XCity 2024 magazine, for journalism alumni at City, University of London

XCITY

‘I WAS HELD AT GUNPOINT ON LIVE TV’ Gangs in Ecuador

Chioma NNADI

Vogue’s new editor talks

school zines, club scenes and the cover star of her dreams

+

Krishnan Guru-Murthy

Elizabeth Day

Jeremy Bowen

BYLINES TO BASSLINES

Journos

by day Rock gods by night

x.com / cit yalumni Join us on ww w city ac uk/ alumni-linkedin

EDITOR’S

For far too long, the journalism industry has been clouded in negativity, from a lack of trust to crippling financial pressures. But it’s not just the external. The job is tough. It’s about building trust while maintaining boundaries, painstakingly pursuing leads while working under demanding time pressures and finding the words to accurately and fairly tell people’s stories.

But in spite of the myriad adversities, truly incredible journalism persists –a reminder that it is still an integral profession, full of intelligent and tenacious people.

Chioma Nnadi, our cover star and the new British Vogue editor, agrees. She talks of the importance of cutting through online noise by choosing writers who have honed their craft and bring authority voices to stories (p.64). Nnadi has inherited a magazine with a legacy (p.59), but is poised to drive it forward, taking risks as she goes.

Risks can be essential in the pursuit of truth. Ros Urwin proved as much with her investigation into sexual abuse allegations against Russell Brand (p.21). Elsewhere, Rianna Croxford exposed the Mike Jeffries sex scandal (p.55) and journalists at B2Bs have had some of the biggest scoops in recent history (p.100).

Others have taken risks within the media landscape, carving out space for more people to be represented in

CONTRIBUTORS

letter

mainstream media. Queer press has big anniversaries this year (p.79). The sorely-missed gal-dem has left behind a powerful legacy (p.118), and female F1 reporters tell XCity about changing up the male-dominated motorsport broadcasting space (p.121).

The podcast industry has long had men at the top too which Elizabeth Day is seeking to change with the launch of her new production company (p.84).

Journalists have also endured relentless challenges to their work. Jeremy Bowen tells us how he’s used decades of experience to report on the conflict in Gaza (p.41). An Ecuadorian journalist held hostage on live TV shares his story with XCity (p.75) and Tibetan journalists talk about producing stories despite state surveillance (p.88).

These examples are all testament to why there is so much hope for the future of journalism. As are the cohort of talented writers behind this issue of XCity who understand the privilege of poring over words and taking risks to get to the heart of stories.

But for too many this year, that privilege ended too soon. In what has been a particularly deadly period for journalists across the world, we would like to pay tribute to all those who have lost their lives in the pursuit of truth.

Imogen Williams, Editor

Mariam Aziz, Camille Bavera, Ottilie Blackhall, Ceci Browning, Nasia Colebrooke, Faye Curran, Sydney Evans, Tommy Gilhooly, Maya Glantz, Millie Jackson, Ben Jureidini, Jaheim Karim, Nana Okosi, Marina Rabin, Hannah Rashbass, Hamza Shehryar, Yasmin Vince

With special thanks to Malvin Van Gelderen (www.idesigntraining.co.uk), our cartoonist, Ian Baker, and our printers, Tony and the team at Solopress (www.solopress. com)

EDITOR

Imogen Williams

DEPUTY EDITOR

Josh Osman

ART DIRECTOR

Maria Papakleanthous

DEPUTY ART DIRECTOR

Scarlett Coughlan

FEATURES EDITOR

Katie Baxter

DEPUTY FEATURES EDITORS

Caitlin Barr

Lizzy O’Riordan

Maria Sarabi

NEWS EDITOR

Luke Bradley

DEPUTY NEWS EDITOR

Dorjee Wangmo

LISTINGS EDITOR

Sarah Kennelly

DEPUTY LISTINGS EDITOR

Emily Moss

PRODUCTION EDITOR

Lotte Brundle

DEPUTY PRODUCTION EDITORS

Olivia Vaile

Francesca Ionescu

PICTURES EDITOR

Sophie Holloway

DEPUTY PICTURES EDITOR

Aniqa Lasker

CHIEF SUB-EDITOR

Niamh Kelly

DEPUTY SUB-EDITORS

Erin Dearlove

Nivedita Nayak

Devangi Sharma

MANAGING EDITOR

Emily Manock

ADVERTISING MANAGER

Alexandra Parren

SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR

Urmi Pandit

DEPUTY SOCIAL MEDIA EDITORS

Mariam Amini

Sudrisha Goswami

Claudia Cox

PUBLISHERS

Jason Bennetto

Ben Falk

For any queries, please email Ben Falk at ben.falk@city.ac.uk @xcitymagazine

4-19 NEWS

21 Ros Urwin Q&A

22 Journalist musicians

23 Krishnan GuruMurthy

28 In memory of: myself

29 Journalists outside London

32 A night in the life

33 Tales from the typewriter 36 The maternal dilemma

39 Reporting from the Oscars

Jeremy Bowen

Election photography

50 Stories from behind bars

52 Kamal Ahmed Q&A

53 It’s all about TikTok

55 Rianna Croxford

59 Inside the archive of British Vogue

64 Chioma Nnadi 70 Impact of Zines

72 Writer’s block

TS. CON TEN

75 Media and warfare in Ecuador

77 The presenter held at gunpoint

Evolution of queer magazines

82 Voices at the 2024 Olympics

Elizabeth Day

Reporting from Tibet

Behind the scenes of beauty journalism

Neurodiversity in the profession

Department goes dating

B2Bs breaking major stories

Drinking culture in the industry

The rise of WhatsApp

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St George’s merges with City to form ‘health powerhouse’

By Nivedita Nayak

City, University of London and St George’s have agreed to merge, forming one of the largest higher education destinations for students in London. The medical school’s union with City is set to be a “health powerhouse” for students, researchers and the NHS, according to St George’s Vice-Chancellor Professor Jenny Higham.

The joint institution will be called City St George’s, University of London, and is scheduled to start operating from August 2024.

With the formation of the combined university, St George’s will bring the expertise of medicine, pharmacology, and biomedical science to City’s offerings of nursing, counselling, and psychology among others.

Professor Elisabeth Hill, Deputy President of City,

University of London said: “The more strength and power we have, the more multidisciplinary fertilisation there will be across the combined institution.”

The coming together of the two universities will broaden the opportunities for engagement between different disciplines. For example, journalism students may be able to undertake electives in Medical Journalism.

Professor Hill also assured that the cost of the merger will not impact the functioning of other schools in City. “The financial impacts or restrictions that City currently has, they are to do with City’s financial position irrespective of the merger,” said Professor Hill.

“We are obviously paying attention to our financial position. The recent financial decisions have not been driven by the merger

but by programs of work and activity that we already have underway and we will continue to deliver, with or without the merger.”

The work to merge City and St George’s had been underway since 2022 in a bid to enhance the scale and impact of the two establishments. The process involved performing due diligence on financials, health and safety, and contracts with the NHS and other stakeholders.

The union is expected to make City St George’s one of the very few institutions to offer such a wide variety of educational offerings in the health field as well as become one of the largest

suppliers of the health workforce in London.

Professor Sir Anthony Finkelstein, President of City, University of London, who will lead the combined institution said: “City St George’s will assume a role as one of the major London centres for higher education and research, distinctively different from the other member institutions of the University of London.

“We will be uniquely placed to play a key role in resolving one of the greatest societal issues of the day – training and developing the workers and leaders for the NHS and healthcare professions that are so desperately needed.”

Unexpected visitors make squeak in department

It’s not just journalism students that have been running riot in the department building this academic year. In November 2023, students and staff were informed about a serious pest control problem: mice.

Professor Mel Bunce, Head of the Journalism department, in an email to students and staff said: “We are lucky to be based in a beautiful Victorian building. But unfortunately, this can make us attractive to mice, and they can eat through cables and damage

computers and equipment.”

Despite claiming that the problem was being addressed promptly, complaints were still persisting in January of this year, leading many to believe the mice infestation is far from over in City’s Journalism department.

“I saw three mice moving around,” an anony-mouse student posted on Unitu (the university’s new online complaints forum). “I hope the university could spend some more time on solving this issue because I was extremely scared and I

believe a lot of people have the same phobia as me.”

A representative from the Properties and Facilities department responded: “Like many large buildings with high volumes of occupancy and potential food sources, our campus does sometimes attract mice.”

They added: “We have designed our pest control measures to control the mouse population, although such is the issue, common to many organisations, that it is very difficult to entirely eradicate mice.”

Lotte Brundle

Courtesy of St George’s, University of London

Entrance to St George’s Hospital, London

Illustration by Yasmin Vince

New online journalism MA targets international students

Professor Mel Bunce, Head of Journalism department

By Dorjee Wangmo and Luke Bradley

Students can soon study a journalism MA entirely online as part of a drive to recruit more international candidates, Journalism department Head Mel Bunce has revealed.

The department is also expanding its short courses programme, which will continue this summer.

The online journalism MA could launch as soon as September 2025, and will run for a full academic year.

Commenting on the push to attract more international students, Prof Bunce said: “We are hoping to reach people far beyond the UK. We have an amazing reputation as the country’s top journalism school, but we are not as well-known internationally and I think we should be.”

The online MA is also aimed at helping applicants

from lower economic backgrounds. Prof Bunce said: “We are conscious that journalism is overwhelmingly an elite profession. It’s hard to crack into if you don’t have money.”

“We want to do everything we can to make it more feasible. I think the fact you can do it part-time, and that it’s not in London, will make it radically more accessible.”

The summer courses will provisionally include podcasting, newsletter strategy and data journalism. The day-long courses are aimed at both the general public as well as working journalists who “want to continue developing their skills”. There will also be a discounted fee available to City alumni.

Prof Bunce said: “This is a chance for working journalists who might want to learn, for instance, the

basics of data journalism or podcasting or other skills that might have developed significantly with technology since they have studied.”

Prof Bunce said that the decision came from a desire to utilise available resources during the quieter summer months. “We have got amazing facilities, teachers and a lot of time. Especially in summer, we are not doing anything with them. We are even talking about doing true crime journalism or other things that might be interesting and keep people thinking and learning.”

She added: “Hopefully [the short courses] will be a taster for someone who might be interested in studying journalism but doesn’t want to make a big commitment like an MA. So, they can see what it’s like and maybe they will end up doing the full-time MA.”

Mel Bunce to step down as Head of department

Professor Mel Bunce will step down as Head of the Journalism department on 31 July, marking the end of her three-year contract at City.

Ms Bunce will then go on sabbatical for a year, in which she will take on a range of projects, including developing a centre for journalism and democracy in the department.

A new interim head, who will start on 1 August, will only lead the department for a year. A permanent head will then be appointed for a fiveyear contract.

Luke Bradley

Courtesy of City Press Office

MA specialisms expanded to meet demand

By Tommy Gilhooly

Amajor expansion of short courses at City has enabled more than 300 students from all nine MA journalism pathways to do a specialism module for the first time.

Certain pathways, such as the Magazine MA, can opt for two of the 13 modules on offer, which include Arts and Culture, Investigative Reporting, Crime, Sport, Humanitarian Reporting, Reporting the Middle East, and Lifestyle. This is due to the reduction of the Journalism Ethics module from 30 to 15 credits.

The department has also launched two new intensive courses which are Narrative and First Person Journalism, and Photography.

The department has

introduced three new visiting lecturers to support the expansion of specialisms.

Emma Youle is running an additional Investigative specialism module and has previously spearheaded investigative reports on issues such as the coronavirus pandemic and the recent contaminated blood scandal. She received the Paul Foot Award in 2017 for a report into homelessness in Hackney.

Lizzie Dearden is the new tutor heading the Security and Crime specialism, who was previously The Independent’s home affairs editor and is now freelance. Her book Plotters: The UK Terrorists Who Failed was published last year.

Faris Couri is the interim head of the Reporting the

Middle East specialism. He was previously the Arabic editor at BBC World Service and now works as a media consultant.

Last year, the Health and Science specialism did not run due to insufficient interest. This year, all 13 specialism modules have gone ahead. Sports, Humanitarian Reporting, Political Reporting and

Lifestyle were especially popular, with two separate classes running concurrently for each.

Jason Bennetto, the director of specialism modules at City, said: “It is hugely encouraging to see how many students want to do the specialism options. So far, all the feedback has been positive.

“We see the specialism modules as a USP for City because it is a great way for students to either build on existing skills or learn a whole new set of skills. Nowhere else offers this choice, and the new breadth of 13 options is excellent.”

A new specialism, called Reporting Underrepresented Communities and Identities, is currently being considered for next year.

JOIN

New tutor Lizzie Dearden

Courtesy of Benkin Photography

True crime author condemns glamourisation of murderers

By Ceci Browning

The bestselling author behind the new Amazon Prime documentary Dead In the Water has criticised the media for its tendency to “glamorise” serial killers and make them “sound sexy”.

Following the recent documentary adaptation of her popular true crime book, City alumna Penny Farmer said it was shocking that murderers are portrayed on screen in ways which glorify them, and suggested that viewers should take more seriously the horrifying nature of these criminals’ most grievous offences.

Created by Raw TV, the production company behind smash hit Netflix documentary The Tinder Swindler, Ms Farmer’s new limited series unravels the story of her brother Chris and his girlfriend Peta Frampton, who were tortured and murdered on a boat trip in Guatemala during the summer of 1978.

A slew of similar crime series have hit streaming platforms in recent years, such as Monster: The

Jeffrey Dahmer Story and Conversations With A Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, many of which have received criticism for their sensationalised takes on terrifying criminals.

After a 2022 survey of true crime fans by OnePoll revealed that 44 per cent of respondents had a ‘favourite’ serial killer, Ms Farmer was keen that Dead in the Water refused to glorify her brother’s murderer. She said: “It’s weird how serial killers are glamorised. They’re made to sound sexy, and I think it’s terrible actually. But I suppose it’s inevitable, isn’t it? They [streaming platforms] want to attract big audiences.”

Failed by law enforcement both at home and across the Atlantic, Ms Farmer took the investigation of her brother’s tragic death into her own hands. In 2015, she found the killer’s Facebook profile, a discovery which would solve the decades-old case.

Asked whether she thinks the true crime genre can meet usual journalistic

standards of objectivity, especially when involved parties are so invested in the outcomes, Ms Farmer said: “I wanted answers. Obviously I was approaching it as the injured party because my brother died, but actually I worked really hard to see it from

both sides. I think I’ve been very impartial, very open, and non-judgmental.

“Law enforcement screwed up badly and I think I made that point. I presented it as a fact. I’ve tried to write as a journalist rather than the sister of a murder victim.”

Courtesy of Kirsty Ellis/Amazon-MGM Studios

Courtesy of Kirsty Ellis/Amazon-MGM Studios

Image of author Penny Farmer from Prime Video series Dead in the Water

Dead in the Water, official poster

Gary Younge: Newsrooms lack representation

By Dorjee Wangmo

The Guardian’s former editor-at-large, Gary Younge, has said newsrooms have “structural, representational issues including class, race, gender and religion” which need “strategic intervention”.

Mr Younge was addressing journalism staff and students in a talk at City on 27 February in honour of Rosemary Hollis, the late professor of Middle East Policy Studies.

‘I

According to Mr Younge: “A necessary strategic intervention has to be made to go from where we are to where we want to be.

“BBC TV newsrooms are so much more diverse than BBC Radio because you can’t see them,” he said. He discussed the importance of re-evaluating the culture in newsrooms, saying it is only possible through meaningful change in the hiring process.

Mr Younge added that

was totally surprised and

delighted’: Magazine graduate wins PPA award

Dani Clarke was the winner of the prestigious Student Journalist of the Year prize at the PPA’s Next Generation Awards last October.

Each year, the award celebrates a student journalist who has “showcased exceptional work during their studies, and display[s] promise to be the talent of tomorrow.”

Ms Clarke, who is currently a sub-editor at Hearst, said: “I did not expect to win or even really believe I’d won. I was totally surprised but also completely delighted.”

She added: “It was a nice finishing touch on the year and made it seem even more

special. It has inspired me to become a multi-award winning journalist!”

Amongst the other Next Generation winners were fellow Magazine alumnae Kelly-Anne Taylor (Editor, Radio Times Podcast), Jess Hacker (Senior Reporter, Pulse and Healthcare Leader), and Isabella McRae (Reporter, The Big Issue).

The ceremony was held at the Mondrian Hotel in Shoreditch. Featured guest speakers included Nina Wright, CEO of Harmsworth Media, and Greg Williams, editor-in-chief at WIRED Caitlin Barr

even if representational issues in the media landscape were fixed, journalists would still need “courage” to write things that might prompt a backlash.

“If you write something, a group of people will come for you and very few people will back you up. The likelihood of you writing becomes less probable,” he said. “But nobody has to tell you what to write, you will know once you get in trouble. If I write

‘Let’s have an open and honest conversation about white people’ that could get me in trouble.”

On the flip side, he said that if all we have is courage then “you’ll be the soldier who goes over the top in the field and gets shot”.

“I wouldn’t be standing here, having spent 26 years in journalism, if I had run my mouth a lot. I made calculations about what I thought mattered.”

Students and staff at Gary Younge’s talk, titled “How racism shaped my critical eye”

Dani Clarke with ‘Student Journalist of the Year’ award

Courtesy of Eve Lacroix

Courtesy of PPA

Blind s tudent helps Chelsea FC with accessibility issues

By Luke Bradley

Ablind MA Podcasting student was enlisted by Chelsea Football Club to provide advice on reforming their disabled supporters association.

Tim Utzig’s involvement with Chelsea began as a fan, but his connection grew after starting at City in September last year.

Mr Utzig started the Podcasting MA course in September 2023 to pursue his interest in sports coverage. Through senior lecturer Brett Spencer, he got in touch with the director of Chelsea FC, Daniel Finkelstein, brother of City’s president Anthony Finkelstein. From there, he attended a match as part of his coursework, and produced a story on Chelsea’s win over Sheffield United.

The Chelsea Disabled Supporters Association (CDSA) later contacted him to hear his thoughts on the matchday experience for disabled supporters. Mr Utzig, who has Leber’s Hereditary Optic Neuropathy (LHON), was eager to get involved.

The CDSA is grappling with accessibility issues at the club’s stadium, Stamford Bridge, which was last renovated in 1998.

Mr Utzig said: “They are reforming this group to make supporting Chelsea as inclusive as possible, which is a great effort.”

One key issue that he has flagged is the accessibility of disabled toilets. “Stamford Bridge is an old stadium, and the disabled toilets are in inconvenient spots. Trying to get access to them is really difficult.”

Another issue he has raised is the protocol for

returning commentary radios to reception after the match. “Trying to walk through [the reception area] is such a bottleneck. It’s not very accessible. It’s not safe, there needs to another place to drop off the radio.”

He added: “The people who need the radio are blind or visually impaired. It’s things like that, things you don’t necessarily think of, that can really help.”

Chelsea FC have had prolonged plans to either redevelop Stamford Bridge or relocate the club entirely. When and if these plans materialise, the CDSA is working to ensure their voice is heard and is informed by the people they’re representing.

“You’ve got to think about everyone involved,” Mr Utzig said. “It takes having a disabled supporters group to get that perspective. Setting up groups without having people with disabilities in mind sets you back.

“Keeping those voices in while you’re setting things up, which is what they’re planning to do at the start of the new stadium, is always a key way to make things inclusive.”

As Chelsea’s tumultuous season continues, perhaps the club needs Mr Utzig’s help in more ways than one. “I don’t know what in the world has happened, but every time I’ve gone to Stamford Bridge, they’ve won,” he smiled.

Know your history to prevent future conflict, say economic experts

Journalists need to know history in order to prevent future wars, according to Ruben Andersson (International Journalism MA, 2005) and David Keen (Print Journalism PGDip, 1982), authors of Wreckonomics: Why It’s Time to End the War on Everything

The book explores why wars on migration, terror, drugs and crime continue to endure and expand even when it’s clear they are ineffective. Prof Keen explains that one of the biggest issues Wreckonomics raises is how journalists need to be extra cautious on not getting caught up in the “latest drama of a high-profile political response”.

Prof Keen said: “The temptation to forget ‘then’ and revel in the ‘now’ is enduring - and it is something politicians have frequently exploited in launching their spectacular fights against migration or wars on terror.”

The authors are university professors at the London School of Economics (LSE) and the University of Oxford, respectively. When the pair met at LSE, they understood that they shared views on war policies and set out to write Wreckonomics together. They wanted to start a discussion that can bring out positive change.

Prof Andersson says: “I think [journalism] both gave us the nose for unearthing a big political story and for asking critical questions.”

Tim Utzig with guide dog Alisa, outside Stamford Bridge

Maria Papakleanthous

Courtesy of Luke Bradley

Spotify offers £25,000 to fund place on Podcasting MA

By

A£25,000 scholarship funded by Spotify will be available to one student studying the Podcasting MA at City.

The scholarship will cover the tuition fees and living expenses of one UK student with a place on the 2024/25 course. The application process will include a 600word essay outlining why they wish to pursue a career in podcasting.

Jon Mounsor, Podcast Content partner at Spotify, said: “The creative industries only stand to benefit from different perspectives, viewpoints, and backgrounds, so it’s a privilege to be able to support City on the creation of a scholarship like this.”

He added: “Huge credit to the team here for recognising the need for something like this, then doing the work to create it.”

Brett Spencer, director of the Centre of Podcasting Excellence at City, said: “We are trying to attract

somebody who has lots of ideas, passion, and excitement for podcasting, but would not have the funds to pursue a master’s at City. This could help set them on the road to a bright career.”

City launched the UK’s first dedicated MA in Podcasting last year.

According to the 2023 Q3 results from Radio Joint Audience Research Ltd (RAJAR), nearly one-third of the UK’s population aged 15 and above listen to podcasts on a monthly basis.

Mark Sandell, lecturer on the programme’s “Pitch to Product” module, said: “In 2023, we saw huge growth in daily news podcasts and in 2024 - a big election year around the globe - there’s been a proliferation of politics podcasts.”

Mr Spencer said that the podcasting industry is facing challenges with finding versatile producers who are adept in all aspects of the job, a problem the course aims to resolve.

“Making a podcast is more than audio production,” he said. “It requires expertise in media law, marketing, SEO, podcast discovery, understanding platforms and monetisation, writing host reads, and more.”

With the programme heading into its second year, the senior lecturer added that the first cohort heard from “some of the biggest names in podcasting every week”. Students also undertook work experience at numerous successful companies, including Goalhanger, Persephonica, and Message Heard.

Mr Spencer added: “We hope from that, they will be able to hire a range of wellrounded employees.”

Charlie Brown, a student on the Podcasting MA, praised the “holistic approach” taken to learning, as well as the “excellent contacts” that the tutors have in the industry. “It’s been an incredibly beneficial time so far.”

Bursary for International MA boosted by over £4,000

The Nick Lewis Memorial Trust increased its funding for the Nick Lewis Scholarship from £10,820 to £15,000 for the coming year. Some £14,500 from the scholarship will go to fully fund the home tuition fees of one MA International Journalism student and the remainder will be given to the student as a bursary.

Suzanne Franks, professor of journalism at City said: “This is to keep pace with the rise in fees and the rise in costs of living in London.”

St Bride’s Church also extended the £4000 Guild of St Bride’s bursary for the next academic year. “The church has always been very generous and willing to help youngsters entering the profession,” said Prof Franks.

Due to its location in Fleet Street, the birthplace of the publishing industry in the UK and heart of the British newspaper industry, the church has had a longstanding relationship with journalism. St Bride’s Church has continued to offer the bursary each year to one MA Digital and Social Journalism or MA Newspaper Journalism student at City University for the past 12 years.

Sudrisha Goswami

Nasia Colebrooke and Sudrisha Goswami

Speaker Neil Cowling gives guest lecture to City journalism students

Courtesy of Nasia Colebrooke

‘My many night shifts prepared me’: New baby joy for broadcast lecturer

By Olivia Vaile

City journalism lecturer Lara Whyte gave birth to her baby boy Ezra on 16 January 2024. Weighing 8lbs 5oz, she said he is “healthy and happy.”

Particularly pleased with the new addition to their family is four-year-old Leah, who is embracing her new role as a big sister. “She is adjusting to no longer being a lonely child, but is loving having a baby brother,” said Ms Whyte.

Ms Whyte said she is missing City, but is enjoying spending time with her family. Whilst the department is yet to meet the six-week-old Ezra, Ms Whyte has shared photos of him wearing the bib gifted by her colleagues for them to gush over until they do.

Putting aside the Mum blogs this time, Ms Whyte said: “I’ve been able to read more than I did the first time round, although I am doing so at a snail’s pace”. She is enjoying reading the fiction stories in New Yorker magazine that have been sitting on her desk for years, adding they’re “good to read over several days, or weeks.”

Ms Whyte assures her maternity leave has been anything but leisurely, adding she is “enjoying the labour of mothering but it is like a job.” Though Ezra is making a night owl of her with his 4am feedings, the former ITV writer owes her nocturnal resilience to journalism: “My many night shifts at ITV prepared me!”

