stories positioned within the wider context of the region’s sporting identity.
Human stories and awareness campaigns around sport
Alongside match and club-focused pieces, Carson writes human-centred stories that sit at the intersection of sport, health and public awareness. His article on John Davidson’s role in helping Scottish Borders Council highlight Tourette’s Awareness Month is an example of how he follows a campaign through the people driving it, foregrounding lived experience and the local institutions that support it. In that kind of coverage he uses the language of awareness days, council initiatives and community events rather than only on-field detail, showing an interest in how sport-adjacent figures and organisations shape understanding of neurological and mental health conditions.
These pieces fit alongside his sports work without breaking tone, extending his beat into stories where public bodies and campaigners work together in the same communities his club coverage serves.
Work across Scottish local titles
Carson’s portfolio spans several thousand published articles across local and regional outlets, with his work appearing in titles such as the West Lothian Courier, Kilmarnock Standard, Irvine Herald, Ayrshire Live, Airdrie & Coatbridge Advertiser, Belfast Live and other newspapers and digital platforms.
Across these mastheads his reporting is described as focused mainly on sport, with social events and local gatherings forming a secondary strand of his output. He works as a freelance sports journalist as well as a copy editor and proofreader, which gives him a broad workload while keeping sport as the organising theme of his professional identity. That mix of roles means he can move between straight sports coverage and more general assignment work, but recurring attention to club football and regional sport remains the distinguishing through-line.
Collectively, this body of work marks him out as a reporter whose primary lens is local and regional sport, and whose distinctive contribution is the way he ties those beats to the everyday institutions and campaigns that share the same communities.
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