Nine miles inland from Whitby in the middle of the North York Moors National Park is the small honeypot village of Goathland. It's here that you'll find CJS

CJS - what's that then?

Crazy Jumping Snails? Complete Juniper Solutions? In reality nothing quite so exotic; CJS stands for Countryside Jobs Service, which as a happy reader once memorably said "does what it says on the tin". CJS provides a one-stop shop for everyone in the countryside, conservation, ecology and wildlife sectors. You'll find adverts for jobs and volunteer placements, there is a daily news service, a full training directory of courses plus a large library of in-depth information covering the whole industry - quite a bit more than the original single function of a jobs service for countryside staff. All of this can be found on the CJS website: countryside-jobs.com 

From small beginnings

In July 1994 the first edition of CJS Weekly landed on doormats, a genuine kitchen table operation in those days.  It seems like it was only five minutes ago that we were stuffing sheets of A4 from a daisy-wheel printer into multi-sized, shaped (and even perfumed) self addressed envelopes. CJS founders, Niall and Anthea Carson took on the task of converting those snippets into a cohesive newsletter, As word spread of how good this new service was, subscriber numbers increased and the daisy-wheel printer was swapped for a dot-matrix before the heat from the printwheel caused the office to combust.  In those early days there was no paid advertising only the Standard Linage which was all free; with the increase of outside funding and funding partners needing to use logos (even on a free advert) we started taking paid adverts. CJS has continued to grow following the natural progression of the countryside sector with just a gentle nudge every now and then.  Kerryn Humphreys took over as Editor when Niall retired in 2006 and CJS has continued to grow. The Team now has five (soon to be six we hope) members plus office dogs, people often can't believe that it's just our small team operating from our lovely rural spot producing the behemoth that is CJS, covering three newsletters, one quarterly publication and the huge website - sometimes I'm not sure I do either!

Reasons to be proud

We're incredibly proud that in nearly 30 years we have never missed a deadline despite some very trying circumstances ranging from seriously broken websites and multi-day power cuts to needing a large digger to excavate several feet of snow from the lane to the office.

We're just as proud that we hold true to Niall and Anthea's principals of putting back as much into conserving the countryside as possible, CJS is run along Social Enterprise principals.  We still offer Standard Free Linage in CJS Weekly in fact, it's possible to advertise virtually anything (anything relevant to the countryside that is) free of charge with CJS and since 2020 we've offered free subscriptions to students and recent graduates to our only paid for publication CJS Weekly.