‘Like

nothing I’d ever experienced’: Financial professor’s challenges in writing Barclays book

Jane Martinson, the Professor of Financial Journalism at City, has revealed the challenges she faced researching her new book on Sirs David and Frederick Barclay, controversial owners of The Telegraph.

Jane Martinson, the Professor Financial Journalism at City, has revealed the stress and anxiety she suffered in having to fight legal threats for her new book on David and Frederick Barclay, the previous owners of The Telegraph.

You May Never See Us Again: The Barclay Dynasty: A Story of Survival, Secrecy and Succession was published in October.

You May Never See Us Again: The Barclay Dynasty: A Story of Survival, Secrecy and Succession was published in October after the notoriously litigious Barclay family took her required she go to court.

As part of her research for the book, she took part in a legal challenge in court after lawyers for Frederick Barclay’s nephews attempted to stop reporting of his divorce proceedings.

In 2022, Prof Martinson was investigating how Frederick Barclay had not paid his ex-wife any of her £100m divorce settlement. David Barclay’s sons, Aidan

and Howard, objected to the case being held in open court. The Barclays’ case named Prof Martinson as a journalist digging for private information on the family. The High Court opened with lawyers for Prof Martinson arguing for open justice in July 2022.

“It was astonishing and like nothing I’d ever experienced in many decades as a journalist,” Prof Martinson said.

She added: “It was all very stressful.”

The Guardian paid for two barristers to support Prof Martinson, supported by letters from the Financial Times, Bloomberg and PA, and the judge later denied the case for privacy. During the proceedings, Prof Martinson gained access to digital communications and

letters from family members and trustees which “helped enormously” with her research.

Prof Martinson had to piece together their story from documents in the National Archives, Guernsey Press articles, company accounts. She visited Sark, which neighbours Brecqhou, the private island they bought, to meet with people who knew them.

“I called everybody that had ever met or worked with them,” she said. “The value of digging into something that takes time can’t be emphasised enough. Stories that matter take time.”

The book was included in the Financial Times’ Best Books of 2023 list.

She hopes her book will encourage other journalists to delve into the stories on

media publications and the proprietors behind them.

“The media industry doesn’t like washing its dirty linen in public.” Prof Martinson said. “Journalists need to ask more questions and be aware that the influence that is wielded by owners is huge.”

Claudia Cox

Baby Ezra snoozing in the sun

Courtesy of Lara Whyte

Jane Martinson with book

Courtesy of Jane Martinson

Former Labour leader Neil Kinnock has warned journalism students that the Labour party cannot afford to be complacent, despite an 18-point lead.

Addressing the students on the Political Reporting specialism in February, Mr Kinnock said that, in the run up to the general election, “complacency in the Labour Party must not be allowed”.

He argued that, however politically divided the Conservatives may seem,

Question

the Labour party’s opinion poll lead does not guarantee them election success.

He said: “Fortunately, Mr Starmer has got ‘complacency is forbidden’ across the inside of his eyelids and he’s managed to secure that condition for quite a lot of his colleagues.”

However, he added: “These are human beings, and this is a political party. You can try to safeguard against complacency as much as you like, but when you have an 18-point lead,

Time panel on

Neil Kinnock warns Labour against election complacency

By Hannah Rashbass

there will be people who knock on the door once a week instead of the three times that is required.”

He said that MPs are liable to do and say rash things, citing the example of Labour’s withdrawn Rochdale by-election candidate Azhar Ali, who said that Israel knowingly allowed the 7 October attacks to go ahead.

Mr Kinnock said: “There was no justification for what he said in any circumstances, but he did

say it. And the party is now, instead of being on the front foot, dealing with the alienation of Muslim voters.”

He added that while the party seemed to be avoiding a repeat of their narrow election loss to the Conservatives in 1992, when Mr Kinnock was leading the opposition, they “could avoid it a bit more.”

“I still think they should make further disclosures about tax and spend in the months they’ve got left until 14 November.”

human-led reporting:

‘It will always be central to what we do’

Esme Wren, City alumna and editor of Channel 4 News, advised City students to attach value to human reporting as “AI is going to change the shape of journalism”.

James Ball, City alumnus and Pulitzer prize winner, hosted the Question Time panel on 4 March 2024. The guests included Esme Wren, editor for Channel 4 News, Rosie Wright, presenter of Times Radio’s Early Morning Breakfast, and Kamal Ahmed, co-founder and editor of The News Movement.

With the recent rise of AI in journalism, Ms Wren encouraged students to

remain consistent in the way they report news.

She said: “There are so many competing issues like AI which are going to change the shape of journalism. But you hope that people want that eyewitness reporting and there is some value attached to that.”

She added: “What you want to ensure is that the news you see is gathered by humans that have been physically there to witness it rather than creating that content artificially. It’s tough, but I still have hope for it.”

The other panellists were also optimistic about the future of journalism. Ms

Wright emphasised the need for trusted humans to tell stories. She added: “Human connection, and a person telling you what they know and how they found out about it, will always be central to what we do.”

AI being used in journalism has led to growing concerns about core values of accuracy and validity, as well as job security. In a recent report by JournalismAI, 73 per cent of news organisations surveyed believed generative AI such as ChatGPT presents new opportunities in this field.

While AI has its benefits such as removing human

error and helping to analyse data, there is also a dark side of machine-led help. The ethical implications of using AI such as algorithmic biases and surveillance are becoming more prevalent in the age of misinformation and fake news.

However, Ms Wren highlighted that this is being discussed by all organisations in hopes of protecting democracy. She said: “There are a lot of roundtables at ITN about the future of AI and fake news and how the government has to take it seriously. But the way we report news –that shouldn’t change.”

Mariam Aziz Ahmed

Courtesy of Hannah Rashbass

Neil Kinnock with City journalism students

BAFTAs, BBC, and breakthroughs: Meet the new staff inspiring students

By Niamh Kelly

Aformer red carpet presenter and a BBC podcast editor are among the new members of staff joining City’s journalism department this academic year.

Brett Spencer is a senior lecturer on the new MA Podcasting course and director of the university’s Centre of Podcasting Excellence. His previous work includes being the digital content director at Bauer Media Group, and over 15 years at the BBC.

He said: “I created some very early podcasts that are still popular, and I’m really proud of that.” Mr Spencer helped develop the Kermode & Mayo’s Film Review podcast, which featured critics Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo and ran from 2001-2022.

Another highlight of Spencer’s career was 6 Music Live, a project which broadcasted live performances of

up and coming bands and musicians via The Guardian’s website. “When we started,” Mr Spencer said, “we were really scrapping around for people to play, because no one knew what it was. And then, in our last season, we had Paul McCartney.”

Joe Michalczuk has also joined City’s journalism department as the new programme director of MA Broadcast and MA Television. Previously the journalism programme leader at the University of Winchester – a teaching role is not new ground for Mr Michalczuk. However, he said: “There’s definitely an extra sense of trepidation stepping into City, because it’s just so renowned for its journalism training.”

From Robert De Niro to Daniel Radcliffe, Mr Michalczuk has interviewed the stars of Hollywood releases for vast audiences of The Saturday Show,

The Wright Stuff, and BBC Radio London, among others, as well as for freelance purposes. But the confidence needed to question celebrities has somewhat prepared him for teaching at City. “There was a sense of nerves but also excitement,” Mr Michalczuk said. “Being given the ability to run two prestigious courses is a great opportunity.”

Attending the Oscars and BAFTAs for Sky News as their entertainment reporter and film critic, Mr Michalczuk said his time interviewing the stars of the silver screen is a highlight of his career. “It showed how great it can be to be a journalist,” said Mr Michalczuk. “When you’re a journalist and get to be in the front row of something, it’s a great opportunity.”

Suyin Haynes is a visiting lecturer on the MA Magazine Journalism course who was the editorial head at gal-dem, and a senior

reporter on staff at Time magazine. gal-dem was an online and print media organisation dedicated to spotlight perspectives from people of colour and marginalised genders that was developed in 2015 and ran until 2023. The publication shut down in March 2023.

Ms Haynes’ work at Time magazine spanned from Hong Kong to London, firstly as an audience editor, before moving to a senior reporter role. She has also interviewed Greta Thunberg and Stormzy as a freelance journalist for various publications.

However, it is not these star-studded interviews that are Ms Haynes’ favourites. “As much as the big names or household names are fascinating or fun,” she said, “I find speaking to just ordinary people doing extraordinary things have been the most powerful interviews of my career.”

From left to right: Joe Michalczuk (with Steven Spielberg), Brett Spencer and Suyin Haynes

Courtesy of Joe Michalczuk

Courtesy of City Press Office

Courtesy of Christy Ku

Media exam includes AI question after ChatGPT passes law paper

By Alexandra Parren

The media law exam featured an artificial intelligence (AI) question for the first time this academic year, after the department tested ChatGPT on past papers and discovered it did well enough to pass.

In the exam, postgraduate students were asked to assess the AI’s ability to critique a court report and to judge whether it was able to identify legal risks pertaining to reporting restrictions and contempt of court.

Module leader for postgraduate media law, Richard Danbury, said: “Last year we read reports that AI had passed the Solicitor’s

Qualifying Exam and a Harvard MBAs, so we put a couple of sample questions from our exam through AI. It didn’t do very well, but it did enough to pass.”

Although AI has been met with mixed feelings by the media industry, its use is becoming more widespread. Director of postgraduate journalism, Jonathan Hewett, said: “AI is not going to go away. It has great potential to both relieve journalists of tedious tasks and make some corners of journalism more accessible.”

Mr Danbury added: “We thought long and hard about what to do that was sensible. Other institutions

were going back to pen and paper exams. We realised that AI often gets it wrong, so we decided to build that into the exam by teaching people that what the AI is telling you could be rubbish.”

The hope is that AI will be used to enhance journalists’ ability to produce news reports, as opposed to replacing them. One example of this is Microsoft partnering with the Online News Association to provide training to journalists, promising to help them build the knowledge needed to adapt to the changing face of journalism.

Although learning how to understand and use

AI is a crucial tool in a modern world, feedback from students was mixed.

“Some found it interesting to start with, but it got quite repetitive,” said Mr Danbury. “Some of the seminar leaders dropped the weekly critique of AI. But it was necessary to do it, so that everyone knew what the process would be when the exam came around.”

When asked if the department will keep the AI question the same in future exams, Mr Danbury said: “It depends on the results of the exam. If a lot of people particularly struggled with that exam question, we’ll have to have a look at it.”

Muslim journalist panel probes industry prejudice

Muslim voices are being increasingly and disproportionately vilified in the UK media, the head of the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) revealed at a City event.

During a panel discussion on navigating the British media as a Muslim journalist, Rizwana Hamid, director at CfMM, said that Muslim voices were facing heightened scrutiny and misrepresentation following Israel’s offensive into Gaza in October 2023.

The event, organised by MA Magazine Journalism student Mariam Amini, featured Mustakim Hasnath, News Editor at Sky News, Narzra Ahmed, freelance journalist, and Ms Hamid.

Broaching investigative research carried out by CfMM, Ms Hamid said: “We’ve analysed thousands of articles and broadcast clips. When it comes to online and print, 59 per cent of the stories are negative

about Muslims and Islam across the board... television is 49 per cent.”

She added: “The theme under which we are covered is predominantly terrorism and extremism.”

Amini organised the event to provide a platform for Muslim voices. “Only 0.4 per cent of journalists in the UK are Muslim, despite there being almost 4 million Muslims in the country,” Amini said. “It was this sole statistic that planted the

seed that led to this event.”

CfMM’s findings were disclosed in a 148-page report, published on 6 March. Among the publication’s findings were that the British media was 11 times more likely to refer to Israelis as ‘victims of attacks’ compared to Palestinian victims, and that TV reports cover Israeli perspectives three times more often.

The panellists also addressed a range of Muslim-centric concerns,

offering insight into personal struggles in the field, including prejudice, biases, and pressure to cover specific types of stories.

“There were times when I was brought into stories just because of my access in certain communities,” said Mr Hasnath.

He added: “I’m happy to do these stories as long as I’m not just used as a contact maker.”

Hamza Shehryar and Devangi Sharma

From left to right: panel host and Magazine MA student Mariam Amini, CfMM director Rizwana Hamid, Sky News Editor Mustakim Hasnath, freelance journalist Narzra Ahmed

Courtesy of Sudrisha Goswami

Remembering broadcaster Russell Hargreaves

By Luke Bradley

Sports journalist and former City lecturer Russell Hargreaves has passed away at the age of 45. A talkSPORT pundit for a wide variety of sports, Hargreaves was also a veteran member of the journalism department, having both studied and taught at City.

Known affectionately as “Russ”, Hargreaves read Classics at Cambridge University before graduating from City’s MA Broadcasting course in 2001.

After graduating, he went on to have a successful career in sports journalism that saw him cover a range of events, from the Ryder Cup to the Lions Tour.

Hargreaves was an avid fan of Harlequins rugby team, as well as National League football team, Kidderminster Harriers. He was also an Arsenal FC

supporter and provided regular commentary for their matches, which endeared him to many City alumni.

In 2021, Hargreaves returned to City as an undergraduate tutor and guest editor of the MA Broadcast programme. “When we needed another tutor on our undergraduate programme, he sprung to mind as an obvious choice,” said Sandy Warr, City’s senior lecturer who taught Hargreaves and worked with him at talkSPORT.

“Russ had a wonderful gift for helping people feel comfortable and confident, and develop their abilities. He was always very generous and spirited in helping other people discover their talent.

She added: “It was a wonderful full circle moment of him learning his craft here, going into the

industry and developing an extraordinary range of skills, becoming a good coach, and then coming in here and teaching as well.”

In talkSPORT’s online tribute, radio producer and presenter Scott Taylor said: “Not only was he the ultimate professional, who was well-researched and would tackle any show with the same amount of effort and commitment, leaving no stone unturned, he was the most genuine, kind, humble human being who would make time for everyone, and I mean everyone.”

Professor Mel Bunce, head of the journalism department at City, said: “His love for media, his passion for Arsenal and his habit of calling everyone ‘mate’ won him many friends.”

Hargreaves is survived by his wife, Rachel, and his three children.

The Foreign Press Association awarded Maya Saad ‘Student Foreign Correspondent of the Year’ at their Media Awards in November 2023.

Ms Saad, a graduate of City’s Investigative Journalism MA last year, won for her final project, a video on small boat migration in Lebanon. In her acceptance speech, she dedicated her award to Reuters’ video journalist, Issam Abdallah, who lost his life while reporting on the southern Lebanese border during the Israel-Palestine conflict.

“It was very exciting getting the award,” said Ms Saad. “I wasn’t expecting it. It was a long and challenging process making the video. It was my first experience filming alone, with my father helping me carry my equipment. It was very rewarding making the piece, speaking to people and getting to know them.”

The judges, who included City’s own senior journalism lecturer Glenda Cooper, said: “The story had excellent access to individuals and the families directly affected – which was dealt with great sensitivity. Maya is not from Lebanon but managed to get all the right interviewees to produce a well balanced and topical report which showed great humanity.”

Caitlin Barr

Russell Hargreaves in the commentary box at Twickenham Stadium

Courtesy of Rugby Union Writers Club

Laptop thieves target students and staff at Dame Alice Owen pub

By Emily Manock

Thieves are targeting City students and other patrons at the journalism department’s favourite watering hole - the Dame Alice Owen pub.

At least three journalism students and a journalism lecturer have had their laptops stolen from the pub on St John Street, opposite the university.

The pub has been the site of thefts in previous years, but this academic year has seen a rise in Journalism students being targeted.

In March, Professor Mel Bunce, Journalism Department Head, emailed students warning them to be “vigilant” in the pub.

Prof Bunce wrote: “One of our MA students had their laptop stolen from the Dame Alice Owen pub this week.”

She continued: “I know

lots of you are in and out of the Alice all the time –please be really vigilant with your belongings and tech equipment.”

MA Magazine students

Luke Bradley and Josh Osman had their laptops stolen on the evening of 16 November 2023, while at the Dame Alice with their coursemates.

The magazine cohort had chosen to pile into the Dame after finishing a big deadline. Despite plenty of coursemates remaining at the table, three men were able to swipe the laptops.

After picking up their bags to leave, Mr Bradley and Mr Osman realised they were suspiciously light.

While Mr Osman phoned the non-emergency police number, Mr Bradley used a tracking app on his phone

to set off after the thieves, tailing them all the way to Old Street before giving up and returning to the pub.

Mr Bradley said: “I had only just settled into London and I bought my MacBook right before I left. I shouldn’t have chased after them, my mates were worried about me until I made it back.”

Mr Bradley continued: “The staff were sympathetic, there’s not much they can do to prevent theft. The police were no use.”

Vinnie Baker, assistant manager of the Dame, said: “We got our cameras upgraded, and we’re putting up posters asking people to be vigilant of their belongings. We’ve also got a neighbourhood-watch-style group chat with the other pubs in the local area.”

Mr Osman said of the situation: “It came as such a shock. It’s a popular pub and we all go there so often that it really caught me off guard.”

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Scene of the crime: Dame Alice Owen, St John Street

Courtesy of Luke Bradley

Match made at City: Journalism graduates tying the knot this spring

By Millie Jackson

City alumni Kate Samuelson (MA Magazine Journalism 2014) and Tom Brada (MA Broadcast Journalism 2014) are due to be married on 1 April in a Jewish ceremony in Oxfordshire.

The couple met in an English tutorial at Bristol University on Shakespeare, bonded by an eccentric professor whose lectures on Titus Andronicus went over their heads. A year of friendship followed before the relationship developed.

The couple also did journalism courses at City in the same year, but their paths rarely crossed except

when revising Media Law. Mr Brada said: “My friend and I came out of the exam and thought we had done unbelievably well, we were cheering each other, just so cocky. Then we got the results. Kate had absolutely smashed it and we had almost failed!”

In a twist on tradition, Ms Samuelson proposed on Brighton Beach. She said: “We went to Brighton to see a Sugababes concert and I proposed the next day. I’d been planning it for a while, but he was shocked.”

The groom will wear a forest green suit and the bride will be in an ivory-

coloured dress from Brides do Good, an ethical and sustainable bridal brand that donates a third of profits to charity projects working to end child marriage. The dress is silk and will be paired with a veil.

“We’re getting married beneath a chuppah, which is a structure that symbolises the home.” said Ms Samuelson. “Traditionally, the seven blessings would be read in Hebrew, but we’ve asked seven people to do interpretations of those blessings. We’ll definitely do some dancing on chairs.”

Ms Samuelson’s mother and father are giving her

away, and the evening’s festivities will start with a surprise performance of ABBA’s Gimme, Gimme, Gimme by a tribute band.

Of the upcoming nuptials, Ms Samuelson said: “We’re a bit overwhelmed by how much admin there is, but definitely excited.”

Mr Brada is senior broadcast journalist at the BBC and Ms Samuelson is a senior journalist in newsletters at the BBC. She was previously editorin-chief at The Know and has a newsletter called ‘Cheapskate’, which makes London’s culture finanically accessible to all.

Kate Samuelson and Tom Brada, from their 2014 graduation to present

Courtesy of Kate Samuelson

Alum’s fiction debut labelled one to watch

By Ceci Browning

It’s third time lucky for long-form journalist Tom Lamont, whose debut novel Going Home will be published in June. The 41-year-old wrote the book within a year after failing to get two earlier drafts accepted. Set in the suburban north London Jewish community where he grew up, this successful attempt marks his first step into the world of fiction.

“I am delighted and super relieved because even though I gained a lot mentally and spiritually from writing it, you can’t help but add up the time you spent,” Mr Lamont said. “I wonder, if the third manuscript hadn’t found a home, whether I would have been able to sit down and carry on.”

Going Home tells the story of Téo Erskine, a road safety instructor who returns home to visit his ageing father, Vic. When a former classmate dies suddenly, he and his childhood pal Ben

find themselves responsible for taking care of her tricky two-year-old son.

Speaking on the transition from true stories of journalism to the imagined worlds of fiction, Mr Lamont said: “Embarrassingly, I’ve always done both. I just haven’t ever been published before. Fiction has been this thing I’ve done in secret.

“For the last 15 years, more or less, I’ve started every day by doing a bit of fiction in the morning. Then I turn myself to journalism, my public-facing job. I see it as quite a nice, enlivening, almost caffeinating beginning to each day.”

While celebrated by The Observer as one of the best emerging novelists of 2024, Mr Lamont already has a huge portfolio of pieces for national newspapers. Books scratch a different itch.

“The deeper satisfaction of writing is having a body of work and not just individual pieces,” he said. “I love

Above: Tom Lamont

Right: Going Home cover

having a good chunk of the road behind me, full of old, interesting jobs. And I want to try and replicate that with books. I want to fill a shelf if I can. If I have time. And if publishers keep wanting it.”

What comes next?

Mr Lamont has already set to work on a second book: “The day I finished the one that’s coming out, I started the next one.”

Creative fellowship launched for working-class journalists

A new fellowship for aspiring journalists from workingclass backgrounds has been praised by City alumni as “a remarkable thing to do”.

Independent publication Polyester opened applications in February for a programme to support creatives from less privileged backgrounds. It was founded to commemorate Polyester’s managing editor, Eden Young, who passed away last year aged 29.

The feminist arts and culture magazine explained

that the recipient will get a “fully paid, full-time, yearlong position” at Polyester The fellowship will pay the London Living Wage and provide mentorship directly from the editors. This was described as the same training that Young undertook at the start of her career, without industry connections or experience.

Lilith Hudson, graduate of City’s MA Magazine Journalism course in 2022, said the fellowship is an opportunity she would have been grateful to have had

at the beginning of her career. “It’s such a nepotistic world in journalism, unless you know somebody who knows somebody, unless you have a way in,” said Ms Hudson, who attended a comprehensive school. “There needs to be more bursaries like this.”

Ione Gamble, editor-inchief at Polyester, said in a press release: “Eden had so many wonderful attributes, and chief among them was being a proud workingclass woman - a rarity in an industry wherein over 80

per cent of journalists come from professional and upper class backgrounds.”

Rhys Thomas, a 2019 MA Magazine graduate from a working-class background, said it is a touching and ambitious initiative to help improve class diversity.

“I would hope that it acts as a catalyst to help better the industry,” he said. “The effort levels that are involved for a small publication like Polyester to do this kind of embarrass many major media companies.”

Urmi Pandit

Courtesy of Tom Lamont

City takes on University Challenge

By Caitlin Barr

Here’s your starter for ten. How many City journalism alumni featured in the Christmas University Challenge? For a bonus point, did they lose? The answer is three, and sadly, yes. But not by much.

The team, composed of journalists Zing Tsjeng, Joe Crowley, and Sebastian Payne, as well as lawyer and campaigner Martha Spurrier, went up against Kings College for the programme which aired on 18 December 2023.

They lost with 120 points to Kings’ 155, with BBC host Amol Rajan suggesting to the City team that it was “more of a Christmas conversation than a quiz from your point of view”.

Team captain Mr Crowley, a 2007 alumnus of the Broadcast MA, who now reports for One Show, and has presented several Panorama programmes, said: “We had all sorts of fear going into it, but it was so fun, and we came out absolutely buzzing.

“We knew going in that as three journalists and a lawyer, we didn’t have the greatest depth of knowledge, but we did pretty well. We got enough points to be respectable.”

The team answered questions on a wide range of topics, including French dishes, UK plays from 2023, and scientific anniversaries.

The show marked the first Christmas special with journalist and broadcaster Mr Rajan at the helm, following his succession to

the role in July 2023, taking over from Jeremy Paxman.

Ms Tsjeng, who graduated from the Magazine MA in 2012, and was most recently editor-in-chief of Vice, said: “Amol was a delight to film with, cracking jokes while the cameras were off. He made us all feel very comfortable.”

She added: “I hit up a former University Challenge champion I knew for advice. His words of wisdom were: ‘Press hard on the buzzer, it is surprisingly sticky!’”

News reporters win awards for work with sexual abuse survivors

Two City journalism graduates have been recognised for their survivorinformed reporting at the 2023 Write to End Violence Against Women Awards.

Newspaper MA alumna Connie Dimsdale, who graduated in 2021, and is now a reporter at The i, won in the ‘Best News’ category for her piece titled: “‘I was groomed on Facebook’: Child abuse victims demand action to tackle targeting of girls online”.

“It was such an honour to win,” she said, “particularly

given how much amazing work was in the category.”

The piece featured a sensitive interview with a child sexual abuse survivor urging Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to bolster protection for women and girls in the Online Safety Bill.

Ms Dimsdale added: “Frida was very brave to share her personal experience of being groomed on Facebook by a 30-year-old man when she was 13, and the piece would not have been the same without her testimony.”

Charlotte Wace, a 2015 Newspaper MA graduate, shared the ‘Best Investigation’ award with colleagues at The Times for their reporting of the Russell Brand sexual assault allegations. “I can definitely say that awards never even crossed our minds while we were working on it,” she said. “We just wanted to get it over the line and tell those stories - but it’s obviously really nice that the work that went into it has been recognised.”

