Katie Wheatley
Katie Wheatley is an award-nominated senior reporter at the Northampton Chronicle & Echo who covers food, businesses and hospitality, using campaigns, profiles and practical features to give a clear voice to the people behind them. Her reporting stands out for combining service pieces such as recipes with sustained, issues-led campaigns that run across multiple stories. She treats food coverage as part of a wider picture of how venues, entrepreneurs and community groups shape everyday life, rather than as standalone lifestyle content.
Food features and practical recipes
Within her food beat, Wheatley writes pieces that centre on named cooks and bakers sharing recipes in full, inviting readers to make the dishes themselves. Her feature on a Britain’s Best Cake competition winner sharing a recipe for a seasonal sweet treat shows how she ties food stories to clear, step-by-step guidance and a sense of occasion, pitching them as something readers can bring into their own kitchens. She favours accessible language and straightforward framing, with headlines that promise a result — a cake that “steals the summer season” — rather than abstract commentary.
This recipe-led approach fits with her broader style of service journalism, where food is a route into celebrating individual achievement and craft. The focus is less on restaurant reviewing and more on the people who bake, cook or run hospitality venues, and what readers can learn or try as a result. Her food stories often double as soft profiles, giving space to how winners and business owners reach milestones and what they hope readers will take from their work.
Profiles of businesses and hospitality venues
Wheatley consistently reports on businesses and hospitality, with a particular emphasis on explaining what they offer and why they matter. She describes her work as giving “a profile and voice to businesses” and fighting for important issues that affect them. That focus runs through features that spotlight independent enterprises and community-led ventures, often framed around a clear hook such as an award, a new opening or a milestone, and then built out into a human story.
Her pieces are usually structured as straightforward news or feature stories rather than critic-style reviews, with detail on what a venue does, who runs it and how it connects to wider trends in trade and hospitality. Feedback from organisations she has featured highlights that she brings out their origins and aims, suggesting a reporting style that is strongly interview-led and aimed at making small operators legible to a wider audience. Across these stories, she balances positive coverage of success with attention to challenges, drawing on her campaign experience to show when businesses are grappling with issues such as costs, staffing or changing customer habits.
Campaigns and community-focused reporting
Campaign work is central to Wheatley’s journalism. She is described as a four- or five-time campaign lead, and as someone who uses the paper to fight for important issues. Her campaigns are grounded in specific, practical goals and often involve sustained coverage over time, rather than one-off stories. One such strand involves litter and environmental clean-ups, where she works alongside volunteer groups to highlight the impact of waste and to encourage readers to join organised efforts to address it. In this kind of reporting she acts as a convenor, giving space to organisers, public bodies and residents while keeping the focus on tangible outcomes.
She also uses curated features to celebrate community figures, such as her International Women’s Day piece profiling ten inspirational women and their contributions. That article combines list-based formatting with short, focused profiles, aligning with her habit of turning broad observances into specific stories about named individuals. Across these community pieces, Wheatley tends to emphasise recognition and visibility — who is doing the work, what they have achieved, and how readers can either support them or mirror their actions.
Reporting across group titles and formats
Although based at the Chronicle & Echo, Wheatley’s reporting appears across sister titles, including regional newspapers and digital platforms in the same group. This syndication means her food and community stories can reach audiences beyond the core paper, and she also writes more general news pieces such as a story on a former Formula 1 racing driver receiving a driving ban. Earlier in her career she contributed feature material to another city daily’s weekend supplement, including a front-cover piece, which shows a longstanding focus on narrative-led, lifestyle-adjacent journalism.
Across these different outlets and formats, the through-line of her work is consistent: she uses clear, news-style writing to run campaigns, celebrate people and explain the work of businesses and hospitality venues, often with food and everyday experiences as the entry point. For anyone looking to place a story, she is most effective when there is a human face, a practical angle — such as a recipe, initiative or campaign goal — and a clear sense of what change or recognition the piece is meant to achieve.
4 more food journalists.
Adam Maidment
Adam Maidment is a senior What's On and LGBTQ+ reporter whose food and leisure coverage is built around immersive, first-person reporting and concrete detail. He works at the Manchester Evening News, focusing on new restaurant and bar openings, regular food reviews, gig and event coverage, and issues affecting LGBTQ+ people. He treats restaurants, pubs, bars and experiences as stories about place, people and community, explaining what makes a venue different and how it fits into the local dining scene. His pieces cover pricing, service, atmosphere, crowds and concept, and he is willing to be critical when gimmicks undermine the experience. He writes character-led pub profiles, works shifts, joins treasure hunts and attends major cultural events, inviting readers to follow what he does and use his straightforward assessments to decide where to eat, drink and spend time.
Alice Lorenzato-Lloyd
Alice Lorenzato-Lloyd is editor at Secret Manchester, where she treats food as part of how people live in the city, not as an isolated subject. She covers restaurants, bars, street food and casual dining, linking new openings and food trends to neighbourhood change, local businesses and everyday routines. Her pieces focus on accessible spots, comfort dishes like pizza and tacos, and clear details of menus, presentation, atmosphere and practical information such as opening hours and booking. She often combines food, drink and live events, producing guides to venues for major sports tournaments and themed pop-ups as part of wider things to do. Alice also reports on hospitality business pressures, city-centre public spaces, charity initiatives, transport and infrastructure, always showing how food and drink fit into community and lifestyle stories. She previously wrote for other regional “Secret” sites as a staff writer and describes herself as a writer and food fanatic.
Aly Walansky
Aly Walansky specializes in service-driven food coverage that treats cocktails and dining as tools for celebration, focusing on how logistics, ordering options, and menu choices turn everyday meals and major holidays into shared experiences. She is a longtime food and travel journalist now writing for Forbes, where her beat centers on cocktails and occasion-driven dining. Her work includes practical, expert-driven roundups such as guides to many variations on the classic martini, shipped-meals gift lists for Mother’s Day, and accessible formats for Thanksgiving and other holidays. She reports through structured lists, restaurant features, and menu-focused profiles that highlight signature dishes and dining trends. Across outlets, she extends this approach to home cooking, grocery shopping, and recipes, and runs a newsletter that shares her current assignments and industry commentary.
Ben Hurst
Ben Hurst joins food, entertainment and cost-of-living angles, treating cooking, groceries and celebrity stories as everyday decisions for readers. He is Head of Lifestyle and Money at WalesOnline, shaping practical, trending coverage that is tightly written, headline-led and easy to scan and share. His food reporting leans on TV chefs and supermarket behaviour, turning their advice and product changes into clear tips and consumer explainers focused on value for money and household budgets. He also writes extensively about TV and celebrity figures, using recognisable names to carry stories about health, family challenges, cancer treatment and resilience. Alongside these, he produces visual, nostalgia-driven galleries and concise explainers on wide-interest phenomena, drawing on a senior newsroom background that includes executive editor, video lead and news editor roles.