New Board Member for Social Media & Web

We’d like to introduce you to the new board member who will all be playing an active role in making this yet another successful year for the BPPA and British Press Photography.
I am Julie Edwards and I have been a press photographer for just over 10 years, working mainly in the Entertainment Industry.
I have already introduced a series to the BPPA website called “Members Talks” but my second task is to ensure that all the new (and old) board members write an introduction or “about me” focused not on their photography but what they believe the BPPA should be and how they will help achieve that. It’s not fair that I ask others to do this without putting pen to paper myself first.
With this in mind, what follows is not the normal “I’m a photographer because I grew up surrounded by photography” type introduction  (although I did as my dad was in newspaper distribution and I was surrounded by all the papers every day).
At school I was a maths head and started my career just as the desktop computer revolution started. My father said “computers are the future”, so I combined my maths and design talent in the drawing office running computer aided design systems. This career grew and I ended up as a consultant selling and implementing some of the most advanced design solutions on PC’s, starting my own software company in the 90’s as the internet era was in it’s infancy. Luckily I was working with one of the largest organisations in the CAD field whose investment in Marketing and Sales training was second to none which I benefited from greatly. In about 2007 I gave this all up with a huge change in direction to return to my first love: photography. Well not just photography, press photography, using my sales and marketing skills to get into positions quite quickly that normally take many years in the industry.
Why do I detail this past? My portfolio for the BPPA is Web & Social media. I have a past well rooted in technology and problem solving, anyone who knows me knows I have some of the most bleeding edge and automated workflows possible. This gives me the right background to help to bring the BPPA right up to date into a modern, forward looking, helpful association that press photographers think vital to be part of.
UK Press photographers are not always the most creative but they are without doubt the most versatile, quick thinking and resourceful photographers on the planet. Our work is seen every single day by millions of people. No other group of photographers have their work this visible and yet, only last week, on a train, I was likened to being “no higher than an Estate Agent”. Why do we have this reputation? Probably because the only time we are in the limelight is when it is negative (privacy intrusion etc). The BPPA needs to help change that, it needs to show the world what we do and the web is the perfect platform for this. 
Julie