Caitlin Barr

From left to right: Zing Tsjeng, Martha Spurrier, Joe Crowley and Sebastian Payne represent City on the BBC quiz show

From top: Dimsdale, Wace Courtesy of BBC Courtesy of Connie Dimsdale Courtesy of Charlotte Wace

Rosamund Urwin Q&A

The investigative journalist who broke the Russell Brand scandal, alongside Charlotte Wace, speaks to Sarah Kennelly about justice, collaboration and the libel laws that protect the rich

You once applied for the MI6; were you always driven to chase a career in investigative journalism?

To be honest, I became a journalist by accident. It was the only industry that would have me in the end. I was never one of those people who had a plan. And then I suddenly thought, I’ve got to apply to something. So, I applied for the MI6 because I discovered I love telling people things they don’t know, it’s just a glorified form of passing on gossip. But I didn’t get through, they rightly rooted me out.

Do you think that journalists can help to deliver justice in the #MeToo movement?

I’m not a judge or a jury. But it’s a difficult balancing line because we have a system that doesn’t deliver justice to people very often. I think we’ve got to take our responsibility seriously as journalists but with the caveat that we are not the police, the jury, or a judge. So, we’re not delivering justice in that sense but I think we can help in productive ways. Sometimes you’re in a difficult position where you feel like you’re taking on a lot of somebody’s emotional load and I’m not trained to do that. I want to be sensitive to their needs but, at the same time, I don’t have any formal training in counselling and I don’t want to overstep the mark by saying something that’s wrong.

You gave birth to a son shortly before you broke the Russell Brand story. Do you think there’s an unfair standard placed on women in journalism to work outside of their maternity leave?

That was a personal choice, work wasn’t putting pressure on me to continue. But I felt like I owed it to the women to finish it. I don’t think other people should do what I did if they didn’t want to. The industry is contracting. And there isn’t enough time to do long-term investigations. So, you end up doing them in your own time. For most of us, we’re also doing a day job but then doing investigations on the side. But if you have young children, you don’t have that time around the edges because you’re trying to keep childcare down to fewer hours to keep the price down.

You have a WhatsApp group with other #MeToo journalists – is there a greater sense of collaboration with these stories compared to others?

How do you maintain boundaries to protect your mental health when writing about such difficult topics?

I think it’s very hard not to become emotionally invested but ultimately you’re a professional doing a job and you always have to have that in the back of your mind. But of course, you end up caring about people, I don’t think that’s intrinsically a bad thing. Otherwise, you’d be using them and that would be a terrible thing. And with my own mental health, I’m not going to say there’s no trauma in covering this stuff because there is. But I always remind myself these things did not happen to me and I’m lucky in that regard. I want to help women to speak out. You have to compartmentalise it a bit but it bleeds into your life. I can do this work but it’s not for everyone and that’s fine.

It’s not as though we’re constantly messaging each other but I wanted it to be there because this is emotionally draining work and knowing other people that do it might give you some support. But I also felt like there could be greater collaboration across publications because we get better journalism with knowledge. There’s always going to be competition between outlets. But I think there’s great potential to be a bit more collaborative. You can’t possibly do all these investigations yourself and sometimes it feels like the right thing to do. If there was a bit more willingness to work together in this industry, that could result in very good journalism.

Have the United Kingdom’s strict libel laws stunted the #MeToo movement here?

Definitely. I am a critic of our stringent libel laws. We don’t have libel laws, we have privacy laws. It’s a system that protects rich people. We have a system where these rich people can control the truth too much. And journalism is there to challenge that. I think it’s very important we do that. We’ve got to push back against that because it’s not conducive to free speech.

Image courtesy of The Sunday Times

Si n g . . . s o n g

us a

They say every journalist has a novel in them, meet the ones with a chart-topper.

By Camille Bavera and Yasmin Vince

There are some reviews that tear musicians to shreds. They are brutal, unforgiving and souldestroying. Those being reviewed might be left wondering, “If the journalist knows so much, why don’t they get onstage themselves?”

Some have. There are a select few who know what it’s like to be both a journalist and a musician. They’ve written articles and songs, toured as musicians and press and been on both sides of a review. Five, both veterans and newcomers, tell XCity what that is like.

Naomi Larsson Piñeda

Naomi Larsson Piñeda is a musician and multimedia journalist of British-Chilean heritage, who was Political Editor at gal-dem prior to its closure in 2023. Her band has toured globally since.

Is it easier to express yourself through journalism or songwriting?

“There are many crossovers between my work as a journalist and songwriter.

"My new EP is about a relationship. I've written about it as an anonymous long read for The Guardian and a long read for ELLE. It's basically about sex addiction. It's the same experience of what happened, but in a more critical context that incorporates expert opinions. It's a different approach."

Growing up, what did you feel more drawn to?

“I’ve played guitar for ages, and then started writing songs when I was a teenager or maybe in my early 20s, but it was always just a hobby. Later, I realised that there’s a lot more to life than a job. The journalism world is difficult. You can’t put your eggs in one basket.”

Libby Driscoll

After years of songwriting and a degree in popular music, Libby Driscoll panickedly reached out to a local magazine for work experience. She has since created an online magazine, FLARE, and plays with her band Quila Dreams.

Is promoting a magazine and band similar?

“The only shared process is social media. My process with FLARE is structured due to deadlines. But for Quila Dreams, promotion is on more of a ‘as-and-when’ basis. It’s easy to put too much pressure on your art, which can completely outweigh the rawness of simply creating.”

Would you rather be known for journalism or music?

“I don’t have a preference but journalism is my job and music is more of a cathartic process, a creative outlet. I plan on being more proactive with my music in the coming year. I released a single, Paisley and her Flowers in January with Quila Dreams. But both music and journalism are fulfilling avenues.”

Naomi Larsson Piñeda

Courtesy of Chris Patmore

you’re a journalist

Garry Bushell

Garry Bushell has been namechecked in three songs because he writes vicious reviews. This includes Press Darlings by Adam and the Ants, which responded to Bushell’s claims that they “wear their pretensions on their sleeve” by implying that he had no taste. Yet, Bushell has been in several bands throughout his 50-year career.

50 years is a long time. What’s your best ‘on-the-road’ story?

“Printable ones? I think singing Buy Me A Drink You Bastard and coming offstage to be greeted with four whiskies and several pints. That was at the Viper Room in Hollywood in 2017. Never happens in England. I also went to New York with The Specials. I got a lift to the gig with Debbie Harry and Chris Stein, which was unexpected. We bumped into Andy Warhol at the venue. The night ended disgracefully.”

“Disgracefully,” how?

“I’ve learnt to be cautious in interviews. A throw away line could sink a career. So I think I’ll spare you the details.”

Jerry Thackray (Everett True)

Jerry Thackray performed as “The Legend”. The name came from Alan McGee, who founded Creation Records; he thought it was funny to introduce the dullest person he knew as “The Legendary Jerry Thackray”. Under an alias, Everett True, he became an infamous Melody Maker writer.

Did you get to interview any of the other acts McGee discovered?

“I tried not to. When I started writing, I was writing about myself. I felt that no one cared about what I did, so if I didn’t write about myself, no one else ever would. I also fell out quite badly with the Creation Records lot a long time ago. For instance, it’s been 40 years since they last saw me, but the Jesus and Mary Chain took a dig at me in The Guardian at the end of January.”

Do you find it easier to express yourself through writing music or journalism?

“Growing up, it was writing because everyone wanted you to rehearse music. I think rehearsing music is fundamentally dishonest. You write heartfelt lyrics and then practise them hundreds of times until they are not heartfelt anymore. But in 2000, I started playing with improvisational musicians. I finally found my niche and could express myself spontaneously on stage. Now, whether it’s written or performance, I can express myself easily. As long as I don’t have to rehearse it first.”

Julianne Regan

For Julianne Regan, ‘writing’ initially meant journalism at Zig Zag magazine. She was sent to interview the band Gene Loves Jezebel, after which she left the magazine, and became their bassist. From there, she went on to cofound All About Eve.

What’s it like being interviewed, and reviewed knowing what the process is on the other side?

“I had a lyric in a song that referenced ‘jewels in Elysian pools’. I know that they’re actually ‘fields’ but where’s the rhyme in that? A journalist felt they had to point this supposed error out to me in print. Clearly they had no understanding of poetic licence. I’d have liked to have seen that copy before it went out and to have torn a little strip off the journalist, but ever so gently.”

Have you interviewed one of your musical heroes?

“One night after seeing a band called Gene Loves Jezebel play, I tracked them down and asked to interview them. I then stayed (as their bassist) for about 10 months or so and left as there was quite a lot of fighting between other band members, but it was a thrilling baptism of fire. The piece I wrote was naive and awkward, but I was proud of it, even though the opening line was; ‘At last a welcome enema has been shoved up the weary backside of a stagnating scene’.”

Garry Bushell

Courtesy of Garry Bushell

Strictly, social media, and the unique buzz of live broadcasting. Ceci Browning and Lotte Brundle get the low down

Krishnan Guru-Murthy

Exhausted, Krishnan Guru-Murthy is slouched on a sofa wearing a dark green sweatshirt, which is somewhat disappointing considering that over the last six months most of his days have involved sparkles, sequins, spandex, or all three at once.

First, on Strictly Come Dancing, and more recently as part of the Strictly Come Dancing Live Tour. He’s 24 performances down – only six to go – and seems visibly relieved.

“It’s weird because it’s not the same as the TV show,” he explains. “Most of the celebrities sign up to the tour because they’re bereft that they’re out of the show and want to carry on the journey, but you very quickly realise that you basically signed up to a pantomime.

“It’s good fun, but it’s totally different. And it goes on forever. Your mind is totally scrambled. You have no idea what day it is or where you are or what city you’re in, because you do a show and then you jump on a bus and go somewhere else. We’re all sort of broken.”

Before the Saturday prime-time show threw him under a different kind of spotlight, Guru-Murthy was best known as the lead presenter of Channel 4 News. Over the course of an almost three-decade career, the 53-year-old has reported on almost every major story, including 9/11, the Mumbai attacks, and conflicts in Syria, Yemen, and Gaza.

“I definitely get an adrenaline buzz from doing the news every night,” he admits. “I’m on a high when I come off air, and it takes me an hour and a half or so to decompress. The Strictly nerves were different because I was totally out of my comfort zone. The likelihood of making a complete fool of myself was really quite high.”

Along with fellow journalist Angela Rippon, Guru-Murthy was a firm fan favourite on the show. Audiences were both shocked and impressed that he’d dropped over two stone in preparation for the competition. He was booted out in Week Eight, but not before scoring 30 points from the judges for his Cabaret-themed Charleston. “I felt nerves I haven’t felt since I was a kid. I had wobbly legs while waiting to go on. It’s really interesting that I don’t feel that at all on tour.”

“I don’t get the same buzz dancing as I do covering breaking news”

Despite the pre-performance jitters, Guru-Murthy was surprised to discover that nothing could match the rush that broadcast journalism brings him. “I don’t get the same buzz dancing in these massive arenas full of thousands of people as I do covering a breaking news story or doing a good interview,” he says. “That’s been quite revealing to me.”

Live television is what invigorates Guru-Murthy the most, but this is not without its downsides. While mostly supportive, some viewers have been quick to criticise him online for his unforgiving interviewing style.

“We all know that social media isn’t the same as real life. What you’re doing can very easily become the focus of a particular group of quite active users, and it might be supportive of what you’re doing or it might be critical of what you’re doing, but either way, you’ve got to be very wary of it.”

It’s easy to wonder whether Guru-Murthy is referring to one of his many viral moments, such as when he mistakenly called a Tory MP a “c***” live on air, unaware that his microphone had been left on, or when director Quentin Tarantino angrily told him “I’m shutting your butt down” after a particularly vigorous round of questioning. More recently, he was caught using his mobile phone at the wheel of his

Tesla in rush hour traffic. Despite this, it seems that he remains largely unbothered.

According to the presenter, platforms like X and Instagram can become echo chambers that tend not to reflect wider public sentiment: “It’s a particular self-selecting audience. Before, you had to be really engaged with something to be bothered to write a letter and put a stamp on it and post it. Now, people will just fire off any old thing.”

That’s not to say he doesn’t use these apps, though. He has over 700,000 followers on X and posts almost daily, with diverse updates ranging from family snaps to clips of chats with world leaders.

Some positives have come with the internet age too, Guru-Murthy admits. When he started out at the BBC, working on the discussion programme Open to Questions as a fresh-faced University of Oxford student, the landscape looked very different – any story worth breaking required a huge amount of effort.

“We can’t cover current wars the way that we traditionally have”

“It was very hard to set anything up,” he says. “If you were filming in the developing world, a lot of people didn’t have telephones. If you were trying to plan something in Pakistan or India or wherever in the late 80s, the chances are that you wouldn’t be able to. You had to fly somewhere, go there, and do it on the ground.”

Now, digital communication tools are integral for all kinds of journalism, not just broadcast. They are both where information comes from and how it is spread.

“We can’t cover current wars the way we traditionally have,” he explains. “I was in Gaza the last time there was a war, but we can’t go there now, so we are totally reliant on people we can hire remotely to work for us, and on imagery and video that has been shot by anybody with a mobile phone or a camera and uploaded to the Internet. Without that kind of technology none of us would be seeing anything. We wouldn’t know what was going on.”

Comfortable as he is between the four purple walls of the Channel 4 studio, Guru-Murthy seems to miss being on the ground. “As soon as we can get into Gaza, we will. Everyone’s desperate to go. But we can’t at the moment because we’re not allowed in by Israel.”

His main criticism of the state of journalism, however, is not this threat to press access. Rather, what frustrates him is the tendency of reporters to wear blinkers – to become obsessed with whatever story they’re pursuing at a particular time to the detriment of other, equally important scoops.

“I think from Covid onwards we’ve been in this environment in which the news is totally dominated by one story,” he confesses. “That might be the Ukraine war or the Middle East or whatever it is. We’re not very good at having a balance of news.

“On the internet, algorithms learn what you’re watching and you end up in a hole of a particular topic. Broadcast journalism is mimicking that in terms of what it serves people. If you look at mainstream programmes, they’re spending a lot more on a single topic than they used to. We need to return to a broader news agenda.”

To Guru-Murthy, this boils down to dwindling resources. In an international arena of crisis after crisis, there’s simply not enough money, equipment, or people to go around. But he’s quick to take some accountability on behalf of the industry.

Courtesy of Channel 4

“There seems to be a lot more repetition on the BBC than there used to be. The challenge is being comprehensive, making genuine programmes that serve domestic and international stories. It’s entirely our responsibility, the media, in terms of what we are delivering.”

With a general election approaching, fair coverage is a task set to get even trickier. Not only are there legal requirements during a campaign, demanding the inclusion of all relevant voices, but even interviewers like Guru-Murthy find themselves grappling with the slippery tentacles of public relations managers.

“You’ve got to be careful to not be hoodwinked into covering things that aren’t really news,” he clarifies, frowning through his glasses. “Pretty much every political story is part of an election campaign. There’s no end of ‘political announcements’ now by people who just want to get their face on the telly. They will all stick to the agendas that they’re comfortable with, ad nauseam. Reporting requires a bit more thought. I have to be extra vigilant because I’m in an election campaign and I’m influencing the way people are going to vote.”

the public outcry, and promises from Silicon Valley that they would reform their platforms, Guru-Murthy isn’t convinced that this year will be any different.

“There’s lots of talk about how this is going to be the dirtiest election ever, but I’ve heard that a million times before,” he asserts. “There have always been dirty tricks in elections, some questionable political advertising. We’ve got to work out where it’s happening and what they’re doing. Like all elections, this one will be decided by a relatively small bunch of people who haven’t quite made up their minds yet. They become very important for parties to reach.”

“The media landscape has changed this election. We have partisan channels now”

No stranger to political reporting, the Channel 4 regular has covered five general elections and hosted political discussion shows such as Ask the Chancellors, a key debate between the chancellor of the exchequer and his opponents in 2010. After a string of unelected prime ministers – May, Truss, Sunak – does he think anything will be different this time around?

Ahead of the 2016 election, consulting firm Cambridge Analytica collected the personal data of millions of Facebook users without their consent, then used it to encourage swing voters across the country to vote in favour of Brexit. Despite

“The media landscape has changed this election,” he responds. “We effectively have partisan channels now. Recently, I saw a video of Rishi Sunak on GB News doing a TV promo for a discussion programme he’s doing with them. Politicians can choose channels and interviewers that they think favour them more easily.”

Courtesy of Channel 4

Guru-Murthy thinks that the Conservative Party could decide to channel their messaging to a core support base through GB News, which is where a growing number of their loyal voters get their news from. “That’s one thing we gotta keep an eye on, you know?”

While it’s important to him that he keeps up with the broadcast output of other channels, he is belligerent when it comes to suggestions that he’d ever leave Channel 4. He makes it clear that the BBC could never get him on the Six O’Clock News

“I can’t imagine ever wanting to be a newsreader,” he declares. “I do a programme in which we interview amazing people and travel the world. I would not be interested in reading out loud. That’s the easiest bit of what we do, and I’ve been doing it since I was about three.”

After becoming part of the Channel 4 team in 1998, GuruMurthy never left. In the 26 years since, he’s gotten married, had two children, and become something of a minor celebrity. Apparently, that’s not an entirely unusual trajectory for television presenters; it was only after 32 years that his predecessor and former colleague Jon Snow retired.

“It’s not a blind loyalty though,” Guru-Murthy says, “just longevity. The reason lots of us stay at Channel 4 News for so long is because it’s got this very unusual journalistic mindset, which is about making trouble, holding power to account, and digging up stories. A lot of television news isn’t like that. It’s basically about reportage.”

He continues: “I don’t want to talk other people down or anything, but a lot of television news is basically just telling the public what happened today, whereas we want to do

something extra. Channel 4 News is full of people who disagree all the time in meetings and argue, and that’s really good. I think what it brings to television journalism is different from what other programmes bring.”

As he wraps up, called back to the stage, it becomes obvious that Guru-Murthy has a clear idea of what success in journalism looks like: if you’re not perpetually asking difficult questions, you’re doing it wrong.

“We’re so fickle these days. At the beginning of the year, you couldn’t turn on the television without it being about the Post Office. Now, no one’s covering that scandal anymore. But it’s not over,” he says. “There are still people’s lives which have been ruined.

“Sticking to your guns, that’s what makes the difference, I think, between the good journalists and the really outstanding ones. Pushing a story when a lot of people think the story’s over.”

If you had to nominate three of your fellow journalists for the next season of Strictly Come Dancing, who would you pick?

Clive

Myrie, Mary Nightingale, and Nick Ferrari

Courtesy of BBC

In memory of: Myself

XCity asked five writers to prepare their own obituaries #RIPme

Tributes poured in from world leaders last night for Charlotte Ivers - known as ‘the last human left in journalism’. Ivers was permitted by The Robots to keep her job, after she argued she had ‘always been polite to ChatGPT’, got her round in and wasn’t ‘any good at anything else apart from writing really’. Ms Ivers’ third husband, 26, told the BBC: ‘She was good, but let’s be honest she was no Giles Coren.’

Sian loved a bargain and would frequently regale her colleagues with various offers she had scouted or freebies she had wangled. She loved a party, and would often find herself among the idlers at the end. This was good for gossip, but not the early morning newsletter that she edited.

He died in his sleep at the age of 140 in the magnificent villa on the French Riviera, bought for him by his Nobel Prize-winning daughter 80 years ago to celebrate his son’s appointment as England cricket captain. The late Giles Coren was lying in state in Paris, capital of the nation of which he was made king, upon the restoration of its monarchy in 2063, in recognition of his services to gastronomy. A week of international mourning has been declared and his wife has sworn never to remarry, despite still having it in spades at the age of 129.

Illustrations by: Emily Moss

Charlie Baker, who died last Friday at the age of 92, led a long and happy life after quitting print media. After starting The Fence magazine and guiding it to success, he sold his stake in Railing Media and began a 40-year career in film and the charity sector. He divided his time between a house in North London and a farmhouse in Umbria. Survived by his wife, four children and twelve grandchildren, he will be greatly missed.

Harry Lambert, one of the more improbable senators for New York in American history, died yesterday at 75. He moved to the US in 2029 for the New Statesman to cover President Trump’s refusal to leave office after his second term. He never left, becoming eligible for office in 2044 at the age of 52. He won the Democratic nomination after running a populist campaign calling for Georgist land taxes in the world’s most expensive city. The media conglomerate he built remains in the control of his wife. His children have promised to divvy it up without rancour.

Escape to the country

Whether it’s high rents or hybrid working, journalists are leaving London.

Lizzy O’Riordan talks to the writers embracing life outside the capital

Illustration by: Maria Papakleanthous and Jaheim Karim

Last December, author, The Sunday Times columnist and City alumnus Dolly Alderton took the stage in a show at the Barbican. As the evening drew to a close, the floor opened up for questions.

“Do you think it’s worth it, living in London?” one audience member asked.

Alderton began to list all the things she loves about the city. A summer day in the park. A good lunch from Pret. For her, she said, it is absolutely worth it. Yet, for some journalists, it isn’t that straightforward.

Paying an average of £1,000 to rent a single room. Piling onto a cramped tube at rush hour. Receiving a salary that barely covers the basics. It’s no wonder the capital is losing its appeal. With remote and hybrid working now becoming the norm, it’s becoming easier to work outside the city.

According to Reuters’ 2023 research, 65 per cent of newsroom leaders said that their organisations have implemented some form of flexible or hybrid working for their staff. Only 16 per cent of survey respondents said their staff were required to be in the office the majority of the time.

Thanks to this shift, while London remains the media epicentre, some writers are moving to live elsewhere. XCity spoke to journalists seeking a different work life balance.

The finance

Money is often the most pressing reason why many journalists choose to move out of London. Living in the capital has always been expensive, but for a lot of journalists, especially those just starting out in the industry, the cost of the city has become too much to bear.

City alumna Lilith Hudson managed two years in London before deciding to relocate to the Derbyshire Dales, where she works as the News Editor at Livingetc, partially remote. “The financial pressure was the predominant factor,”

Hudson explains, speaking from her cosy countryside annex, which she is renovating. This is a big contrast to the boxy flat in London that she had been sharing with two flatmates.

“I was blessed in that I have a secure job, and a lot of journalists don’t have that,” Hudson continues, “But I still didn’t want to live paycheck to paycheck. In fact, that’s not true. The funds were slowly depleting.”

This is an all too common story according to Tilly Smith, a spokesperson at the organisation Generation Rent. “It’s a massive issue that rent in London is unaffordable. It’s not surprising people are leaving,” she says. “It’s extremely unaffordable for people starting their careers.”

This is one of the major reasons people are choosing to leave the city. This was the case for Millie Hurst, a journalist who had been living in London for ten years, working at Home and Gardens magazine, before leaving in July 2023.

In 2022, Hurst’s London rent doubled. “I was working really hard and felt like I didnt have money to spend on anything that wasn’t essential,” she says, “I had lived in London for so long and I love London. But I was just tired of feeling like I was making a loss.”

“I was buzzing for ten years in London”

Hurst was unhappy to leave the city, but she decided to pack her things up and move to Sheffield where she has a family network. Here, she is renting in a hilly suburban area called Crookes, which her cousins helped her move into and “paying half the price for a flat that was bigger and nicer.”

The freedom

Money isn’t the only reason for leaving the city. In Hurst’s case, the biggest reason was the freedom. Both Hudson and Hurst say that they couldn’t have kickstarted their careers if they didn’t start in London. But, Hurst says her career has developed in a new way in Sheffield.

Hurst says that while she was working for Home and Gardens magazine as a section editor, she was constantly dreaming of going freelance. However, since “London is quite an unforgiving place financially”, there was no way of taking that risk while living there. In Sheffield, with less monetary pressure, she took the jump and now works for herself. As we talk, she’s working from a cafe and taking online meetings with clients.

The move also gave Hurst the space to make a few changes in her personal life. Mainly, it gave her the chance to slow down. “I was buzzing for 10 years in London and now I feel calm. Even the conversations I have with people are slower and more considered. I feel I can listen more.”

Being freelance, she does all of her work from Sheffield. She admits that she misses her friends in the capital, but not much else. “It was nice to be able to do things like go to the Tate Modern, but I found that I wasn’t actually making the most of it because I was busy with work.”

A similar ‘expectation versus reality’ scenario is expressed by Hudson, who says: “You watch something like Friends and imagine that work and communal living gets even more fun when you’re outside uni because you’re with friends and you have money. In reality, for the vast majority of people, it’s harder than anyone cares to admit.”

This certainly was the case for health journalist Sarah Graham, who now lives in Letchworth Garden City, a town in North Hertfordshire, writing for the i paper alongside other

Courtesy of Lilith Hudson

Lilith Hudson in Derbyshire

titles. Having made the move in 2018, she explains that living in London had simply caused too much of a detriment to her mental health.

