Journalist > Podcaster > Writer
I’m Emma Gunavardhana, but Emma Guns, has become my moniker because my full name didn’t fit on Instagram when I joined so I shortened it to fit, not realising it’d become such a huge part of my work causing it to stick.
I’ve been a journalist for 25 years and spent ten of those editing the fashion and beauty section of OK! magazine. In 2016 I launched my podcast The Emma Guns Show, which has had over 20 million global downloads to date.
In my career, I have interviewed Bette Midler, the former Head of Negotiation for the FBI, shared my experience of and recovery from binge eating disorder, interviewed a former Secret Service agent who worked in the security detail for the Clintons, The Bushes and the Obamas and I’ve committed interviews with Christina Aguilera, Jessica Alba and Simon Cowell to tape too.
I trained as a journalist but in the last decade I’ve benched my pen for audio and video content, but the urge to write became too strong, which is why I am here on Substack.
One of the reasons I started my podcast was because there were subjects I wanted to explore and people I wanted to talk to that weren’t quite right for the mainstream titles I was writing for. Now that podcasts have gone mainstream and have become so metric-driven, I have come back to the written word to explore those things that might not be so attention-grabbing on such busy mediums.
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Something we ‘old school’ content creators struggle with is getting paid for our work. We seem to be the generation who believes ‘if you build it, they will come’ but times have moved on and that’s just bad business. If you like the free column I publish every week or have been tantalised by the longer reads that don’t sit behind a paywall and want more, then I encourage you to become a subscriber by entering your email below and choosing a subscription.
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