Lew Baxter
http://cities500.com
Lew Baxter is a writer and journalist fired by Celtic passions forged through his associations to Scotland and Ireland; and he currently lives in Wales. As well as co-founding Cities500, he runs the UK based Action Media specialist features agency and is an associate of Barge Pole Press, a worldwide collaboration of award winning writers, photographers and graphic designers.
He has over thirty-five years experience as a journalist, variously with the Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph, the Scotsman, the Daily Post and the Sunday Mirror in the UK, and a number of specialist publications in the USA. He has also written for China Daily, the Shanghai Star and the Hong Kong Standard amongst others in the Far East. He has edited a range of newspapers and magazines, including the UK arts and cultural monthly Scene Out, the business magazine Trident and the travel and tourist magazine Trax.
He spent a number of years in China where he was latterly - through to late 1999 - bureau chief of Sino Media Limited, a multinational media agency, following a period as Far East bureau chief for the USA owned Phillips Publishing International Group. At one stage he was consultant English language editor for the multi-lingual weekly magazine Beijing Review published by the Foreign Languages Press. He also operated in the same capacity at the Xinhua News Agency in Beijing, on both its international and domestic news desks. He was further involved as a writer consultant with Xinhua’s expanding ‘Oil and Gas Technology’ focused editorial section, as a result of his earlier experience as editor of International Offshore Oil Weekly. For several years he contributed the main essays on China for the Summit Conferences of the World Economic Development Congress, staged in various international locations. The essays explored the economic challenge of China in the 21st Century and focused on its major urban and infrastructure issues.
His books include The Fool on the Hill, A Tale of Tall Towers and My Beatles Hell. He is also editor-in-chief of the Cities500 photo essay books series which currently include: Urban Reflections - a collaboration with Hewlett-Packard - which focuses on Europe, the Middle East and Africa; The Friendship Arch which puts the focus on Shanghai; World Heritage City, a book inspired by UNESCO with a foreword by British prime minister Tony Blair; and a photographic commemoration of the UK’s Wirral peninsula, with a foreword by Lord Hunt.