“There are lots of things I love about London, but the air, noise and light pollution - that constant sensory overloadmade me feel very anxious,” she says. “I remember the first night in our new home, my husband and I lay in bed saying ‘It’s so quiet and so dark! I haven’t heard any sirens all day.’”

The changing landscape

The exodus from London has been made possible because of how journalism is changing. Debra Waters is a journalist who lived in the city for 30 years before deciding to relocate to the seaside city of Brighton in her 40s. A features writer across a series of women’s magazines, she says that she never goes into London anymore.

According to her, the industry is embracing new working setups, allowing more writers to work across the country. “I chose not to move until I knew I could work from home,” she says, “COVID was good in that respect because it proved I didn’t need to be in the office.”

Living outside of London has negatively impacted her in some ways, Waters says. Working away from the city has “definitely closed some doors, I’d say that two-thirds of my freelance work came from contacts and I don’t network as much because I’m not in offices or going out for work drinks.” Especially in a journalist’s earlier career, these networking experiences may be vital and are largely London-centric.

Her words mirror those of Graham, who explains that she has never had to regularly commute into London since she has moved. She’s now convinced that writers can live anywhere, so long as they have “a laptop, the right skills and ideas, and the confidence to put yourself out there.”

In-house journalist George White also manages to do the majority of his job remotely. A sub-editor for the RadioTimes Online, he works four days of his week from his home in Nottingham, which he shares with his partner. “Hybrid has been a godsend,” White says, “RadioTimes does a great job of making sure I’m involved whenever I can.”

White says that without hybrid working, he wouldn’t be able to do this role. “Getting the train down to London more regularly is simply too expensive, as is buying in London.”

Still though, he does find himself missing out. “There are

plenty of opportunities that I miss out on because of where I live – junkets, recordings and so on.”

White also says that, while he loves hybrid working, he isn’t confident about its future. For freelancers, it may be sustainable long-term but “a lot of employers are slowly moving back to office-focused set-ups, as they’re likely paying vast amounts for office space and want that filled.”

Hudson, on the other hand, argues that the Londoncentric, office-based view of journalism is starting to feel outdated and unnecessary. “There are some people, especially nationals, that still have the expectation of a bustling newsroom where everyone is in five days a week. But that seems like archaic Fleet-Street-minded journalism.” She explains her work has a large remote community, which allows journalists countrywide to apply for work. “They do miss out socially though”, she concedes. “There are many events which all staff are invited to, but which only those who live in London usually attend.”

“There are plenty of opportunities that I miss”

In line with Reuters’ research into changing newsrooms, released in 2023, 38 per cent of respondents shared a similar worry, that hybrid and flexible working weakens a staff member’s sense of belonging and community within an organisation. Media companies are also concerned about productivity. The executive of one major London-based publisher, who wished to remain anonymous, revealed that earlier this year their company imposed a minimum three days a week in the office, after it was discovered that working from home reduced productivity by some staff.

Additionally, according to Reuters, there’s a sense of concern about proximity bias – a term that describes when people physically close to authority may be given preferential treatment. In many ways, this may be inevitable. As White puts it, “being in the office means getting involved in opportunities more.” Therefore, climbing the ladder will naturally happen faster. So, while living outside of London is possible, it may slow down a writer’s career trajectory.

It’s a slow and imperfect journey for publications becoming less London-centric. But, it is a gradual shift that is underway. Some organisations might be unhurried to follow the trend, but it’s undeniable. As Hudson points out, “Fleet Street journalism doesn’t exist anymore.” Like it or loathe it, that model of working is a thing of the past.

George White in Nottingham

Millie Hurst in Sheffield

Courtesy of Millie Hurst

Courtesy of Curtis Powell

Goodnight and good luck

ITV Assistant News Editor

Enoch Mukungu takes Francesca Ionescu through a night in the life

Preparation

The night shift runs either Monday to Thursday or Friday to Sunday 10pm to 7am. I get the day to myself to do my shopping and laundry since I know I am going to be useless and sleep all day the rest of the week. The first night of the rota is the only one where I actually feel well rested. If I start the shift already feeling like shit, it will be the best I will feel all night.

10 PM

I catch up with everyone as that is my last form of human contact for another 10 hours or so. The first thing I do is watch the BBC and ITV news at 10, to be able to do a handover for the morning shift - headlines coming in, any news or interesting things that might have happened while everyone else is sleeping. Once everyone leaves, I get all the headlines from the papers, and do boring admin stuff such as copy out the staff list and programming times.

11-12 PM

Now I can relax a little in the time between headlines coming in. Usually I watch whatever Netflix has coming out that week. I waited to watch the new season of Sex Education during my night shifts. I did have a colleague who brought in their PS4 and played video games. You can carefully allow yourself to dip into relaxation a little until about…

2 AM

The newspapers start arriving and I have to scan through the big five – The Times, The Sun, the Daily Mail, The Guardian and The Telegraph – and get at least three stories from each. We always include the front page headline in the handover, and then anything that might make a good TV piece. For us, it’s great to have good print journalism coming in, but we need stories we can make visual.

5AM

I get three things in now: what will be on Good Morning Britain, BBC pipeline headlines (which is a great summary of what the agenda is that morning), and the overnight report of what was covered by ITVX. I put that in an email and send off the handover. That should take me to about 5:15am.

6AM

Now the news editors arrive. Often I stay to do a handover briefing. If they need me to stick around I do, but more often than not I’ve been there since 10pm and no one wants to see me hanging around.

7AM onwards

I don’t really have the mental capacity to do a lot. I get the train home trying to stay awake, and then I get home and crash. Sometimes I eat before crashing – a breakfast bap from Wenzel’s and some apple juice is a staple.

It’s a lot easier in winter. If I get home and it’s still dark, even with terrible curtains, I can go to sleep as normal. In the summer when the sun is blazing it makes me ask if I really need to go to bed right now. My body really resists sleeping - I could be wiped out, asleep by 8am and I will still be up by 1pm. By night three, I’m exhausted and burnt out.

Best Part

The freedom of it - getting to make big editorial decisions and having time to really consider choices with no mad rush to get things done. It can be almost meditative.

Worst Part

The crushing isolation. I firmly believe that human beings are not meant to be alone. Between 11pm and 5am there is no one but yourself. The office can be a startling space when empty; at one point in the night, everything that moves will drive you mad. Oh, and you can’t take a break – you’re alone on the desk and if the phone rings and you’ve missed it, that’s it. You’ve missed it.

Tales from the typewriter

Relive the 60s and 70s through the eyes of the journalists who enjoyed and endured the era, by Sarah Kennelly

Jan Iles-Kaluza

Jan Iles-Kaluza is a 71-year-old retired music journalist and co-author of the book The Magazine Girls. She started out working for publications like Record Mirror, writing at the peak of music journalism’s popularity.

Who is the most famous person you’ve interviewed?

Meeting Bob Marley in a haze of ganja smoke was like a fantasy in itself. I arrived at our appointment, very late and very frazzled, after being stuck in a taxi in heavy London traffic. I somehow found myself sharing Bob’s spliff to steady my nerves but it was so strong I almost melted into his sitting room rug. I didn’t remember anything afterwards, so I went back to the office and made the interview up.

What struggles did you face in the 70s as a journalist?

For all its liberalism and radicalism, there was a woeful underrepresentation of women in the music press at the time. Rock journalism teemed with testosterone. When I switched from teen magazines to music papers, I thought gender wasn’t supposed to matter, but it did and it shaped everything. Female journalists were sometimes given a hard time at interviews; women writers were generally thought not to be so serious about rock and roll and more interested in the men who played it.

From top to bottom Iles-Kaluza and Bob Geldof Iles-Kaluza on her own

Courtesy of Jan Iles-Kaluza

Quentin Falk

Quentin Falk is a 75-year-old entertainment journalist who made his mark on publications like Screen International and the BAFTA Magazine. He is the author of 12 books, including a biography on Anthony Hopkins.

Were you ever starstruck?

I was lucky enough to interview amazing characters like Muhammad Ali, one of the greatest boxers of our time. I remember watching him as a kid and he was absolutely the most charismatic man on earth.

I also interviewed John Wayne who was one of the great cowboy stars. He was very vocal in American right wing politics and he was spouting all this incredible stuff about “whining radicals who call themselves liberals.” He was condemning himself but he didn’t care because he was a famous film star.

What was the most difficult part of your career?

Back in those days, some journalists were real backstabbers and there was a system of creative tension. You’re all vying with each other to get stories into the paper. I learned all about the horrible bits of newspaper journalism. If someone is having a crisis in showbiz, I would have to go and stand on someone’s doorstep and ask: “How does it feel to be divorced?”

Linda Newman

Linda got her start in journalism at the age of 16, raring to write about all things popular culture. Getting her start in magazines like Rave, she was immersed in the glamorous culture of swinging London. But her love of writing spurs her

Quentin Falk and Sir Kenneth Branagh Courtesy of BFI/ Guardian

Courtesy of Linda Newman

Ian Soutar

Ian Soutar is a 78-year-old retired entertainment journalist who made his mark covering arts and culture for the Sheffield Telegraph

Who is the most famous person you interviewed?

I interviewed the actress Andie MacDowell, who was in Four Weddings and a Funeral. A one-to-one was arranged in a London hotel at the tail end of the afternoon. When I sat down in the chair opposite her, she said: “Oh, do you mind if I lie down?” So there she was, draped across this couch, and I’m sitting right beside her thinking: “This would be somebody’s dream.”

What is the biggest challenge facing the journalism industry today?

I am rather disillusioned with the way this profession is going. They’ve withdrawn resources so they’re understaffed and newspapers can’t cover anything properly. The paper [Sheffield Telegraph] that I used to work for is a shadow of what it was. They have less staff and higher workloads so the content isn’t what it used to be. With social media, a lot of people are taking news that hasn’t been verified and whether we can get people to value information which is shown not to be false, I don’t know.

Barbara Blake Hannah

Barbara Blake Hannah was Britain’s first Black female TV presenter in 1968 when she got her first broadcast job at Thames TV. She experienced racist backlash from the show’s viewers who wrote to the station to get her fired. Now, at the age of 82, Hannah has led a successful career as a journalist and anti-racism activist in Jamaica.

Can you describe the experience of losing your job due to racism?

In 1968, I became the first Black television presenter in the UK. Racist viewers were outraged. They wrote to the station to complain and demand that I be taken off air. At the end of my nine-month contract, I was called into the office and told that my role wouldn’t be renewed. The two other reporters who got the job at the same time as me had their contracts renewed. They told me it was because so many people had written to them asking to get that Black woman off their screens. I was totally dumbfounded. It made me really sad. There was nothing I could do but accept it and pretend nothing happened. I didn’t even tell my friends because it felt like I had a communicable disease. Living in England showed me racism at its ugliest.

What advice do you have for today’s journalists?

My only message is love. It’s the only thing worth saying. Love the world that we live in, the plants, the climate, but most of all love other human beings. Let love be your fuel in everything you do.

Courtesy of Barbara Blake Hannah

Courtesy of Ian Soutar

The maternal dilemma

Female journalists who are subverting archaic attitudes towards motherhood in the industry speak to Maya Glantz and Marina Rabin

“I thought I wouldn’t be taken seriously anymore,” says Charlotte Philby. The journalist-turned-novelist was 27, and had just given birth to her first child after unexpectedly falling pregnant. For most women in this position, juggling life with a newborn would be enough, taking it as time to take a step back from their work and adjust to this new pace of life. But for Philby, this fear around her perceived professionalism led her to make a counterintuitive career move. Leaving her editorial role on the features desk at The Independent’s Saturday magazine, she took on a new job as a News Reporter at the same paper – and all the extra time the role demanded.

Philby’s fear reflects a common dichotomy created between motherhood and journalistic professionalism. It’s what law professor Joan C. Williams termed “the maternal wall”. Its premise: that regardless of a woman’s level of success pre-pregnancy, once they become a mother, their professional capacity is questioned. This sets a time constraint upon their career – a ticking clock until they are confronted with the decision between breaking stories or being with their family. “I loved the work,” Philby says, “but I felt it would be hard to progress in the role without adversely impacting my family life.” This isn’t helped by the all-

consuming, intensive nature of journalism, cultivating what Sirin Kale, a features writer at The Guardian, refers to as “a twenty-four-seven mindset”. This mentality is unsustainable even for those without children, and frequently reveals itself to be incompatible with the commitments of parenthood – commitments that in heterosexual relationships still fall disproportionately on women. “It is the unfortunate case that women do tend to bear the load,” says Kale. This is reflected in the fact that women are 13 per cent more likely than men to leave employment after having a child, according to a 2019 Cabinet Office survey.

Freelance health journalist, Rosie Taylor, also formed a career on news desks. While there, Taylor noticed an acute absence of working mothers among her colleagues in general reporting and breaking news. “Ironically, there seemed to be quite a lot of dads,” she recalls.

Taylor experienced an unspoken understanding that parental commitments would not be considered an “excuse” for an inability to keep up with the workload. “The idea that some big story could be breaking and your editor tells you to go to Birmingham, and you say: ‘Actually I can’t because I don’t have childcare.’ That wouldn’t really wash.”

For women entering the industry, the notion of appearing

as a ‘serious’ journalist is embedded in them from the outset of their careers. Inevitably, this results in an internalisation of these beliefs. One journalist recalls an attitude instilled in her and her postgraduate cohort that “news was proper journalism, and lifestyle was this fluffy thing you do if you didn’t get into news”. Motherhood-related journalism invariably did not fall within this bracket of ‘worthy’ journalism. This culture is apparent to Taylor: “It’s very easy to trivialise motherhood – people use terms like ‘mummy-bloggers’ and ‘mum-influencers’ to denigrate women”.

This pervasive attitude has created a reluctance among female journalists to shift their content after giving birth – despite the relation of being a lifestyle writer and sharing one’s own experiences. “Before I became a parent, I didn’t want to become one of these ‘mummy writers’, where once you have a baby, you’re pigeon-holed and then all you do is write about being a mum,” Taylor says.

obvious transition into covering fertility and birthing-related stories. In 2022, she launched her podcast Mother Bodies, which is dedicated to broadening the conversation around postnatal health.

“These are massive issues and if we don’t highlight them, they’re not going to change”. Taylor aims to promote expert-led, reliable advice for mothers, helping to fill the gaping holes in societal knowledge about women’s health.

“It’s very easy to trivialise motherhood - people use terms like ‘mummy bloggers’ and ‘mum-influencers’ to denigrate

Initially, Kale had made the decision to not shift her content after childbirth and to continue exploring a wide variety of topics as she had before. However, her encounters with misinformation around breastfeeding and her resultant seclusion propelled her to explore the idea through writing an article about her challenges in The Guardian after returning from maternity leave. “I’ve had such a rough experience and I just knew that I couldn’t be the only person to have experienced that,” she says.

Yet, despite this reluctance, for many writers, having a child is accompanied by the realisation that ‘motherhood’ is not a monolith. Just as the category of ‘mother’ cannot be flattened into one template, the topic of ‘motherhood’ cannot be dismissed with one brush stroke – rather, it’s a canopy encompassing a diversity of often unexplored issues. Many journalists find that even if they don’t switch their entire focus to motherhood, becoming a parent unavoidably changes the lens with which they approach their topics. “I think I’m probably more alert to states of injustice than I was,” says Kale. “I don’t want to suggest in any way that people who have children are more radical in general or more empathetic. However, I don’t think you can have a child and not emerge different.”

For Taylor, having a child opened a new avenue in her career as a health journalist. Similar to Kale, becoming a mother broadened her mind to issues and ideas on the fringe, unreported in mainstream media. Her own birthing experience exposed her to the number of issues existing in the coverage of postnatal health. This, coupled with her pre-existing passion for women’s health, made for an

After trawling through NHS websites and breastfeeding forums, Kale had a realisation: “A lot of what I’ve been told on the internet is not actually true,” she says. Often, issues are unknown to those not directly affected by them, and Kale used her platform to launch the discussion around breastfeeding into the mainstream, viewing it as “public service journalism”.

After its publication, Kale received an influx of messages from women who had been in her position and found comfort in seeing their own story reflected in print – a lifeline for many new mothers in what can otherwise be a hugely isolating time. “That’s one of the powers of journalism,” says Kale. “How a story like that can help others in the same situation feel less alone.”

Some female journalists grapple with the experience of a monetary value being placed on personal details about their life, and sending it off to be chopped and cut by an editor, leaving them feeling probed and exposed. Here, the rising popularity of Substack has played a crucial role in reforming the careers of female journalists –particularly for those writing about motherhood.

While Rebecca Cope did not initially envision herself changing her writing focus to her experience as a mother, she has since embraced the topic – primarily on her Substack called ‘Longtime listener, first time mum’. For Cope, Substack allowed her to establish more autonomy over her income, setting the value of her writing herself. But also, it allowed her to gain a sense of control in a time of insurmountable change. “One day

I was living in London with a long-term partner, going to work at Tatler every day,” she says. “And then suddenly I was a single mum in the suburbs of Birmingham with no job”. When her partner left her just weeks after she gave birth to their first child, Cope had to piece together a life she had never planned. Leaving her job as digital director at Tatler and relocating to her childhood home, Cope found herself searching for ways to “get my old identity back a bit”. Exploring her experiences as a newly single mother offered her an avenue to process and share these events, while maintaining complete editorial control over her story.

“Suddenly I was a single mum in the suburbs of Birmingham with no job”

After Annie Ridout was made redundant while on maternity leave from her job as a copywriter, in what she now believes was maternity discrimination, she used this time to launch her own digital platform: ‘The Early Hour’. Here, she explored the early morning demands mothers face, through which she discovered the true heterogeneity of the topic. This led to a series of commissions from the likes of The Guardian and Red magazine. “It was all off the back of self-publishing that I started to be commissioned as a journalist,” she says. Since then, Ridout has shifted the platform onto Substack, where she writes for her loyal readership on topics ranging from business advice, to reflections on motherhood.

Philby left the news desk, and went on to launch her digital magazine Motherland in 2014, subjugating her fear of “not being taken seriously”. Motherland was targeted “for women who happen to be mums”. At the time, this was “quite groundbreaking,” she says, as it was a period “when the main online content was Mumsnet, and [was] before the explosion of baby bloggers and parenting influencers.” By couching her experience in these terms, Philby acknowledged that women’s positions change postmotherhood – while not centering their identity around it.

So, instead of rolling our eyes at female journalists who return from maternity leave to write about motherhood;

And the Oscar goes to...

The gowns, the gossip, and the glamorous after-parties. Claire Gregory, Sky News Entertainment Editor spills the secrets from this year’s Academy Awards.

First thing on the day of the awards, the alarm goes off for me and my team at seven o’clock in the morning. We drag ourselves out of the hotel’s beds after a jet-lagged sleep and our live correspondent, Katie Spencer, gets her hair and makeup done. She’ll be reporting live to the UK sporadically throughout the day, so she needs to be looking her best.

Morning I meet with Katie to discuss breaking news from the day before. This turns out to be a protest calling for an immediate cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war. They led to some discussion of the organisers calling off the awards show altogether.

Lunchtime

We join our team at the Vanity Fair (VF) red carpet in Beverly Hills. It’s an Oscars watch party as well as the venue for the after-party. The whole event is extremely exclusive.

Pre-Ceremony

I keep in touch with the entertainment desk in the UK about timings and Katie delivers live pieces-to-camera each hour to update what’s going on and any other breaking lines leading up to the Oscars. Now the celeb-

By Niamh Kelly

spotting starts, these ones aren’t attending the main Oscars event, but instead joining us on the VF carpet to watch the livestream. Behind the façade of the stars posing for their photos to be taken, is a long, ordered queue of Kardashians, JLaw, and Dame Joan Collins. Each year, it’s interesting to see the unexpected celebrities nattering to each other, Tan France and Billie Eilish, speaking with Miles Teller and Emma Chamberlain. People you would never place in the same worlds talking like school children after morning break.

Ceremony Starts

At six minutes past four o’clock, the ceremony started streaming on a jumbo screen next to the red carpet. Meanwhile, we get a token for a drink and an In-N-Out burger from a truck parked at the beginning of the carpet.

Post-Ceremony

As soon as Al Pacino strangely delivers the last award of the night – by skipping the “and the Oscar goes to” – Katie goes straight back to broadcasting live, summing up the main happenings of the night to the UK audience. After this, the winners start streaming in with their soon-to-be-engraved statuettes. Some winners are more than willing to stop and have a chat; we talk to Johnnie Burn and Tarn Willers, the winners of Best Sound for Zone of Interest, and Jennifer Lame, the Editor behind the seven-Oscar-winning Oppenheimer. In a whirl, Christopher Nolan swans down the carpet with his two Oscar awards gripped in his fists as he says no to all the press and walks straight into the party.

This is pretty standard for the stars, campaigning their films for close to nine months makes them immune to the press shouting at them for interviews. As a reporter on the carpet, you can’t get too precious about not getting to interview the big names – instead we focus on showcasing the smaller ones.

The VF party is a strictly no-journalist-zone. The celebrities can let their hair down but we get intel from staff that it’s your typical, swanky party. Servers with champagne and freebies, a photobooth, music.

It’s 2am and the carpet wraps. We pack our kit and head back to the hotel, exhausted from the day’s events.

Claire Gregory at the Oscars

Courtesy of Claire Gregory

Courtesy of Evan Agostini/AP

Billie Eilish at the Vanity Fair Oscars Party

The veteran war correspondent talks a career spent in conflict zones and why he’s not yet ready to leave the battlefield

By Imogen Williams

Jeremy Bowen: Uncovering truth at war

Courtesy of Jeremy Bowen

On 7 October 2023, Jeremy Bowen woke up in Kyiv on day two of a three-week trip covering the war in Ukraine. “I reached for my phone to see what had happened in the world and it was all unfolding on the office WhatsApp group,” he recalls. Ninety-minutes later, after videos of Hamas gunmen crossing into Israel surfaced, he rang his BBC Foreign Editor and said: “I think we’re in the wrong place.”

Within two hours, he was on the road. By the evening of 8 October, Bowen reported live from Amman, Jordan. By 9 October, he was just 13 miles from the Gaza border in Ashkelon, live on the evening news. The sandy city was a far cry from the bitter temperatures of Ukraine’s capital.

Bowen is no stranger to being uprooted at an instant’s notice. As he approaches four decades reporting from conflict zones, the contacts he has made in the region throughout his career are crucial to his success at getting extensive and fast access to breaking stories. “It worked for us because I’ve got a very good contact who’s got very good connections with the security people,” says Bowen. “She made it happen for us to go through pretty smoothly but other people who were trying to go through at the time took much, much longer.”

The “pretty smooth” route involved a 500-mile drive through the night from Kyiv to Warsaw, multiple cancelled flights to Tel Aviv, a flight to Vienna followed by a flight to Jordan. On the drive into Israel, they were re-routed at the last minute to the Northern crossing of the Allenby Bridge, costing them another few hours. Then, it was a brief stop at the BBC office in Jerusalem to pick up new identification and work out the closest the team could get to the Gaza border. Hours later, they were headed for Ashkelon, from where Bowen’s face beamed onto hundreds of thousands of television screens across the UK.

Five months on, sitting in his hotel room in Jerusalem, sipping a herbal tea, the 64-year-old seems almost entirely unfazed as he recalls what, to most, would feel like extraordinarily stressful circumstances. It is, in fact, only the “awful” weather endured on the 13-hour drive to Warsaw that evokes any sort of grimace, proof that nearly 40 years as a War Correspondent provides a certain level of immunity to high-pressure situations.

Bowen, who grew up in Cardiff, joined the BBC in 1984 as a news trainee before reporting on his first conflict in El Salvador in 1989. Six years later, Jerusalem became his base as the BBC’s Middle East Correspondent. He went on to make the region the focus of his career and is today one of the most recognisable faces on television news as the BBC International Editor.

For the BBC’s weekly audience of over 400 million, he is the face and voice through which countless people become more informed about the world. On Zoom in his clean, wellfurnished hotel room in the Israeli capital, Bowen is reflecting on the changing nature of conflict reporting – from assessing risk to filing copy in conflict zones, to his relationship with fixers, and a fleeting visit inside the Gaza border. He is a long way from Camberwell, where he lives with his wife, journalist Julia Williams, with whom he has two children.

Israel. Impartiality is synonymous with the BBC and at the core of what Bowen was expected to pursue in the new role.

“I’m not interested in being neutral,” he states, “I’m interested in being truthful.” His unwavering desire to pursue the truth and ingrained commitment to impartiality guide his reporting. “It’s not about saying on one hand and on the other hand so therefore the truth lies somewhere in between,” he says. “No, it doesn’t. It lies with the truth.”

“We don’t always get it right but the important thing is to always try to”

Over the years, Bowen’s impartiality has, however, been called into question. Even now, he cannot resist looking at social media to see this unfold. “There are people, I see them on social media when I make the mistake of looking at it, who think I’m biassed in whatever direction. Mostly, I think, because I don’t echo the thoughts they’re having.” Facing complaints does not seem to exhaust nor concern him in the slightest. “Being true to myself in terms of searching for the truth is really what it’s all about.”

Prior to his appointment as International Editor in August 2022, Bowen served as the Middle East Editor for 17 years. The role was created following the 2004 Balen report which reviewed ample BBC coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict, commissioned after complaints from both the public and the Israeli government that the BBC coverage was anti-

Finding truth in a conflict, which has thousands of stories to tell and on which nearly everybody holds an opinion, is a monumental challenge that Bowen must take on under significant time pressures. His starting point is always trying to get a clear picture, first-hand with his team, of events. “I’m a great believer in eyewitness reporting,” he says.

Bowen as BBC Geneva correspondent in 1987

His penchant for eyewitness reporting meant that on arrival in Ashkelon in mid-afternoon, just two days after the first attacks, he and his team headed out on a drive around the area. “There was an alarm, people were running for cover, there were some explosions, mostly iron dome, the anti-missile system, knocking Hamas rockets out of the sky.”

Against the clock to gather stories and prepare their television package in time for the evening news, footage of what they saw proved crucial to the broadcast they shared that night.

In the months that followed, Bowen has hardly stopped to rest, using his experience to channel his energy so that he avoids burnout: “If I’ve lost any energy, I don’t think I have really – because I’m experienced, I’m better able to direct it.” Sat casually, with an arm slung over the back of his chair, he looks put together in a soft black collared top with a wellkept beard. If he is exhausted, he is doing a brilliant job at disguising it.

“You try to cross check things, you try to get things from more than one source, best of all you take a look for yourself and talk to the people involved. But no, we don’t always get it right,” he says, shaking his head. “But I think the important thing is to always try to get it right.”

Fixers and local reporters are of paramount importance in getting the access and information that teams like Bowen’s need to be able to explain the unfolding events. As a veteran journalist, Bowen is well versed in developing relationships and building trust with local reporters and producers.

While Bowen could not get access to Gaza himself, it is the hometown of the senior BBC Palestinian journalist Rushdi Abualouf with whom Bowen has often worked. “I know him quite well from over the years so we have a working relationship, friendship, in fact,” says Bowen. Abualouf, who was inside the Gaza border, shared with Bowen details of the events. “I’m trying to find out what the mood is there. I’m texting him, you know. He was available on WhatsApp at that point,” says Bowen.

Bowen has worked closely in teams with local journalists who work hard to enable access for foreign media. Oren Rosenfeld is a multi-award winning Israeli filmmaker who supported Bowen in his search for the most pressing stories. “He’s very, very good at what he does and we’re lucky to be working with him,” he says. When Bowen’s team decided to talk to Jewish settlers in the West Bank, it was his relationship with Rosenfeld that secured them access.

“Oren had a very good connection with some quite radical Jewish settlers, who, almost undoubtedly if we just bowled up there, would have been way too suspicious of the foreign media,” he says. “Because [Rosenfeld] knew them and they trusted him, he said ‘these guys are going to be fair to you’ and I think we were because we basically just passed on what they were saying. We were able to get in. Again, it’s about access.”

The way that media is consumed today means that Bowen now works under extraordinary demands not just to obtain access but to generate content for multiple BBC platforms. “In daily journalism, you’re working under massive time pressures,” he says with an exhausted tone of voice. It is the first hint that any of his experiences over the last five months have rattled him. “At the BBC, because we have so many outlets, you don’t have very long to put things together. On a big story, you can’t hang around.”

Bowen, as International Editor, has and continues to work on some of the biggest stories coming out of the current conflict, meaning that he witnesses sights that would be unbearable to most. In early November, he and his team managed to get access into Gaza to see the aftermath of a month’s worth of attacks.

“It’s a horrible sight but I’ve seen it before so it’s not novel”

“They were still clearing buildings, they were still pulling out bodies, buildings were still smoking, having been on fire,” he recalls, remarkably nonchalant. “It was very hot, even though it was early October so [the bodies] were rotting and starting to stink.”

For over five months now, Bowen has given almost daily updates on radio, online, and television, bringing to light some of the most harrowing stories as the conflict has escalated. Significant efforts are made to ensure all reporting surrounds facts that the team are able to corroborate, but as Bowen well knows, this is not always possible.

How, after witnessing such visceral sights, does he still manage to show up every time and face it again? “Well, I’ve seen it before,” he says. Through the screen, he looks down at the table in front of him with a furrowed expression and takes a long pause. “You get very focussed about what it is you need to do,” he says. “In terms of the horribleness of it, I think that’s part of it. It’s a horrible sight but I’ve seen it before, so it’s not novel.”

It has, at times in his career, affected him more deeply than it appears to now. In what Bowen has previously

Courtesy of Jeremy Bowen

referred to as a pivotal moment in his life, his then driver, friend, and BBC colleague Abed Takkoush, was shot and killed by the Israeli army in South Lebanon. Bowen and his cameraman were recording a piece-to-camera just a short distance away. In his 2003 book, War Stories, Bowen expressed regret at not having rushed to the aid of his friend. If he had, he too would have been killed. Following this tragedy and the birth of his first child, Bowen took a break from front line reporting, co-presenting Breakfast alongside Sophie Raworth.

“I felt that the strains inside the conflict were intolerable and they would burst in some way”

But Bowen had always wanted to be a journalist, and it was international reporting that piqued his interest early on. Raised in the Welsh capital by a journalist father and a photographer mother alongside his four siblings, it was both nature and nurture to him. His father worked for BBC Wales and his mother had been a photographer on the Merthyr Express before he was born. Surrounded by the hustle of news reporting throughout his childhood, it is no wonder that Bowen only lasted two years as a studio presenter before returning to work as a foreign correspondent.

In the years that followed, Bowen has worked in dangerous situations all across the world, including being

shot in the head with shotgun pellets in Egypt in 2013.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, the current Israel-Gaza conflict has been the deadliest for journalists since the non-profit organisation started recording journalist casualties in 1992. Deep down, over the last five months, has he been scared?

“No, not really,” he says casually, seemingly fiddling with something on his desk. He explains that the extensive risk assessments that are now mandatory in his line of work help to reduce the level of danger reporters are exposed to. He leans forward, arms on the table, and begins to talk about the various considerations his team reviews in the planning process. He reels off question after question they typically contemplate, getting quicker with every new thought.

A key part of any conflict reporter’s planning process is sourcing on-the-ground access to territories in order to provide eyewitness accounts from the conflict. Since October, access into Gaza has been almost impossible for the majority of journalists, unless accompanied by the Israeli military. This is an evident frustration for Bowen who, at the end of February, joined more than 50 journalists in signing an open letter calling for “free and unfettered access to Gaza for all foreign media”. The letter has been signed by journalists at the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and Sky News.

Bowen has only managed to cross the Gaza border once, back in early November. Despite having government press office ID cards, the area around Gaza, known in Israel as the Gaza Envelope, was declared a closed military area, meaning the team had no independent access.

“You coordinate with the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) spokesperson’s office by WhatsApp,” he says. “They were saying to us, it was really, really short notice, that they were taking people in to some of those places which Hamas had been attacking.” Bowen’s decades of experience working

Courtesy of Jeremy Bowen

Bowen in Sarajevo 1992

in Israel is obvious as he explains the logistics of named road junctions acting as meeting points for press and the military. From the chosen junction, Bowen’s team and other journalists were taken in a convoy into Gaza by the Israeli army. “The soldiers on the checkpoints were very jumpy,” he recalls. “I wouldn’t have wanted to have been an unknown person there without being with the army.”

Even once Bowen was in, freedom to move around was unpredictable. “It depends a lot on the personality of the IDF person who was running the gig as it were. Some of them are quite restrictive and say, ‘you go there and go here and follow me around’. Others would say just ‘get on with it’.”

Gaining footage and sourcing eyewitness reports from within critical zones is important to Bowen. “It’s about access. Being a TV reporter, you need to get access to things.” Is he hopeful he’ll get the chance to go back in? “I would love to have the opportunity, but I’m not holding my breath.”

Despite decades in the region, this conflict feels different to Bowen. “30 years ago, there was hope that the peace process was going to deliver peace,” he says. “Palestine alongside Israel, two-state solution, the Oslo negotiations were going on so there was a genuine sense of optimism, not among everybody but on both sides the conventional wisdom was ‘I think we’ve actually done it’.” In the decades that followed, the long-hoped-for peace never materialised, and Bowen has continued to work in the region covering events live as they have unfolded.

“What I’ve seen is a steady decline into worse conflict and I have thought for quite a while that some kind of appalling explosion was coming,” he says, “but I didn’t think it would come out of Gaza or happen the way that it did.” Well-versed in the history of the region, Bowen’s knowledge of diplomatic relations in the Middle East is palpable. “I felt that the strains inside the conflict were just intolerable and they would burst in some way and there would be some appalling episode of bloodletting which is what we’re seeing.”

Does the difference he senses in this conflict affect how he reports on it? “The essence of journalism is always the same,” he says. “It’s about being accurate. It’s about being on time. It’s about being fair. It’s about explaining what’s happening.” Of course, the technology of getting stories out has “changed beyond recognition”. In his first trip to broadcast on TV from Afghanistan in the late 1980s his team took 1000 kilos of equipment. “Now we still carry a fair amount of gear, but nothing on that scale and essentially you can do everything off a laptop.”

“People are more aware now of the need to control the media battlefield”

With technological advances, come greater demands to provide more media more quickly, which Bowen believes has increased the danger to journalists. During the Croatian war in 1991 he would drive a few hours to source footage and film pieces-to-camera before strict cut-off times meant they returned to their safe hotel hours away, with a restaurant, clean sheets and hot water. “Now, we’re more likely to be staying somewhere really uncomfortable, closer up to where it’s happening, so it’s more dangerous because you’re not getting out of the area in the same way.”

His obvious frustration at access restrictions is another way in which he feels the profession has become more dangerous. “People are way more aware now of the need to control the media battlefield,” he says. “Journalists are more

often seen as protagonists in a conflict than non-combatants which is one reason why it has gotten more dangerous.” This is not something that he agrees with. “If you’re in the serious business of covering the news, you can’t feel that you’re there to push a certain point of view because then you become a propagandist or an advocate.”

Separating his opinion from work is a task he faces with every broadcast and written piece. “You wouldn’t be normal if you didn’t have your own thoughts about it,” he says. This is, after all, often what attracts people to the job. “The kind of people who do this sort of work are people who take a lot of interest in these things, so they’re going to have opinions.”

But he does believe that it is important not to get too wrapped up in the profession which, by nature, can be allencompassing. “Take your leave. Take some rest. Don’t get too carried away with going from one story to the next,” is his advice for upcoming foreign correspondents.

“Essentially, it’s a great job,” he says. “I’ve had a fantastic career. It’s not over yet and it’s a real privilege because you get to go to places and see the things that are happening and especially working for an organisation like the BBC, I’m the person who’s there to tell what feels like the whole world, sometimes, just what’s going on.”

He appears almost wistful as he reflects on the last 40 years working at the broadcaster. As he recalls in his autobiography, War Stories, the first contract he signed at the BBC back in 1984 gave him a resignation date of 5 February 2020. Having already surpassed that by four years, Bowen is not yet ready to slow down. “You know anybody who wants my job? I have to give them the bad news that I might be around for a while yet. Until I stop liking it.”

Courtesy of Jeremy Bowen

PHOTOGRAPHERS ON THE

In a year defined by elections, Ottilie Blackhall and Sophie Holloway look through the camera lens at critical moments in the political past and present

More voters than ever in history will be heading to the polling stations this year, as over 50 countries are holding national elections worldwide, with more than 2 billion people flocking to cast their ballots. Seven of the world’s most populated nations – India, Bangladesh, the United States, Indonesia, Pakistan, Russia and Mexico – will be voting, countries home to nearly half the world’s entire population.

FRONTLINE OF DEMOCRACY

Senegal, 2024

On 4 February, riot police threw tear gas at supporters of the opposition presidential candidate, Daouda Ndiaye, in Dakar. Stefan Kleinowitz, based in Dakar for almost four years now, was asked by Associated Press News to cover the demonstrations. “Since the government in Senegal did not authorise any protests, I expected things to get heated and the police to stop any gatherings of people,” he says.

Opposition leaders had rejected the decision by the country’s president, Macky Sall, to postpone the 25 February presidential election over an electoral dispute between parliament and the judiciary.

“I was aware that aggression between protestors and police can happen at any time,” Kleinowitz adds. “However, I was in shock that the police started shooting gas at us. It was very unexpected. I walked away, to not breathe in so much of the gas, and started taking pictures.”

Courtesy of Stefan Kleinowitz/AP

South Africa, 2024

This photograph, by Jerome Delay for Associated Press, was taken at the end of the South African president Cyril Ramaphosa’s speech. Ramaphosa outlined the African National Congress’ campaign plans for the 29 May elections at a rally in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal.

“There were not many Mandela posters around, and this one caught my eye,” says Delay. “I have photographed Madiba many times in his living past, and this reminded me of the times, as an elder statesman, when he would get energised by the crowds and in return give them hope. That was then…”

France, 2022

The photograph captures the glee of a young Macron supporter, just after a comfortable victory against far-right opponent Marine Le Pen in the 2022 presidential race.

“It was a large gathering on the Champ de Mars, just behind the Eiffel Tower. A very powerful place for images,” says photographer Lewis Joly.

“This photo was taken just as the first results were officially announced, and they showed a victory for Macron, with the crowd jubilant. I still have a rather bad memory of that evening. The crowd was extremely compact, it was difficult to move around and the transmission of images was very poor and slow, no doubt due to the number of people present.”

Courtesy of Lewis Joly/AP

Courtesy of Jerome Delay/AP

UK, 2019

The 2019 General Election would see the Conservatives emerge victorious.

This image, taken by Alberto Pezalli for Associated Press, shows a Chelsea Pensioner, a retired soldier of the British Army, at the entrance of the Chelsea polling station on 12 December.

The Associated Press agency team worked for 48 hours without sleep, capturing images of the then prime minister, Boris Johnson, arriving at the polling station in Westminster, voters, and the counts— all night long until 5am.

“On election day we go to polling stations and look for interesting shots,” says Pezalli. “Many photojournalists are assigned to cover the candidates voting, granted permission. The Chelsea Pensioners, retired veterans, go to vote wearing a bright red uniform.”

USA, 2021

This was a day that shocked the world. It followed a rousing speech by Donald Trump, in which he incited more than 2,000 Americans to storm the Capitol, causing widespread disarray.

Jose Luis Magana, an independent photojournalist who was reporting on the uprising, recalls his experience. “During the clashes with the police I heard supporters saying this was their French Revolution, and, I was like, ‘Wait what!?’

“It was difficult in every way. Not only because everyone was afraid of catching COVID, but also of getting hit by demonstrators if they saw you as part of what they called fake news.”

He adds: “I just remember running around trying to get pictures here and there. I had been in messy and dangerous assignments in Latin America, and I just treated January 6 as another crazy protest.”

“At that moment, I didn’t know how big this news was.”

Courtesy of Alberto Pezzali/AP

Courtesy of Jose Luis Magana/AP

Life Sentence

America’s largest maximum security prison is an unlikely backdrop for an award-winning magazine. Faye Curran navigates shanking, sub-editing, and censorship with the inmate editors of The Angolite

Every morning at 6am, as the sun peeks over the swampland of Tunica Trace, Louisiana, John Corley sits down at his desk to work. Aside from the occasional coffee, he spends the next 16-and-a-half hours writing, laying out, editing and proofing. If he needs a break, there is a stairwell outside where he might spend a few minutes. Then it’s back to his magazine, The Angolite, which will be distributed to subscribers in all 50 US states and 5 overseas countries. This has been his life for the past 19 years.

However, unlike most other journalists at this stage in their career, Corley will pocket around $400 (£315) a year for his 82-hour weeks. After his shift, he won’t go home to his family, his home, or his comforts. There’ll be no rush hour traffic or missed trains. Instead, the associate editor will make a 10-minute journey on foot, between two oxbow

lakes, to get from his office to his shared dormitory. But this isn’t any normal residence, it’s part of the largest maximum security prison in the United States.

He will be greeted by armed guards, and about 50 of Louisiana’s most dangerous men, with whom he will share pleasantries as he waits for his turn in the communal showers. Then it’s bedtime. The lights will stay on all night, and the sound of snores and toilet flushes fill his dreams.

This has been Corley’s working life since 2005 when he first joined The Angolite – Louisiana State Penitentiary’s inmate-edited and produced magazine. The penitentiary, known as Angola (after the former slave plantation that occupied the land) has been his residence since he was convicted of beating and strangling his wife Glenda to death on a dirt road outside Florian, Louisiana in 1989. The judge handed Corley a life sentence, meaning he may spend the

Angola’s front gate Courtesy of Burk Foster

rest of his life in this high-security prison farm which houses over 6,300 prisoners. He will earn his keep reporting on the swampy ecosystem of Angola.

“The Angolite provides a window into the world of incarceration through which the general public may peer,” he says.

Since its creation in 1935, The Angolite has had a succession of editors and writers, and Corley has written more features than anyone in the magazine’s history. Its founder was William Earnest Sadler, a convicted forger and scam artist, who had his fill of brutal forced labour in Angola’s expansive agricultural fields. Then, in 1976, under former Editor Wilbert Rideau, the magazine was given a pledge from Corrections Secretary C. Paul Phelps that it could operate with almost complete autonomy to publish any story as long as it conformed to the same ethics and journalistic standards as any other professional publication. Rideau’s reporting on sexual violence and botched execution attempts forced people to pay attention to The Angolite. The magazine won the George Polk Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award.

prisoners and subscribers will find stories on inside events, like talent shows showcasing poetry, rap and song, but also editorials and features on local, state, and national criminal justice issues. Their sections include: Mailbox, From the Editor, Inside Angola, Straight Talk (notable quotations), Legal Spectrum (new jurisprudence), Club News, Religion in Prison, Sports Front, Sounding Off (essays), Expressions (poetry). There are at least two feature articles for each issue.

Censorship begets delays, and the administration is prone to flagging material they do not agree with as “inappropriate”. Getting the magazine out on schedule is not their top priority by any means, so approval can take anywhere between one to three months.

However, as John Corley sees it, free rein to report on whatever they choose is no longer on the table.

“The licence to rival the mainstream media with investigative journalism was revoked during the late 1990s by a prison administration determined to control its own PR,” he writes to XCity, in email correspondence which is monitored by the current deputy warden.

“Subsequent administrations adopted that position. We are no longer an uncensored publication. This conservative state administration has thrown down a blanket of Draconian laws designed to lock people up and leave them there. These officials stand for increased penalties, capital punishment, no parole, [and] no consideration for juvenile offenders.”

Even in these Draconian conditions, the powerful drive to report is alive. On creaking Lenovo computers, the team design and layout using Adobe InDesign and Photoshop. The pages are filled with inside features – their most popular content with inmates – peppered between powerful images that they take themselves on Nikon cameras. The edited and proofed material, once approved, is sent to the printer, about an hour away in Baton Rouge. The printed copies are returned to the prison grounds, ready for distribution. Angola prisoners receive four free issues per dormitory.

Across the pages,

To get around reporting restrictions, the writers have to be creative. For example, a recent increase in fentanyl (mixed with other substances, such as meth or cocaine) circulating within the prison is not permitted to appear as a feature or editorial, so readers must find clues in the Death Notices section. In the July/August 2023 edition alone, you will find: Billy Daigle, 56, who died of hyperthermic sepsis with multi-system organ failure following an overdose; Reginald Satinac, 49, who died due to cardiac arrest following an overdose; Detrell Scott, 31, who died due to a cardiac arrest following an overdose, Michael Sumrall, 55, who died in his cell due to cardiac arrest following an overdose.

Barriers to reporting are exacerbated by their small team of reporters. Optimally, Corley says, they would have seven staffers working on each edition. Currently, there are only three: Editor, Jeffrey Dale Hilburn [life sentence for murder of his ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend], Corley, the associate editor, and contributor Lawson Strickland [life sentence for first degree murder, armed robbery].

Working for the magazine is not a fruitful proposition in Angola, where staffers are paid $0.20 (£0.16) per hour, compared to the $1 (£0.79) wage prison electricians and labour workers earn. Still, like any regular

The Angolite is unwilling to compromise on certain morals when it comes to their staffing.“We are very selective,” says Corley, “which is one of the reasons there are so few of us.”

All of the current staff are convicted murderers serving life sentences, though this does not mean that all crimes are equal in the eyes of The Angolite

As an unwritten rule, there are no rapists and no child murderers. Judging by the current staff’s rap sheets, murders are better received if they’re impulsive. The 70-page

Courtesy of JSTOR

Lawson Strickland (left) and John Corley (right)

The May-June 2017 edition of The Angolite

magazine is read by senior members of the Louisiana justice system, as well as academics working in reform. Putting together a magazine on the inside is no mean feat, but for the small staff of reporters on The Angolite, its impact is enough to keep the flame alight.

“Countless readers have responded to stories of prisoner-led achievements, education, hospice care, and community organisations with, ‘I had no idea’,” says Corley.

“Five of my ten best friends are convicted murderers”

“Our articles showcase positivity and productivity, rather than negative aspects of prison that fictionalised entertainment elements have stereotyped for decades.”

Contact with Corley is tricky. Like any Angola prisoner, he has access to JPay – an email, money transfers, and video chat service to access the “free world”. His correspondences are monitored, and users must pay to send emails. Some $6.00 (£4.73), 75 per cent of Corley’s weekly wages, will get you 20 emails.

Video calls must be pre-approved by the Deputy Warden, Rochelle Ambeau, who oversees the prison’s administrative support services. Getting approval for these calls is almost impossible, and interview requests are subject to interception and disclosure.

This is what Corley describes as the “chaos that administrative involvement can bring” – a barrier he is more than familiar with after three decades of trying to report on it. This becomes all the more complicated when The Angolite attempts to conduct research, as prisoners at Louisiana State Penitentiary do not have access to the internet.

Instead, contributors who live outside of the jail and work with The Angolite go digging online for broader research into criminal justice, Louisiana laws and international current affairs that may impact Angola prisoners.

One of these two researchers is Burk Foster, a former military police officer turned criminal justice lecturer at the University of LouisianaLafayette. Foster is the longest-running contributor at The Angolite, having written for 35 years. He first crossed the prison walls in 1977, in the early years of his career, when he was working for a privately operated boy’s home.

“When I came to Angola, it was the first time I’d ever been around convicts,” he says.

“I had a background in police work, so I arrested them, put them in jail, and had no idea what happened to them. I didn’t know any murderers. So, I became acquainted with a lot of people that were very serious criminals. Now, five of my 10 best friends are convicted murderers, and John Corley is at the top of them.”

The 70s and 80s were a dark era for the penitentiary, where murders and rapes inside Angola had become monthly occurrences.

It earned the title as the “bloodiest prison in America”, and reporting became a contentious issue and potentially dangerous occupation for in-jail reporters. As Foster recalls: “If you wrote an article about drug distribution in Angola, and talked about the main meth dealers in the main prison dormitories, then you might find yourself shanked [stabbed] in your dorm in the middle of the night, as it used to happen in the old days.”

The magazine did, however, have the backing of the warden and Secretary of Corrections.

“They saw The Angolite as a way of really calling attention to prison problems, that this was good because they were trying to make changes in the culture,” he says.

Things began to fall apart when in 1987 the former co-editor, Billy Sinclair, revealed that he had been cooperating with the FBI for their investigation into a pardons-for-sale scheme. The paper’s credibility was in tatters and with external pressures from a series of scandals about the prison’s conditions, new administrations no longer welcomed outsiders like Foster. His research and correspondence with The Angolite team is now sifted through with a fine-tooth comb, often facing censorship and interception.

“I send research to John at his Angola mailing address, which is delivered to him in the dormitory. But not all of that mail gets through,” he says.

“If they find something objectionable in the mail, then they just take the article out and he doesn’t see it.”

In recent months – following a major controversy in the way Angola housed juvenile offenders – all reference to and reporting on the juvenile system was deemed “objectionable”. This can lead to significant delays in the publication of The Angolite, meaning the six issues they are supposed to produce each year often amount to only two or three.

Through all of this, however, The Angolite continues to churn onward, transforming into what Corley describes as a “true news magazine”.

“A lot of what is happening outside the gates is happening inside”

“A lot of what is happening outside the gates is also happening inside,” he says. “I have the benefit of knowing what to look for, what questions to ask and, from nearly 4,000 others similarly situated, a deep well of experience from which to draw.”

“I try to not allow myself to be influenced by anything other than producing a fair and balanced publication. I do not believe it is my place to tell our readers how they should think, rather, it is my job to present the facts and allow readers to draw their own conclusions.”

The New(s) Frontier

Meet the content creators adopting journalistic skills to reach massive audiences. How is TikTok shaking up traditional news?

By Caitlin Barr and Yasmin Vince

This February, TikTok user Theresa ‘Reesa Teesa’ McCoy (@reesamteesa) went viral on the platform for her 52-part story time detailing the ways in which her ex-husband had allegedly swindled and misled her. On TikTok, ‘Who TF Did I Marry?’ garnered over 100 million views. If every person in the UK read an article, it would still be over 30 million consumers short of this TikTok saga. The story has now been picked up by USA Today, The Daily Mail, and Vulture

McCoy’s videos are just one example of the ways in which TikTok creators are using the app to spread news and work like journalists, despite few having training in the field.

Phil Carr (@philc84), whose videos involve deep-dives into the lore of British towns on location, explains the series that are essentially articles packaged as short form videos are rewarded by TikTok. This is because the platform is pushing for longform videos and series like McCoy’s ‘Who TF Did I Marry?’ story times. “People’s patience on the app is getting longer all the time,” he says, which is why series like McCoy’s perform very well.

In the past year, users have reported live from unfolding disasters. This includes the infamous nine-month cruise where passengers on the Royal Caribbean’s ‘Ultimate World Cruise’ kept viewers up to date on everything that could

and have gone wrong when you spend three quarters of the year at sea. Many on the app are using the same skills as journalists to create their videos, yet the media landscape is resistant to treat them with a similar level of respect.

“It’s frustrating that you are not prioritised when you contact people for a quote,” says Carr. He recalls contacting a bank to ask them for a comment on a video he was making. “The video was probably going to get 800k views and yet I had to chase them, while they probably gave press releases to magazines with a circulation of 4,000. If I was a producer of a TV show, they’d jump on that straight away.”

Some may ask why creators, when faced with such difficulties, don’t offer their services to legacy media. One reason is because they fear similar derision from journalists. Gavin Wren (@gavinwren), who makes videos unpacking food policy, has thought about making a documentary but says this would be “an uphill battle”. He explains: “There is a sense that content creators are a threat rather than people to work with.” Many on the app feel the way they are treated when pitching ideas to publications lacks respect and indicates creators are viewed as taking up space in the zeitgeist that should go to traditional journalists. This is despite doing a lot of similar work.

“I’m identifying stories to talk about and extracting key pieces of information. I try to condense that into a hook,” says Wren. In the same way that traditional journalists spend the bulk of their time finding relevant reasons for publication, Wren always finds a ‘why now’ before writing his scripts.

Similarly, Carr is keenly aware of the need to “judge what people are interested in” in the same way that an Editor does. To make his videos, he often combs through archived issues of local newspapers for interesting stories. This is also how he fact-checks his information, key for reliability and staying on the right side of media law.

Amanda Matta’s (@matta_of_fact) commentary on royal news involves a great deal of fact-checking, predominantly to avoid spreading misinformation. For a video she made in March this year about the Duchess of Sussex’s lifestyle brand ‘American Riviera Orchard’, Matta trawled through the trademark registrations to ensure she had the evidence to back up anything she said about the direction of the venture. Factchecking is particularly important since her account has grown exponentially, and there are more eyes on her videos. For the Queen’s death in 2022, she gained over 400k followers.

Matta says some of her past videos have been accused of being “part of the problem” by ‘royalists’ who view any criticism of the monarchy as conspiratorial. Despite always having ethics at the forefront of

Matta’s content focuses on royal news

Courtesy of @matta_of_fact

her mind, the creator reminds her viewers that she isn’t beholden to neutrality in the same way someone working in legacy media might be. Nor does she have any responsibility to a newsroom or employer, meaning her content can be whatever she wants it to be, from commentary on news and investigative videos to features on royal fashion and tradition.

“People talk about the algorithm like it is some shadowy thing, but the algorithm is people”

TikTok’s encouragement of independence is also beneficial when it comes to the kind of content Matta makes. “I can talk about things earlier than the media, especially if conjecture is involved.” This was relevant during the recent ‘Katespiracy’, in which many people on social media were speculating on the whereabouts of the Princess of Wales. Traditional media outlets, especially in the UK, were silent on the unfolding story. Matta’s independence meant she could report on press releases from the palace more freely. As such, she could address the allegations those on the internet were making, like whether a profile of Lady Rose Hanbury in The Independent was paving the way to announce a divorce between William and Kate.

Creators like Matta and the ways in which they ‘bridge the gap’ between traditional and social media are the reason younger generations are finding their news through apps like TikTok. According to Ofcom, for the youngest named generation, Gen Alpha, the most popular source of news is TikTok. Those on the app think this is primarily because of the personal touch creators can add to their news dissemination. Both Matta and Carr agree that putting yourself and your personality into the video helps audiences relate more to the story. “You are a trusted face,” says Carr.

Ellie Colton (@officialelliecolton) is predominantly involved in traditional journalism through her role as a presenter on BBC Radio Sheffield’s breakfast show but has taken to TikTok to build her personal brand. She sees relatability as deeply important for the spread of a story online: “People who relate to something are more likely to comment on it and like it and share it.” The more comments and shares a TikTok receives, the more likely it is to be bumped up the For You Page, putting it in front of more viewers and giving creators the chance to gain notoriety.

It’s not all sunshine and rainbows for creators on the app though. As with every social media platform, TikTok has a lifecycle, which Carr estimates as four or five years left at its peak. “Apps get bigger and bigger, until they don’t,” he says.

This does not bother some, like Max Fosh (@maxfosh). “I try not to worry myself about things that are out of my control,” says the popular online personality, whose vox pop videos saw him catapulted to virality on YouTube and TikTok. “People talk about the algorithm as some shadowy figure, but the algorithm is people, and if people are enjoying content, that content will spread and do well.”

But for others, like Matta, TikTok’s unique volatility in the US thanks to renewed efforts to ban the app present a challenge for prolonged reporting in a way legacy media may not fear. As such, Matta is ready to pivot to alternative sites, including more traditionally journalistic routes such as Substack. But few creators consider themselves journalists

so this would be a move away from what they know.

Fosh explains some reasoning behind this position, citing TikTok’s “low barrier to entry”. He says: “There are loads of people on that platform and lots of noise. Traditional forms of media have more checks.”

The creator says the accessible nature of TikTok and the doors it can open to journalism is a good thing but makes it clear that he sees the app as a new form of media. As such, Fosh does not consider himself a journalist: “If my videos happen to be journalistic, that’s a bonus. I snuck into the London Aquarium pretending to be a baby, so I guess you could say that’s investigative. But is it going to win the Pulitzer Prize? Absolutely not.”

Max Fosh snuck into the London Aquarium, disguised as a baby Courtesy of @maxfosh

How the BBC’s Rianna Croxford broke an international sex scandal

Investigative reporter Rianna Croxford tells Alexandra Parren how she broke the Mike Jeffries sex scandal after nearly three years of gathering evidence

It was a cold, January day when Rianna Croxford made the call that would change everything.

“I was working on a story about [fashion designer] Alexander Wang, who was facing allegations of misconduct by male models and trans women,” she says. While investigating, Croxford saw that one of the men involved in the story had made a social media post about how society wasn’t giving male survivors of sexual abuse the same support as women. She read a comment from model and activist Barrett Pall expressing solidarity and thought it would be interesting to hear his perspective. Croxford got in touch with Pall. Due to lockdown

restrictions in force at the time, she was alone in her London flat, and Pall alone in his home in California.

“I sometimes wonder if it hadn’t been during a lockdown and if those conditions hadn’t been in place, would we have spent so long talking to each other?” she says, three years later. “I’m not sure we would have spoken for so long or if he would have opened up so much.”

Croxford and Pall spoke extensively about life and the modelling industry. An hour in, their conversation took a turn. “He took a long pause, and a deep breath,” says Croxford. “He told me there was something that he’d never told anyone before. But he felt he could tell me.”

Courtesy of Mark Lennihan/AP

Pall made allegations to Croxford about a “well-oiled” operation scouting men for sex events hosted by Mike Jeffries, the former CEO and modern-day founder of fashion brand Abercrombie & Fitch, and his British partner, Matthew Smith. It was Pall’s story that first made Croxford aware that this was something that needed to be investigated.

“He told me how he was flown from Los Angeles to New York and then put up in a hotel,” she says. “Someone shaved his whole body and made him sign a non-disclosure agreement.”

“He said the craziest part was that there was this middleman with no nose and a snakeskin patch over it. It sounded like something from a movie.”

Pall sent Croxford diary entries from around the time of the alleged abuse and a defunct phone number for the alleged middleman, known only then as ‘Jim’.

“He was telling me how harmed he had been by this experience. It broke him. He wondered if there were others out there,” says Croxford.

To start the investigation, she went through two decades of newspaper archives and public records. “I looked for any court documents that named Jeffries or Abercrombie. I searched social media. But there was nothing in the public domain to support the allegations. I was puzzled.”

What Pall had described to Croxford was an “elaborate scheme with lots of moving parts”, so she knew she had to find more evidence. Pall gave Croxford the names of people who he thought might know more about what went on, so she started reaching out.

“Some instantly blocked me. But some independently corroborated elements of what Pall had told me,” she says. “While investigating this story, I made sure to never reveal who I’d already spoken to or details about what I already knew. It’s been hugely important that I don’t contaminate testimonies.”

“He had so much fear, and pain, and shame”

At this point, Croxford had amassed enough evidence to convince her Editor at the BBC to allow her to go to the States and investigate further.

It was while Croxford was with Pall in his home in California that they struck gold.

“He found an old iPad from his modelling days. I took it back to the UK with me and did data recovery on it. I still cannot believe to this day what we found.”

Croxford was able to recover a single day from Pall’s calendar which led her to find an event itinerary with a striking amount of evidence.

“It named Mike Jeffries and Matthew Smith. It named Jim. It had a list of contacts for everyone who had been present that weekend. It was a paper trail,” she says.

Suddenly, Croxford had concrete evidence to support some of what Pall had told her.

From this paper trail and through word of mouth, Croxford was eventually able to connect with more men, including an anonymous source known only as ‘Alex’.

“I persuaded Alex to meet me in New York City,” she says. “I waited on a bench in a secluded corner of Central Park. I was so nervous, I thought maybe I’d been set up. Finally, after nine hours of waiting, he showed up.”

Alex was a key part of Croxford’s investigation. He believed that he had been drugged, raped, and had

contracted HIV at a large event hosted by Mike Jeffries in Marrakesh and was relieved that someone was finally there to help him tell his story. He said the event, which took place in 2011, had been attended by dozens of people and he didn’t know exactly what had happened or who may have been responsible.

“He had so much fear and pain and shame,” says Croxford.

From this source, Croxford was able to gather more documentary evidence that events took place. “It was pretty old-school,” she says about the investigation. “It was a lot of knocking on doors and hand-written letters.”

Thanks to her tireless work, Croxford had the names and phone numbers of people involved, and documentation which supported the allegations that there was a highly organised operation. “I just couldn’t believe my eyes,” she says. “I was so shocked. It was incredible. The documents brazenly named those involved or connected with these events.”

As well as being excited about finding new evidence, Croxford also felt tense. “I’d seen and heard the impact that attending these events had had on the men. Some alleged they had been abused. With an investigation, you never know if you’re actually going to pull it off,” she says. “I was excited by every breakthrough, but every new lead also brought an immense amount of pressure.”

Rianna Croxford with Barrett Pall

Croxford had to scrutinise all of the testimony and evidence. She used two methods of fact-checking.

“I made sure that all the men giving me evidence were kept separate from one another,” she says. “This made it difficult for them, and made them feel incredibly lonely. They knew there were others out there who had been similarly affected, but I couldn’t put them in touch with each other because I had to preserve their testimonies and make sure they weren’t contaminated.”

“From the evidence we had, I knew we had to go public”

Croxford also supported her evidence through paper trails. She spent two years gathering flight tickets, event itineraries, diary entries, and testimonies from people who had been at the events who could match some details of what was being alleged.

One of the most important men involved in Croxford’s investigation was the man with the snakeskin patch. He was the middleman who had been facilitating the recruitment of men to sex events hosted by Jeffries and Smith.

Through extensive research, Croxford was able to identify this middleman as James Jacobson, and with a thorough investigation of public records and social media, she tracked him down to his home in Wisconsin, USA.

“It was my job as a journalist to ask him the tough questions”

“My heart was racing,” she says about the day she confronted him on his doorstep. “There was two-and-a-half years worth of adrenaline rushing through my body. But I was in evidence-gathering mode, so I had to keep calm.”

Croxford and podcast producer Ruth Evans had to take security with them when approaching Jacobson at his home. They had no suggestion or evidence that he was violent but understood he was into hunting and had guns on his property.

“The allegations were serious and you never know how someone is going to react in that situation,” says Croxford. “It’s fight or flight. But I was also thinking about the men who I had spoken to and how hurt and broken they felt.”

Croxford and Evans knocked on Jacobson’s door. “He sat on his porch and put his head in his hands,” she says. “He realised we had enough evidence to name him in the investigation.”

“It was my job as a journalist to ask him the tough questions,” says Croxford. “From the evidence we had, I knew we had to go public.”

The BBC first broke the story at the beginning of October 2023. Croxford’s investigation was turned into a documentary which aired on Panorama, it was broadcast as a podcast, and published as a series of news articles.

“We spoke to two former prosecutors who called for a legal investigation into whether what we found could amount to sex trafficking. I was astounded.”

The former prosecutors independently reviewed the evidence uncovered by Croxford and called for an investigation to determine whether charges for sex trafficking could be brought.

Following Croxford’s thorough investigation and gathering of evidence, the FBI have now opened a criminal investigation and enrolled a grand jury to determine whether there’s sufficient evidence to pursue a prosecution.

“It’s overwhelming to think that the FBI are now involved,” says Croxford. “As journalists, we pursue the truth. We ask questions. We hold people to account. That’s what I’ve seen with the fallout of this investigation.”

Jeffries and Smith did not respond to repeated requests to comment on the allegations by the BBC. Abercrombie & Fitch told the BBC it was “appalled and disgusted” by Jeffries’ alleged behaviour. The company emphasised that it has “zero tolerance for abuse, harassment or discrimination of any kind”.

Since the story broke, Croxford has been contacted by men around the world who have felt affected by it, either because they were directly involved, or because they have suffered similar abuse.

“I’ve had so many emails and messages from men who, thanks to the story, now feel empowered to talk to someone they care about to reveal something that happened to them,” she says. “That is why I do this job.”

“No matter how long ago an event may have happened, there are people ready to listen.”

Courtesy of BBC/Rianna Croxford

Inside the archive of British Vogue

It’s an institution that has been shrouded in exclusivity. Maria Sarabi speaks to author Julie Summers and insiders who have had a front row seat throughout the evolution of the famous magazine

This year, British Vogue bid farewell to its beloved Vogue House. Situated in an elegant corner of Mayfair, its revolving doors were a portal for the last 66 years to an exclusive world draped in couture. The towering gold lettering that looms over the starstudded entrance saw the struts of the biggest names in fashion.

It is a year of change for the fashion and lifestyle magazine. With the rise of the digital age come swanky new offices overlooking the Thames at the Adelphi. Here, loos are complete with Dyson Airwraps and fluffy towels. And to usher in this new era, British Vogue welcomes the first Black female head of the magazine. Under a new title – Head of Editorial Content – Chioma Nnadi is championing a digital community.

The British Vogue archive has been hauled across the river, carrying with it a weighty legacy of glamour, luxury, and social history. The magazine has lived through turbulence and social change. But, through it all, British Vogue has welcomed each new era with grace and poise, and it has become an icon in its own right.

For the first time, the biography of British Vogue – from its inaugural copy in 1916, up to the present day – is being brought to life by historian and author Julie Summers in her book titled British Vogue: The Biography of an Icon. Summers and insiders give XCity an exclusive glimpse into how British Vogue navigated the 20 th and 21 st centuries and interpreted those pivotal eras for women.

All imagery courtesy of Albert Watson for British Vogue except where credited otherwise

1916

The dawn

Vogue was set up in 1892 in America. By 1912, the publishing company Condé Nast had begun to sell American Vogue in Europe, with 4000 copies a month distributed to London. However, in 1916, U-boat stopped non-essential shipping across the Atlantic. William Wood, who was helping distribute Vogue in London, persuaded Condé Montrose Nast to set up British Vogue.

“Fifty per cent of the content, which would have been fashion and most of the articles, would all come from the States. But there would be a British contribution with some features, society gossip, news about the Royal family, and British advertising,” says Summers. The first issue of British Vogue was published on the 15 September 1916.

Cruises became more accessible by the end of the 30s as more people could afford to go abroad. Features in the 1930s, under Alison Settle and later Elizabeth Penrose, largely focused on travel and cars.

1920s The era of the fashion editor 1930s The rise of travel features

Despite popular belief that Elspeth Champcommunal was the editor of British Vogue in the 1920s, Summers reveals this wasn’t true: “Elspeth was the Fashion Editor and Ruth Davidson was the editor. It shows that before 1920 the Fashion Editor played a more significant role than the editor herself, though that was to change after 1923 with Dorothy Todd.”

1940s Women and the war 1950s

Creeping into a new era

In 1948, Withers introduced an exciting, avant-garde experiment – a column for teenage girls named ‘Young Idea’. By the 1950s, ‘Young Idea’ became a regular column edited by Sheila Wetton. “Initially it was there to encourage teenage girls to think of themselves as women of the future. But it gradually broadened out to take in more young fashion,” says Summers. Fashion was also priced for the first time in the magazine after the war due to the dawn of fashion travel shoots.

The magazine became influential during the war through cooperating with the government. Audrey Withers, British Vogue editor from 1940 to 1960, ran a campaign in 1942 to encourage women to shorten their hair. Long, luscious locks snagged in machines and caused industrial accidents.

Unfortunately, women admired the long hair of actors such as Veronica Lake – a style dubbed ‘the Peekaboo look’.

“Audrey got Lee Miller to do a series of photographs of Coral Browne and Lesley Blanch with short hair,” says Summers.

1960s

A revolution

The ‘swinging 60s’ brought Beatrix Miller’s appointment as editor in 1964. Miller left her archive to Vogue when she died. “There were boxes of letters from readers to the editor, and Beatrix answered them all with wit,” she says. One was a complaint from a reader beginning with ‘Dear Sir’. Miller wrote back saying, ‘had it not occurred to her to inquire as to whether the editor of Vogue was actually a female?’. Other letters were written by young girls expressing their dream to be on the cover of Vogue. Miller would write back and offer them the opportunity to speak with stylists at Vogue House. However, she would say “it takes a very professional model to have the knowledge to be a cover girl”.

1980s Fashion forward

Anna Wintour took over in 1985 for two years. “The biggest difference between their magazines was white space. Anna cleaned it up and made it very clear, chic, and sharp. Her Vogues were very shopping-oriented.”

Elizabeth Tilberis became editor in 1988 and was interested in fashion rather than features like her precursors. However, the features continued to be steered by established editors, including Alexandra Shulman.

2017-23 Force for change

British Vogue erupted as a force for change under Edward Enninful in 2017 when he became the first Black editor of the magazine. “People began to rethink what it meant to be British and Enninful headed the debate,” says Summers. Enninful re-moulded British Vogue and the magazine began to spotlight topics such as race, queerness, disability, and sustainability.

Enninful’s first cover saw the mixed-race model Adwoa Aboah captured by Steven Meisel. Aboah donned a Marc Jacobs silk dress and turban, accompanied with glittering blue eyeshadow by Pat McGrath. Enninful dedicated the July 2020 issue to frontline workers. Narguis Horsford, a London Overground train driver, Rachel Millar, a community midwife, and Anisa Omar, a supermarket worker, appeared on a cover.

1970s Providing dreams 1990s-2000s The height of publishing

Inflation increased drastically in Britain during the 70s. Miller was aware that her readers were suffering, but she focused on British Vogue providing dreams. “Miller said that ‘nothing in Vogue should surprise apart from prices’. Vogue was there to help people dream,” says Summers. Miller told the Managing Director Daniel Salem that she wanted to bring sex into the magazine. “She didn’t mean sexualised sex. She meant sexy, beautiful women in lovely clothes but with barer flesh. And she got it just right.”

Alexandra Shulman’s reign as Editor-in-Chief began in 1992 and lasted a staggering 25 years. The 90s were a golden age for British Vogue as magazine publishing reached an all-time high. Fashion thrived under photographers such as Mario Testino, Patrick Demarchelier, and Steven Meisel. The grunge era saw the dawn of Kate Moss – the model holds the most British Vogue covers to date, with 45 issues.

“British fashion became global, and the industry exploded. There was more money piling into the advertising than ever before. British Vogue was riding this incredible wave, and Alexandra was steering the ship brilliantly.”

Photograph by Willie Christie for British Vogue , 1977. Cover designed by Weidenfeld, 2024

Pam Makin

A Runner in the 40s and 50s

Now 93 years old, Pam Makin recalls starting out at British Vogue in 1946 as a runner at the magazine’s photographic studio in Rathbone Street. Here, she did everything from ironing dresses to pinning them on models, handling the post, and delivering memos to Golden Square –the former HQ – and back. She was the resident task girl, working under photographer Cecil Beaton and editor Audrey Withers.

After she finished school, Makin was first employed to deal with the post. While in the studio one day, she saw a clothing assistant struggling to prepare a dress for a photoshoot. “A girl had made a hash up with an iron on a dress that was being photographed. She had probably never ironed a dress in her life before, but because she was the daughter of a Duke it was assumed she would automatically know how to handle a dress. I said, ‘you can’t do that, you’ll burn the dress’,” says Makin. Due to being a skilled ironer, Makin was promoted to work with the clothes and models.

Women would look after the clothes and tend to fittings and men would handle the photographic equipment. She continues: “I learned to type there. But it was rather like looking after big schoolboys.”

As a young girl, Makin loved working with Beaton and Withers. “Beaton was courteous to everybody, and he was an incredibly nice man. I was also very fond of Audrey Withers and would always run errands for her,” she says. Withers promoted Makin to a sales position in 1951.

Despite working in the middle of the war, Makin had no choice but to continue. “Don’t for one instance think it was a glamorous career, because it wasn’t,” she says.

Albert Watson OBE Behind the lens from the 70s to 90s

Having shot over 100 covers for Vogue, Albert Watson OBE worked for British Vogue throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s and photographed the likes of Julie Foster, Isabella Rossellini, and Uma Thurman.

Despite an impressive array of issues under his belt, Watson’s favourite British Vogue cover was his first: the 1977 December issue featuring model Dominique Hamonière. The cover depicts Hamonière resting her hands delicately on her chin while donning a pair of golden gloves.

“The way the cover came about is why I like it so much. I photographed the Saint Laurent ‘Opéras Ballets Russes’ collection for American Vogue and I picked up a pair of gold gloves that had a dark mink fringe – they looked like gauntlets. They were beautifully made as the seam was invisible on both sides,” he says.

The Scottish photographer continues: “Soon after, I had dinner in Paris with Beatrix Miller [British Vogue editor from 1964-84], and I suggested they would look great on a cover. She said she would investigate and then the next morning, while I was still in Paris, she phoned me and asked if I was available that night to shoot the British Vogue cover with those YSL gloves. That’s a lovely story as moments like that rarely happen.”

Occasionally, Watson’s strong photographic style was deemed too “heavy” by Vogue editors who wanted lighter images in the magazine. “I remember shooting couture dresses down in Cornwall and I wanted to do a Wuthering Heights theme. The models had a dark mystery and Romanticism to them as the clouds were dark, it was stormy, and the long grass blew in the wind,” he says.

“An editor said to me ‘does every picture have to be such a damned epic’. And of course, I replied ‘why are we here then, just to do some pictures for a magazine that are forgotten tomorrow’,” he says, laughing.

Lisa Armstrong OBE Heading the fashion features of the 80s and 90s

Currently Head of Fashion at The Telegraph, Armstrong has established herself as a prestigious name in the international fashion world, and conducted interviews with the likes of Miuccia Prada, Donatella Versace and Tom Ford.

Armstrong’s career in fashion began at British Vogue in 1988 as Assistant Features Editor and she became the Fashion Features Director in 1993. “I was impressed as they had computers, whereas they didn’t at ELLE where I’d come from,” recalls Armstrong.

She continues: “Liz [Elizabeth Tilberis - British Vogue editor from 1988-92] was a fun and upbeat person to be around. I got the job with little experience, but she took me to all the fashion shows.”

According to Armstrong, fashion magazines must strike a balance – they should be aspirational, but not unattainable. “Women want to wear clothes and they want it broken down. If it’s too much of a dream, it’s just not that interesting to readers.”

She continues: “Alexandra Shulman [British Vogue editor from 1992-2017] was quite far-sighted because she introduced those practical elements of fashion when she first became editor. There was a lot of how to wear items and what to wear,” she says.

Working at British Vogue during the 90s, Armstrong oversaw the transition from the glitz and glamour of the ‘Supers’, such as Cindy Crawford and Christy Turlington, to the grunge and so-called ‘heroin chic’ era. “There was a new wave of models coming in, like Kate Moss, with this darker element,” she says.

Moss’ first British Vogue cover, shot by Corinne Day in 1993 for the March issue, has become a standout cover for the magazine. “The cover story I wrote for Kate’s first issue was all about London girls,” she says.

Helena Christensen. Tuxedo story, 1994

Plum Sykes

The fashion assistant of the 90s

Plum Sykes was the noughties ‘It Girl’. Waltzing around New York like a real-life Carrie Bradshaw, the city was her playground. But the journalist and novelist began her career as the fashion assistant at British Vogue in 1993.

“I would write funny pieces about what all the Europeans in London were wearing because they were very chic and, unlike the British, didn’t mind spending lots of money on their clothes,” says Sykes.

Sykes’ most memorable shoot was of model Iris Palmer wearing a dress designed by Julien Macdonald. “I found this photographer called Tim Walker and thought he seemed great. And then we were like ‘why don’t we use this girl, Charlotte Tilbury, to do the makeup’.”

“So all these emerging artists were coming through, contributing to these images that ended up as small segments in the magazine.”

According to Sykes, before the 90s, fashion wasn’t a large talking point in England. “I’d write all these articles, but none of my friends read Vogue. Fashion was a niche. The rise of the internet moved British fashion magazines into a larger conversation.”

Sykes moved to American Vogue in 1997 and worked under Dame Anna Wintour. “On my second day at American Vogue, my editor asked if I’d received her email. I just replied, ‘what’s an email, we don’t have email in England’,” she says, laughing.

Carol Woolton Handling the jewels for the last 24 years

Woolton began her career at British Vogue during the late 70s and worked as a secretary under Beatrix Miller [British Vogue editor from 1964-84]. She returned in 2000 under the title of Jewellery Editor until 2019. Woolton has since worked as a contributor for the magazine.

Woolton experienced the culture change after the handover from Alexandra Shulman [British Vogue editor from 1992-2017] to Edward Enninful [British Vogue editor from 2017-24]. “Some people have described British Vogue under Alexandra’s tenure as a girl’s school. There were a lot of women,” says Woolton.

She continues: “There was a huge change in atmosphere when Edward started. It was exciting because a lot of men and younger people came in. There was also a focus on diversity and inclusivity.”

Woolton recalls how she could verbally express or write ideas for Shulman, whereas with Enninful she had to show him. “Everything had to be visual,” she explains.

The change in editor also impacted how jewellery was presented in the magazine. “Edward wanted to include jewellery much more on the fashion pages. They almost became fashion shoots whereas in the past I’d done a lot of still lifes. Before, jewellery was thought of more as an accessory,” she says.

Enninful’s first issue in 2017 (pictured below) is a standout memory for Woolton as prior covers never featured fine jewellery. “It really heralded a change of attitude that fine jewellery was going to be a major part of the fashion stories,” she says.

“Edward was shooting the cover in New York, and I got some unbelievable earrings from FD Gallery. They looked like they were slightly moving in the shot, and it made such an exciting statement,” recalls Woolton.

Courtesy of Steven Meisel for British Vogue , December 2017

Julie Foster. Algarve Portugal Yellow Story, 1977

Adwoa Aboah. December issue 2017

Courtesy of Darren Gerrish/ British Vogue

Nnadi at the British Vogue Fashion & Film party

Chioma NNADI C

The new Vogue editor talks British culture, creating a digital empire, and why every issue needs a ‘secret sauce’

Interview by Maria Sarabi and Imogen Williams

hioma Nnadi has not yet had time to put art on the walls of her new office. At the end of January, British Vogue moved into London’s grand Adelphi Building just off the Strand. In February alone, Nnadi travelled to four cities, attended dozens of fashion shows, and hosted star-studded afterparties. But in her new role as Head of Editorial Content at British Vogue, there is no time to rest. She is busy with the release of the April edition, which marks her first at the helm.

After residing in New York for 20 years, where she worked for various magazines, including American Vogue, Nnadi is back in London. Growing up a stone’s throw from Soho, she is thrilled to be back in her childhood playground. “It’s like discovering everything for the first time again and there’s that child-like wonder that you get when you’re exploring a city,” she says, beaming. “I was always the British girl in the [US] office anyway. The way that I style myself is very true to British style: mixing and matching, putting together unexpected things, a sense of humour and lots of colour.”

True to her word, she is all smiles as she enters the room dressed in a melange of hues and prints. Martine Rose jeans, a distressed Maison Margiela cardigan, and crystalembellished ballet flats with pink socks — she makes her designer look appear casual. How was her first fashion month in Britain’s top fashion journalism job? “It was wild,” she says, emphasising each word. “It’s been perhaps the busiest month of my life so far, but the most exciting one.”

London born and of Nigerian and Swiss-German descent, Nnadi spent her youth scouring for vintage finds on

Portobello Road and shopping for hours in Oxford Street’s “Big Topshop”. From as early as 16-years-old, Nnadi would style herself in a mix of vintage and high-street, ready to hit what she calls, “the early London club scene around garage, jungle music, and drum and bass”.

Storytelling has been ingrained in her since childhood – age 11, she created her first zine at primary school. She plays around with the papers in front of her, fashioning them into the style of the zine, giggling at the memory of it. “It was definitely official,” she deadpans, a sign that she never lost her British sarcasm while living across the pond.

Despite two decades overseas, growing up in a multicultural household in central London has shaped her understanding of the broad scope of what it means to be British. “I can’t say how much that has influenced me – it’s been something that is such a special gift being able to see the different culture clash in London,” she says.

Historically, the pages of British Vogue have presented a very limited experience of British culture and fashion. It is her predecessor, Edward Enninful, who is credited with kickstarting a dramatic period of positive change at the brand in terms of representation. During his six years as Editor-in-Chief of the magazine, he filled the pages with a wider representation of the diverse cultural landscape in the UK. He ended his tenure with the March 2024 cover featuring a diverse group of 40 influential women – a celebration of the progress he had made.

Nnadi is the first Black female head to take on the top job.

“The way I see the world, I can’t unsee it. It’s influenced by my background, who I am and the experiences I’ve had,” she says. “Naturally, it is expressed in everything that I do and the stories that I’m drawn to.”

She hopes to capture the broad range of British culture through the stories that will be told and the fashion that will be showcased across British Vogue’s platforms. “I think we really understand that there isn’t a singular view of what British style or what British identity looks like,” she says.

“I’m coming into this role at a moment where there are so many talented British young designers of colour,” she says. “I want to be able to support designers who represent the values that I represent.” Nnadi name-drops two of her favourite British designer brands – Martine Rose and Wales Bonner – both founded by women of colour.

When Enninful announced that he would step down as Editor-in-Chief last year, Dame Anna Wintour advertised for his successor under a new title of Head of Editorial Content. With the loss of the original and prestigious title, eyebrows were raised across the industry as many media outlets questioned the nature of the new role. Nnadi is embracing the change: “I think content can sound like not the sexiest word, but it’s a really subtle distinction in how we’re operating now and what my role means,” she says.

The change was designed to cut costs, with editors overseeing more platforms and working more collaboratively across the international outlets. The Editor of British Vogue has long been a job associated with showstopper covers and pages worth of high-profile designers. Nnadi’s new role, however, transcends what it traditionally meant to be in charge of a print publication and will demand that she continues to grow the brand’s digital output.

While Nnadi is already synonymous with the digital landscape following three years as Editor of Vogue.com, she now faces the added pressure of maintaining the relevance of a monthly print issue. Feature writing is her “first love” and she has racked up years of experience at print publications as a writer. Her excitement for a long-form profile is still palpable and she has previous cover interviews with the likes of Rihanna, Cara Delevingne and Erykah Badu under her belt. “When you sit down with someone and you get their story and a chance to see the world through their eyes, it’s so special,” she says, becoming increasingly animated.

“We have to try new things. You can’t please everyone”

But April is the first edition for which she’s in charge of the entire publication. A self-proclaimed foodie, she compares the process of putting together a magazine to cooking up an elaborate meal. “You want to make a really great supper,” she says. “You have your meat and potatoes but you need some secret sauce and a good glass of wine with it and

Courtesy of Chioma

Nnadi

Courtesy of Chioma Nnadi

Nnadi, June 1982

Nnadi with her mother, a Swiss-German nurse

a fantastic dessert. All the elements have to speak to one another.”

For Nnadi, the recipe for secret sauce is something unexpected, perhaps even a little risky. “We can’t always play it safe. We have to try new things. You can’t please everyone, but if you’re causing a conversation and people are interested, then that’s a good sign,” she says. “The worst thing would be not to be relevant.”

Her articles for American Vogue have spotlighted previously underreported topics — from writing an opinion feature on the power of durags on the red carpet, to telling the story of a climate activist attending Paris fashion week. Nnadi doesn’t shy away from topics that will spark an important discussion.

The choice of cover star can cause the biggest discussion of all. “Being on a Vogue cover means something and it’s a real announcement to the world. It’s a real statement.”

So how did Nnadi choose the announcement she would make to the world with her first cover? “I got some good advice from Anna Wintour,” she says. “She just said to me ‘make sure it’s someone that you feel personally connected to’.”

But whoever the Editors opt to showcase, they cannot avoid the challenge of ensuring that the cover will still have an impact when the issue goes to print, usually months after the shoot and interview. Nnadi simply puts this down to “the nature of the beast” and describes choosing a cover star as a “gamble”. “It is hard to pick your first cover because it has to sort of set the tone for what’s coming next,” she says. “I truly believe that the woman we chose is exactly that.”

British labels, including Jawara Alleyne and 16Arlington.

The woman in question is FKA twigs, the 36-year-old British-Jamaican singer-songwriter and dancer. Nnadi gave Johnny Dufort, a first-time British Vogue contributor, the role of shooting the cover, which captures the alternative artist atop a London black cab. The cover is a love letter to Britain, with twigs shot in classic London locations including inside a phone box and at Farringdon tube station. In her editor’s letter, Nnadi wrote: “FKA twigs is an artist who represents the ideal of the modern British eccentric: she is a shapeshifter who rejects conformity and takes real joy in clothes.”

The choice of outfits is a further nod to the British essence. twigs is styled by Ib Kamara, a British Vogue contributing editor, and dons a pale yellow silk dress detailed with a large pin by British creative director J.W. Anderson for Loewe. Further images show the cover star wearing other

Nnadi herself wrote the cover story, choosing to both celebrate the artist’s upcoming album while also touching on heavier topics such as twigs’ experience of abuse and her struggle with PTSD.

Nnadi’s choice of secret sauce paid off – the issue recorded British Vogue’s highest ever print revenue for an April edition. Accompanying the print magazine, Nnadi made sure to place just as much of a focus on digital. The online version of the article includes a new feature called “Explore the Issue”, where readers can get access to exclusive behind-the-scenes content, including twigs commenting on her own previous looks and bonus footage from the cover shoot.

Nnadi is no stranger to the power of digital storytelling, and knows how to successfully foster interactivity between audience and brand. She led the digital coverage of the brand’s largest global events – such as Vogue World, the Met Gala, Forces of Fashion – and kept the multi millions

Left to right: Nnadi and FKA twigs for the British Vogue April 2024 issue

Courtesy of Johnny Dufort for British Vogue . April 2024 issue

Courtesy of Johnny Dufort for British Vogue . April 2024 issue

The April 2024 British Vogue cover, featuring FKA twigs styled by Ib Kamara

reading American Vogue’s website engaged. She also remains a co-host for the brand’s podcast, The RunThrough with Vogue. Off the back of her considerable success as the editor of Vogue.com, there is substantial pressure on Nnadi to develop the British Vogue audience in the digital space.

“I’m thinking about how we’re telling stories across different platforms,” she says. “I’m very keen to make sure that we’re moving with the moment, and we’re meeting the moment. We’re inviting new people into the brand.”

Digital storytelling is about speed and access while retaining the essence of the brand at its core. “The value system that we have is universal across all platforms,” says Nnadi. “What makes a Vogue story is always what makes a Vogue story. But what makes a Vogue TikTok story might be different to what makes a Vogue print story.”

A behind-the-scenes TikTok of models preparing to walk a runway, or a Q&A with a high-profile designer, can make a global audience feel as though they have a front row seat to the action within seconds of it happening. It is these timesensitive stories that Nnadi looks to share with the growing online audience. “A lot of the stories that we told at Fashion Week, they have that sort of ephemeral, short lifespan,” she says. “There’s an immediacy to TikTok and Instagram that isn’t the same as print.”

“We all need a bit of fantasy and a bit of levity in these times. I hope British Vogue can be that”

With the rise of a digital era and financial pressures within the industry, Vogue has begun to look beyond the borders of each individual brand, sharing content between its publications. This is the Wintour effect. In 2020, she too was given a new title – worldwide Chief Content Officer and Global Editorial Director of Vogue. “I think we’re much less inward-looking and inward-facing as a culture than ever,” says Nnadi.

She thrives off working with her colleagues across the world to share global, far-reaching stories. Throughout the conversation, she regularly name-drops and credits her colleagues, such as European Features Director, Giles Hattersley. “We’re collaborating. We’re thinking about how we can tell stories that have a global impact.”

But Nnadi is also mindful of the importance of local stories, which are at the heart of the British brand’s community. “I want to amplify those stories and be able to connect with an audience that’s much closer to home.”

Nnadi is committed to curating a British Vogue community but acknowledges this must come from her audience as much as it does her and the Vogue team. “It’s not just a one way street,” she says. She of all people knows this. “When I was a kid, the only way that I could get in contact with an editor or make my voice heard or get feedback about an issue was writing a letter.” Nowadays, feedback is instant, and it is Nnadi’s job to use that to the brand’s advantage.

“We know which stories resonate. We know what people are reading. We have so much feedback. We have so much data around what people want from us,” she says. “So I think it’s a really special time.”

At the top of her priority list is using this data to ensure

that there is a conversation around British Vogue and that the publication stays relevant in an age where it feels as though anyone can broadcast their opinion on anything. Nnadi insists that well-informed journalism is still in demand. “Personally, I think the craft is more important than ever,” she says. “We need to support really good journalism because there’s so much noise out there and so much misinformation out there.”

This is why she firmly believes in bringing voices of authority into the “family of Vogue”. In the fashion space, British Vogue has a certain legacy, but Nnadi recognises that the brand cannot afford to take this for granted. “We don’t want to be incumbent by it, we want to be nimble,” she says.

Today, British Vogue covers an entire cultural spectrum that goes beyond the world of hemlines and shoulder pads. “It’s so important for us to be commenting on what’s happening in the culture at large because we’re not in a vacuum.” The publication spotlights writers such as Zadie Smith on literature and Afua Hirsch on politics to ensure that readers can trust who is telling the story.

But how does Nnadi know that a story is worth telling? “I think it’s always a gut feeling and instantly it should be an easy decision to decide whether or not it is a Vogue story,” she says. Throughout her decades of experience in the industry, Nnadi has had to learn to make a judgement call on a story at speed. “It’s an intuitive muscle that you have to keep strengthening,” she says. “I’ve kind of fed my eye over the years, but it’s definitely instinctual.”

Nnadi’s intuition is timely as the magazine continues to strike a balance between accessibility and inspiration in the face of an economic crisis in the UK. She has a tough task at hand to make luxury sell when thousands are cutting personal costs. “I want the pages of British Vogue to inspire people. I want it to be a celebration of creativity and obviously grounded in reality,” she says. “But we all need a bit of fantasy and we all need a bit of levity in these times. I hope British Vogue can be that.”

Nnadi herself embodies the dichotomy of aspirational and grounded that she hopes to achieve across British Vogue’s platforms. She switches between Adidas track pants and Phoebe Philo trousers as her office wear. She is famously understated but has one of the most coveted jobs in the industry. She hates late dinner reservations – “When I’m in Milan, I don’t want to eat at nine o’clock” – but dines in some of the world’s fanciest restaurants.

Despite working in an industry associated with highlystrung personalities and a level of superficiality, she is a down-to-earth journalist to her core. For Nnadi, fashion is always an accessory that enhances the story of a person. “I always think that if I enter a room, people should see me. They shouldn’t see an outfit, it should be me. When we’re dressing women and dressing people for our stories, you want to see the person. That’s so important.”

Nnadi’s tenure has only just begun, but will, one way or another, define her career. So when she does one day walk out of The Adelphi for the last time, what does she want to have achieved? “With every issue and every story that gets told, I want to be able to uplift and celebrate the best things of British style and British fashion and culture,” she says.

“If I’ve done that and stayed ahead and continued to introduce our audience to new and exciting things, the things that inspire me and inspire the team, then that will be the best job that I could have done.”

That, and her determination to one day land the cover star of her dreams, who she adamantly refuses to share: “I have one person specifically. If I get them, I can retire.”

The April issue of BritishVogueis available via digital download and on newstands now.

From Private Eye and The Face to gal-dem the most influential publications in the industry started (and remain) as zines, write Sydney Evans and

When we hear the word ‘zine’, many will think of pieces of paper stapled together, a series of scribbled down words on queer punk bands, nuclear disarmament, an obscure sci-fi show or period pains passed between hands long before the internet existed.

While pens have since been replaced with keyboards, as a way for voices and opinions to break into a media landscape that had no place for them, the possibilities inspired by the DIY attitude of zines is a legacy that runs deep and remains popular.

According to research firm Enders Analysis, 330 new magazines launched last year, with most of these being independent titles. Although zine and magazine are used more interchangeably today, the possibilities zines produced for a myriad of voices by claiming their independence undoubtedly transformed the industry.

Journalist and author of The Story of The Face: The Magazine That Changed Culture, Paul Gorman says: “Zines are a way of undermining the status quo. That most obviously happened with punk zines like Sniffin’ Glue. But if you think about Private Eye, it literally started as a zine.”

The magazine at the centre of Gorman’s work; Nick Logan created The Face in 1980 after becoming fed up with the corporate culture at NME. More interested in knowing what clothes his favourite bands were wearing or the books they were reading, in an interview with The Guardian, Logan explains how The Face reported on what “NME and Melody Maker were too sniffy to cover”. Inspired by the new romantics movement, the subculture saw musicians like Visage, Duran Duran and Boy George play with flamboyance and androgyny in their appearances. As Gorman points out, at a time when many of the music papers “weren’t going to go for this wonderfully androgynous, dominatrix type, Black singer,” The Face put

Grace Jones on their cover, proving the potential of zines to bend culture to their will.

This ethos, he explains, still applies to bigger magazines. “You don’t immediately think of Private Eye as a zine, but actually it does operate as a zine because it kicks against the pricks.” While the publication now sells over 200,000 copies a fortnight, it started in 1961 as pages full of schoolboy-esque jokes sold in pubs. Once a hand-drawn collection of six pages, it’s gone on to break some of the nation’s biggest stories.

Less bothered by a strict definition of the word, comics journalist and zine-maker Sarah Shay Mirk sees it as “any multi-page work that’s made primarily for passion, not profit.” She adds: “It’s more about intention. Is it your intention to express something you’re passionate about? Something you feel politically about? Or is your intention primarily that this is going to be something that makes money.”

Steven Watson, founder of Stack, an independent magazine subscription service, echoes Mirk’s definition. “I feel like a zine is something made primarily by one person, working on their own, quite likely with some kind of handmade element, and it’s primarily about them reflecting their experience of the world.”

Here lies the legacy of zines in their ability to provide a platform to the voices and perspectives of people from marginalised communities, like Mirk, who identifies as queer and non-binary. From now-defunct feminist magazines like Spare Rib, which thrived in the 70s, to the likes of today’s feminist Polyester Zine and the Black, queer and trans Oestrogeneration, zine making and publishing has long formed an integral part of the activist tradition.

Having started their career as a local political journalist in Portland, Oregon, Mirk transitioned to comics journalism and zine-making after being dissatisfied with the “echo chamber” in which they felt their articles were being

published and read. Since the shift, they’ve made and published zines on everything from abortion rights to gender identity, and in 2020 even released Guantanamo Voices, a critically acclaimed illustrated oral history of the infamous Guantanamo Bay Prison.

“One big reason that I love making zines and comics on my own is because I don’t want anyone’s permission to publish my work,” says Mirk. “I have something I want to make. I want to make it and share it and not have to jump through a bunch of hoops, in order to get it out there.”

“Zines are an amazing way of pulling together voices in a community”

As Polyester Zine founder Ione Gamble notes in her brilliant VICE article on feminist zines, before social media, print zines were the only way for marginalised voices to find each other and unite to organise socio-politically on a larger scale, making them vital to the community-building that paves the way for activism.

As the archives filled with zines from past to present at institutions like south London’s Feminist Library and the mobile Queer Zine Library highlight, this ethos remains today. Even in an era where many print zines have developed an online presence and social media has also become a space for organising activism, the appeal of the zine is timeless. Founder of Sister Magazine (until it ceased in 2022), Beccy Hill says: “Zines have been around for so long. And that’s also why I love going to the Feminist Library. You can see how far these kinds of things stretch back. I think there’s always going to be a place for that.”

“They often come into someone’s practice who doesn’t have the means to put their work out there in traditional ways,” says Lu Williams, an artist and zine-maker who founded the popular Grrrl Zine Fair, a queer, working class, feminist zine-making collective which runs events around the UK. “There’s also a huge amount of control over the content,

and marginalised people don’t often have that much control over their lives. Zines are an amazing – the best even – way of pulling together voices in a community.”

Williams themselves is a prime example of this. At Oxford University where they studied fine art, they felt alienated from their peers as a queer, neurodivergent, working class person who was the first in their family to study at university. “I didn’t have the language to understand that alienation,” they say.

As an art student involved in intersectional feminist activism, however, they had always appreciated the accessible visual language of zines and their close relationship with activism, and initially helped to found the now-defunct Cuntry Living Zine, an Oxford-based intersectional feminist zine. “I fell in love with meeting likeminded feminists, putting on fundraisers, learning to DJ, collaging communally, printing on a risograph at Oxford Green Print and then distributing the zines across campus on bikes,” they say. “I then started to make my own zines to elaborate on ideas in my artworks.”

Like Spare Rib and Williams’ Cuntry Living Zine, most zines only have a limited lifespan. As largely independent, not-for-profit ventures from individuals who don’t usually have the means or contacts to enable their publication to grow its circulation, they’re seldom able to last long, let alone successfully make the transition from a small, independently published zine to a corporately produced magazine with a circulation in the triple figures. The likes of The Face are an exception, not the rule.

Yet the short-lived nature of most zines doesn’t detract from their immense importance in the pop culture canon. From i-D and The Face to more recent successes like Polyester, zines remain a fertile ground for emerging talents in magazine journalism to experiment with their form and copy in a way that doesn’t have to break the bank, and offers a platform to marginalised voices who otherwise would be shut out of the industry.

As for any wannabe zine-makers who are tempted to try their hand at making their own, Williams advises: “It can feel really scary to put something out that isn’t ‘perfect’ – so just embrace the DIY zine spirit. It’s about putting all of that energy into the world and not especially about how it looks aesthetically.”

Zines have changed the magazine industry as we know it

Courtesy of Liz Henry / Flickr

Booze, Kit Kats and 90s rap: Beating writer’s block

Whether it’s an hour until the deadline or a struggle to come up with a punchy standfirst, Claudia Cox asks journalists how they get their ballpoints rolling

Alex Rigotti

Freelance music and culture journalist

Learning that Stephanie Meyer began writing Twilight from Chapter 13 was a revelation for teenage me – you actually don’t have to start at the beginning! Write key scenes from your piece and treat it like a puzzle.

In the name of ‘mental health’ and ‘treating myself’, I will eat snacks for dinner (because who has the time to cook proper meals when you’re writing a very important piece). If you see a stack of Kit Kat wrappers in the bin next to my desk ... no you didn’t.

Tom Howard

Editor, The Garden magazine

The most effective cure for writer’s block is running. I have a lot of good ideas when my brain is full of happy exercise chemicals. If that’s not an option, try to lean on the facts. If you’ve got all the quotes and information, then you shouldn’t get writer’s block. If you have to come up with a column idea, then just read, and you will find something to write about in response.

However, I used to just drink! Especially when I first started as a journalist and I got very nervous before interviews. I couldn’t get completely plastered, but I would always have a couple of pints.

Ellie Muir

Culture reporter, The Independent

If I’m in the office and I’ve got to file a feature at 3pm, I have quite a specific routine. I put my AirPods in, get a Diet Coke, put on some properly intense Hip Hop and walk around Finsbury Square. My favourite motivational anthem is She’s A Bitch by Missy Elliott.

Sarah Bailey

International Editor-At-Large, Vogue Greece

Walking or swimming gives me a sense of momentum. I go on a very unimpressive run most mornings to clear my mind, but oddly enough the words start to flow. I actually can’t indulge in anything that makes me feel guilty. My puritan work ethic is so hardcoded that I start to melt down.

But during breaks, I watch animal memes, scroll through the Brit Cult feed and check my Vinted stats.

Sophie Heawood

Writer for The Guardian author of The Hangover Games

You have to go for a walk and get some fresh air. I tend to waste £10 in Gail’s. I buy their spinach roll and an Earl Grey tea. I teach creative writing courses, and I tell students to set a timer and make themselves struggle for five minutes. They’re amazed at what they can do in that time. If you can’t say it great,

Polly Vernon

Features writer, The Times

Something on the page is always better than nothing. I think they say, perfection is the enemy of creativity. Not everything you do can be brilliant by definition. Mainly, it’s going to be good enough.

If a piece isn’t working, I’ll go for a walk or do a Pilates class and not think about it for a bit. The alpha waves keep working on the problem. Quite often, the answer will just occur to you when you’re in the shower.

Louis Wise

Assistant Editor, HTSI

If you’re struggling to write something, go for a walk and leave your phone at home. Remember that you are an impoverished journalist, and you really need to get over it and file this piece.

I often preface my writing with scrambled eggs on toast and lots of coffee – maybe a croissant too! I like to think that writing needs an awful lot of calories.

Ecuador’s press in peril: Gangs target journalists

From kidnappings to assassinations, Sarah Kennelly investigates how drug lords are using violence to silence journalists

Awave of terror ripped through Ecuador in the New Year when drug cartels unleashed a shower of brutal attacks across the country. Violence erupted when gang leaders in prisons ignited riots, which saw over 200 staff taken hostage and two police officers killed.

Many of these atrocities were concentrated in the port city of Guayaquil, a drug smuggling hotbed in Latin America. A once peaceful place, it has been ravaged by gang warfare.

In one gruesome photo published by AP News, a severed leg lay strewn in a local neighbourhood as oblivious children danced beside it.

This reached a boiling point on 9 January 2024, when a series of organised attacks were orchestrated in a bid

to strike fear into the hearts of Guayaquil’s people. Gangs stormed its university armed with rifles, as crowds of students fled screaming in terror. When staff at the news station, TC Televisión, were held hostage at gunpoint, a stream of the shocking takeover was shared by news outlets across the globe, thrusting Ecuador’s crisis of gang violence to the centre of the international stage. It marked a dramatic escalation of violence against the press, which has been soaring to deadly levels in recent years.

In response, President Daniel Noboa declared war on gangs and issued a 60-day state of emergency, enforcing a nightly curfew to curb violence. Some 22,000 troops were mobilised to tackle what he called an internal armed conflict. Taking office just the previous November, his

Police capture the gang members who held journalists hostage at TC Televisión

Courtesy of Cesar Munoz/AP

crackdown on drug-related crime is said to have sparked the terrorist attacks. From inside prisons, kingpins continued their reign over organised crime, using corrupt guards as their messenger pigeons. Endeavouring to strangle their operations, Noboa planned on moving narco bosses to maximum security facilities, but his plan was foiled when notorious gangster, José Adolfo Macías Villamar or ‘Fito’, vanished from his cell. It was upon his escape that this torrent of violence flooded Ecuador.

“They can make $500 for killing someone”

Ranked in 2019 as one of the safest places to live in Latin America, the country has been ravaged by intergang wars over its fast-growing cocaine trade. Ecuador was once known as a holiday hotspot with its idyllic beaches and green hills, but its reputation has been tarnished. The surge in robberies, carjackings, and murders has turned tourists away from the once lively region. Since the end of the pandemic, drug cartels have flocked to the nation, desperate to get a piece of the profits. Ecuador’s homicide rate has risen to 45 in every 100,000 inhabitants, placing it among the top three most dangerous countries in the continent.

Journalists became easy prey with their investigations posing risks to drug operations. Martin Pallares, Political Journalist for Diario Expreso in Ecuador, has altered his dayto-day life to dodge the wrath of gang leaders. “I work from home and I do all my interviews over Zoom,” he says. “I’ve also stopped answering phone calls and drive my car as little as possible – but I still try to have some normality. On the weekend, I go to the mountains because I love to hike.” Thankfully, Pallares hasn’t had any recent run-ins with gang violence but his brush with drug cartels has left him panicstricken. Drug traffickers threatened to murder him when he wrote the book El Juego del Camaleon in 2009, revealing the gruesome crimes of a gangster duo.

“The drug lords have become even more powerful in the last few years,” he says. “In a poor country like Ecuador, it’s easy for a young boy to start working for them because they can make $500 for killing someone. That’s what makes us feel vulnerable – the power of these organisations – so we often have to be careful and engage in self-censorship.”

Despite warnings from gangs, journalists are continuing to investigate their crimes as part of their duty to uncover the truth. Arturo Torres Ramirez, a freelance journalist living in Ecuador, got his start at City, University of London in 2003 when he studied a masters in Investigative Journalism.

Since he left City, Ramirez has unveiled corruption within Ecuador’s judicial system, where judges were found to be

giving drug lords more lenient sentences. “We have a strong sense of mission,” he says. “We chose this profession even though it’s dangerous, but we can’t trust the police to protect us because they are corrupt and linked to organised crime.”

In 2022, the US withdrew visas from officers in the Ecuadorian state security forces when it was discovered they were linked to drug traffickers. Scandals such as this have led to widespread distrust of Ecuador’s police force, and many journalists are forced to take safety measures into their own hands. This often takes the form of self-censorship or retreating from public life, further isolating them.

As Ecuador’s cocaine trade surges, so do the stakes for people who threaten kingpin profits. Journalists are in their firing line because they are revealing crooked judges, police officers, and politicians aiding the illegal drug trade. But the consequences of delivering justice have proven to be a dire quest for the media. When Fernando Villavicencio, presidential candidate and journalist, was assassinated on the campaign trail, it struck fear into the journalism community. He was shot dead while leaving a rally just one day after he publicly criticised infamous drug lord ‘Fito’.

“They’re receiving death threats over email”

“He was the most furious investigative journalist Ecuador has ever seen,” says Dagmar Thiel, CEO of Fundamedios USA, an organisation fighting for press freedom in Latin America. “He entered politics because he couldn’t bring enough justice through his investigations. His assassination was one of the most brutal crimes we have witnessed, but of course, journalists are not the only collateral victims of this violence – the people of Ecuador are suffering.”

Last year, 343 journalists were victims of violent attacks. According to Thiel, journalism has become the most highrisk profession in Ecuador. “Last year, nine journalists fled in exile,” she says. “They are receiving death threats over email, telephone, and the post. You’ve even got less people studying the subject because they fear the profession. The right of people to have access to information is being

threatened. This is harming the whole Ecuadorian society.”

The UK is the second biggest per capita user of cocaine, Thiel believes that Western countries play a role in resolving the crisis of drug-related violence. She says: “I ask you: what are you doing in Europe and the UK to control the entry, consumption, and promotion of goods for which people are murdered daily in poor countries?” And as the demand for cocaine soars, so do the brutal crimes perpetrated by gangs, with journalists at the top of their list of targets.

Courtesy of Rodrigo Abd/AP

Courtesy of Rodrigo Abd/AP

A girl runs past a tank patrolling the city of Duran, Ecuador

A deserted school campus in Duran, Ecuador

I was held hostage on live TV

José Luis Calderón was held at gunpoint by an armed gang who raided his station at TC Televisión in Ecuador. He reveals to Sarah Kennelly what it was like to put his life on the line

My alarm echoed through my newly furnished apartment at 7AM, it was like any other Tuesday. There were no telltale signs of the chaos that was to come. In a few hours, I would be begging for mercy on live television with a gun pointed to my head. Now, 9 January 2024 is the date that divides my life in two parts: before and after.

The buzz of Christmas festivities had worn off and my schedule was already brimming with stories to chase. I resisted the urge to race straight out the door and whipped up some eggs and oatmeal for breakfast.

Just over a week into the New Year, I felt hopeful for a fresh start after what I thought was the most painful year imaginable. My wife and I had divorced after five years of marriage and I was struggling with the fallout. As my relationship crumbled, the country I grew up in was transforming before my eyes. Drug cartels were running the streets, terrorising whoever was unlucky enough to be in their firing line. I fell victim twice before, mugged at gunpoint in the once tranquil centre of my city Guayaquil. Everyday I left my house, it crossed my mind that I wouldn’t make it back. I remember thinking: “It can’t get any worse.”

When I arrived at the station, I rolled up my sleeves and buckled down. News reporting in Ecuador is action-packed

and by noon, I had already written and presented two stories. Once the morning show had ended, I made a run for the newsroom to eat some lunch with my colleagues. I was only halfway through my tuna salad when we heard shouting coming from outside the studio.

“I saw men run their hands over the women’s bodies, assaulting them”

At first, I thought it was a harmless fight – we often have locals barging in to complain. But as the screams grew frantic, it dawned on us that we were in danger. I grabbed my co-workers and fled to the nearest bathroom. We locked the door behind us, diving onto the cold, damp floor. The 15 minutes that we hid inside for felt like hours, each second painstakingly ticking by as the muffled screams raged on.

Trembling, I called my brother-in-law whispering: “I don’t know what’s happening but I’m trapped and hiding. Please call the police.”

Courtesy of TC Televisi ó n

Masked gun men threatening José Luis Calderón while he begged for his life

That was the moment the penny dropped. Guayaquil was under siege and terrorist attacks had been launched across the city. We were being ambushed by an armed gang.

It wasn’t long until they found us. We could hear dozens of fists slamming on the door, jolting its hinges. When they threatened to start shooting, a feeling of calm washed over me. I knew that I had to to protect my team. It was a moment of life or death, I couldn’t choose to be scared.

The second the latch lifted, swarms of men dressed in tracksuits burst into the bathroom brandishing machine guns and machetes. Their faces were covered by balaclavas but I could tell they were teenagers, children sent to terrorise us.

In a split second, they swung me against the door, shouting: “We are going to kill you!”

My two female coworkers let out blood-curdling screams. From the corner of my eye, I saw men run their hands over the women’s bodies, assaulting them while they spat insults in their faces. I can still remember the look of horror in the eyes of the youngest reporter. It was her first day.

The balaclava-clad men herded us down the hallway, digging the barrels of their guns deeper into our backs with each step we took. They forced their way through the heavy metal doors of the broadcast studio. There, my coworkers lay curled on the floor before me, praying to be spared. A gang leader stormed in, yelling for a presenter to stand up. Our eyes met and he dragged me in front of the camera.

“I will say and do anything you want me to,” I said, slowly raising my hands to signify my desperation.

I felt the mouth of a rifle stab the back of my neck and a hand reach into my blazer pocket, dropping a stick of dynamite inside. I kept telling myself to keep strong for my coworkers, we needed to leave this station alive.

“Turn to the camera and say: ‘If the police come inside the building, they will kill us all’,” boomed the leader.

But a shock of panic burned through my body and my shoulders slumped over. It struck me that this was my final chance to beg for our lives.

I raised my hands together in prayer and pleaded with the police to stay away from the station. But it was too late. Just as I was delivering the message, the sound of their gunshots could be heard from a distance. The thick, soundproof door to the studio would stall them, but not for long.

Some of the gang members dove for cover, searching for hiding spots where they could take the police by surprise. This was our opportunity to escape. But before we could risk

it, the criminals unleashed a frenzy of violence upon us.

A group of men pounced on my colleague, brutally beating him till they broke both his arm and hand. As the gunshots from the police grew louder, the gang fired at the door to keep them back. But a bullet ricocheted off the doorframe, hitting our cameraman and shattering his leg.

With my nose pressed to the floor, I mapped my escape route. I made a dash for the production stairs and took refuge behind the lighting fixtures.

The police finally broke down the studio door and captured most of the gang members who were no match for their power. Yet, even in this moment of heartstopping relief, I was still thinking of how I would report this story the next day. I didn’t feel like a victim – I was a journalist on the job.

“The adrenaline drained from my body and the PTSD took its place”

After being questioned by law enforcement, we were set free. I was in a state of utter shock. The first thing I did was call my mother to check that she was safe. Then I hopped in my car and drove home where I was welcomed by my neighbours with a glass of single malt whisky.

When I shut the door to my apartment, alone, the adrenaline drained from my body and the PTSD took over. The screams of my colleagues, begging to live, haunted my dreams, forcing me to relive the events over and over again.

The next morning, I woke up in disbelief. Phone calls from international numbers flooded my phone. Reporters from the BBC, CNN, and everywhere in between began flocking to my doorstep, fighting to get the exclusive interview. Overnight, I went from being the journalist to being the story, flipping my whole life upside down.

Now, the interest in my story has faded and the dust has settled. But I’m still grappling with trauma from the day I was taken hostage. Life won’t be the same. Big crowds unnerve me and I shut my windows tightly each night, fearful the gangs will come for me again. I dream of leaving this place someday and fleeing to America – I am no longer safe here.

Courtesy of Cesar Munoz/AP

Courtesy of José Luis Calderón

Translation by Maria Martinez-Ugartechea

Armed police capture the attackers at the station

José having fun on a helicopter ride on New Year’s Day

The times

a-changing

they are

Four decades after the launch of Gay Times, what does the history and evolution of the publication and its rivals tell us about the current state of queer media? Ben Jureidini investigates why the magazine is returning to its radical roots

Fewer than three editions of Gay Times were published by the time the police raided their offices.

The September 1984 issue led with “The Struggle Against Censorship,” detailing the increasingly oppressive seizure operations of the Obscene Publications Squad. The article, written by Kris Kirk, ends ominously: “They don’t call it 1984 for nothing.”

Four decades on from the magazine’s launch, queer

publications are mainstream. Gay Times, Attitude, and DIVA continue to thrive. Same-sex relationships are legalised throughout the West. Those with access to PreP no longer live in fear of AIDS. But, with books bans and anti-drag bills Stateside, and a UK government increasingly willing to inflame anti-trans rhetoric for political gain, the struggle against censorship continues. 40 years later, what’s changed for queer magazines? What hasn’t changed?

Covers courtesy of Gay Times and Diva

From Heartlands to Newstands

There was no Issue One of Gay Times. In May 1984, Him Monthly merged with Gay News and “Britain’s Biggest Gay Times” was born. Until then, Him had been a softcore porn magazine which occasionally dabbled in lifestyle, and Gay News’ legislative reporting was struggling to find a readership amid an increasingly hedonistic audience. As the spectre of HIV/AIDS began to stalk the UK, neither was considered appropriate by readers: community energy needed to focus on education and information, but members of that community needed a reason to actually read the magazine. Gay Times blended both.

“Gay Times was the most overt outpouring of a gay community,” says Matthew Campling, the magazine’s agony uncle from 1993-2002. From the esoteric (the legal ambiguities of bondage; the sexual desire to be shrunk down and eaten up; fisting) to the tragically commonplace (the impossibilities of coming out, finding a boyfriend, living with AIDS), Campling’s Heartland column offered advice and information to a community still deprived of their inalienable rights.

Guides created a self-sustaining queer economy within the magazine. As the 90s chugged on, that economy became monetisable. Alcohol and cigarette brands realised the potential of dual-income, typically childless gay men for whom partying was still a fundamental aspect of community. Gay Times offered companies like Absolut and Smirnoff access to this previously untapped consumer. Mainstream advertisers brought mainstream cover stars: Victoria Wood, Lulu, Kylie Minogue. By 1995, the vivid covers of Gay Times were on the shelves of WHSmith, enjoying national distribution. That year, publishers Millivres Prowler launched DIVA: a magazine catering specifically to lesbian and bisexual women.

Did this evolution from community magazine to national title dilute the content? “If you’re getting stocked in WHSmith,” reflects Lewis Corner, Senior Vice President of global content at Gay Times Group, “editorially you have to be more careful about what’s on your pages.” Less cottaging advice, more “Smile, Kylie!”

An Attitude Shift

If you ask Paul Burston, who wrote for Gay Times in the early 90s, tempering content in the name of courting mainstream appeal meant self-censorship. “It was all about positive images,” he recalls. “In the 80s it was justified that the gay press was quite defensive, by the 90s we were living in a different time – there was a kind of false optimism.”

For Burston, access to mainstream audiences required a plastering over of uncomfortable truths within the community. AIDS deaths were at an all-time high in the early 90s, with 1,700 people dying annually. Alcoholism, drug dependencies, sexual compulsion, and internalised homophobia were going unreported. “There was a sort of happy-clappy cheerleader quality to what the gay press wanted you to be,” he says.

“Writing with empathy shouldn’t be a radical act”

In 1995, after a particularly productive dinner party with Northern & Shell publishers Tim Nicholson and Jane Phillips, Burston launched Attitude. Articles by Sunday Times journalists like Chrissy Illey shared spreads with controversial essays by Mark Simpson or pieces about Leigh Bowery and fetish clubs like Torture Garden. “There were tensions within the magazine,” recounts Burston: “but it was productive. We wanted a magazine that would surprise people – we were deliberately trying to shake things up.”

“Each letter was a different life,” he says. “A different set of circumstances and concerns.” The readership ranged from older men – some living with their mothers, some their wives – to 16-year-olds, terrified to come out. Countless letters began “if anyone knew I was reading Gay Times, it would destroy my life”. Campling directed these men to the magazine’s Gay Guides, a roadmap of sympathetic organisations, local community groups, gay switchboards, and nightclubs. “You could help someone feeling isolated to feel a connection with other gay men,” says Campling, “if you bought Gay Times you had a sense of identity.”

Along with the Classified section – where readers paid for ads seeking employment, housing, sex, romance – Gay

Attitude published the kind of content that would have been unacceptable without the proof-of-concept Gay Times had given advertisers. But alongside the desire for provocative pieces, Burston wanted to push the gay press even further into the mainstream: “We wanted a magazine that would be in the men’s magazines sections, not in the gay section.” Gay magazines were confined to the top shelf, automatically viewed as pornographic. Alongside a shift from staples to perfect binding came a jump to the middle shelf for both magazines. “It did benefit Gay Times that we came along,” Burston laughs, “they would never admit it, but it did.”

Online Cruising

Both magazines ushered each other from the top shelf to the mainstream, then on to a niche little invention known as the World Wide Web. In December 1995, the year after Attitude launched, Gay Times led with a piece welcoming lesbians and gay men to the world of “online cruising”: “Whether the net really revolutionises the way we live our lives, or whether

Courtesy of Gay Times

it remains a fringe activity, it’s certainly worth a look.”

It certainly was. As apps like Grindr made classifieds redundant and the internet satisfied the need for immediate information, the magazine’s initial function – connecting an isolated community – quickly became obsolete.

“We realised that Gay Times hadn’t shifted radically enough in so long that it was getting left behind,” says Corner. In September 2021, the publication moved completely online: “As important as that title and its legacy is, and the emotional connection that the community has with it, we knew Gay Times could offer so much more,” he outlines. “Decentralising allowed that to happen.”

After this “digital and social revolution”, the magazine reached a globalised audience. They were among the first publishers to create an Instagram newsfeed that blended headlines, news, and photos. As is true throughout Gay Times’ history, this innovation was born from the blending of genres: when the social media manager lobbied for a dedicated meme account, Corner was concerned the humour might jar with the heavy-hitting reporting. The team decided to make custom Instagram tiles for their content, and now Meta uses their feed as a “best in class” example for a publisher’s online presence.

Despite garnering millions of followers, the move online has generated its own sinister form of self-censorship. Ella Gauci has managed socials at DIVA for eight months. Every day, she says, she’s taken aback by the sheer volume of hatred on platforms like Facebook.

“It doesn’t have to be controversial,” says Gauci. “It could be a relationship timeline of a sporting couple and you’ll have people calling them perverts, paedophiles, or quoting the Bible.

“Sometimes I don’t feel safe using my name in bylines in case homophobic commenters find my social media accounts,” she admits.

Perhaps, then, the online hatred is evidence that the queer press’ original function is more necessary than ever. For Gauci, social media allows DIVA to once again reach those who need it most: “Instead of having to reach to the top shelf of WHSmith for a print copy,” she explains, “anyone, anywhere, can access queer news.”

It is still illegal to be gay in 64 countries. Again, queer magazines are providing lifelines to those whose families, or whose governments, forbid them from coming out. Once again: the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Reluctant Radicals

to play a role in the way that we speak to people.”

To publish a magazine targeting a gender non-conforming audience today is to engage in yet another struggle against censorship. A study by Transgender Europe ranked the UK among the worst places in Europe and Central Asia to be trans, citing the government’s refusal to ban conversion therapy and attempts to alter the Equalities Act. For Americans, now the majority share of Gay Times’ readership, ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bills, drag bans, and a 38 per cent increase in censorship of queer literature in schools are creating an increasingly hostile socio-political climate.

With a new generation of journalists, the magazine finds itself adapting once again. In 2023, Megan Wallace was appointed as the first non-binary Editorial Director. They lead a team of writers and editors increasingly representative of the magazine’s diverse audience, including Jamie Windust, current contributing editor. Reflecting on Gay Times’ ever-increasing mainstream appeal, though, Windust remains cautious: “The increase in inclusivity in our audience doesn’t necessarily indicate a greater acceptance in society,” they say. “Rather, I feel it speaks more to the impact of greater accessibility within the media industry as a result of our queer elders’ fight 40 years ago.”

Times change, reflects Windust, but fear of the unknown remains:

“We saw this during the HIV/AIDS crisis, and we are also seeing it now, especially towards trans young people.

“There have been vast changes, but it’s also important to acknowledge the cyclical nature of prejudice – we still have issues that need our attention.”

Amid these cycles of prejudice, four decades of evolution, and the growth of spikier competitors, Gay Times’ philosophy of positive, uplifting content has not only remained constant, but has become increasingly radical. Recently, Corner decided to limit the magazine’s engagement with the inflammatory ‘culture war’ arguments that saturate mainstream news cycles. “If readers come to Gay Times and we’re also responding to it,” he explains, “where are they going to find that positive content that affirms the value of who they are?”

Gauci, too, accepts that queer media will always exist in a position of reluctant recalcitrance: “It’s vital now that we have a counternarrative to the way the right-wing media report on queer issues,” she says, citing the frequent deadnaming of Brianna Ghey in reports of her death: “Writing with compassion and empathy is a radical act. It shouldn’t have to be.”

With this global outreach came a shift in audience. DIVA, Gay Times, and Attitude now all market themselves to non-binary, trans, and intersex people – groups who find themselves at the heart of contemporary oppression. “Gay Times was born out of the circumstances and the context of its time,” says Corner. “That’s where it thrives, when it looks at the community and the world and understands how best

Gay Times was founded in a year synonymous with censorship, with the Orwellian editing-out of dissident voices. Be it Obscenity Squads or drag bans, Section 28 or institutional transphobia, the role of the queer press has been to combat oppression with community. Burston is confident that these publications are as vital now as they were in 1984. “Visibility has always been the issue,” he says. “Seeing a magazine aimed at people like you is a proudly radical thing.”

Courtesy of Gay Times

Going for gold: The voices warming up for Paris 2024

The countdown to Paris 2024 is officially on. Marking the long-awaited return of spectators to Olympic venues since Rio 2016, the Games - which begin on 26 July, promise to be a spectacle like no other. 206 countries are set to participate, with 184 at the Paralympics. And, for the first time in Olympic history, there will be an equal split of male and female athletes participating, with nearly 40 per cent of broadcasting positions occupied by women – a triple increase since Tokyo 2020. XCity spotlights some of the faces entrusted with delivering the action.

United Kingdom

Sharron Davies MBE

Olympic silver medalist back in the 1970s, Sharron Davis MBE has been a staple in games coverage for 30 years.

What is the best part about being a commentator?

I was one of the first female athletes to get asked to be a pundit. I first started commentating in 1986 at the Commonwealth Games and it’s a real privilege to still be the first person the swimmers talk to.

Other than your own extensive athletic background, what skills do you lean into when presenting?

The best way is to just be honest and bring all those years of experience but also to almost ignore the cameras. It is important to listen to responses and not to have too many pre-prepared questions.

What is your favourite Olympic memory?

Moscow was hard as there were huge expectations as well as pressure from the boycott, but it was the most important as I won my medal there. London 2012 was my favourite overall- it was the perfect Olympics Games.

As anticipation for the Paris Olympics and Paralympics builds, some of the world’s top pundits talk to Olivia Vaile about the highs and lows of the world’s greatest sporting event

Davies (top left), Alsoudi (top right), Hope (middle right), Holmes (bottom left), Sayago (bottom centre)

Australia

Tracey Holmes

The Australian presenter, host of The Sports Ambassador podcast, will be reporting live from the field on her social media platforms, having recently resigned from the ABC. This will be her 14th Olympics as a journalist, and first-time as an official torchbearer.

What is the environment like in the press centres?

It is something like no other. You meet broadcasters from across the world and it does become a sort of media contingent that you maintain friendships with.

“When the unexpected happens, you go with it”

How do you prepare to deliver the games?

Each Games has something special. In Tokyo, which I often dub the ‘Lonely Games’ (because it took place during the pandemic), you started to see interaction between people, who could be the fiercest rivals, such as the high jump joint gold awarded to Qatar Olympian Mutaz Barshim and his Italian rival Gianmarco Tamberi. These are the moments you can’t replicate, and so when the unexpected happens, you just go with it, and you’ll hop into that moment with them.

Do you think there is still a sexist attitude towards women commentators?

A recent report conducted in the state of Victoria which tracked media coverage found that reporting of women’s events was sitting at about 13 per cent. But one thing the Olympics gets right is the scheduling and the language employed. You have the men’s 100 metres and the women’s 100 metres, so if you’re broadcasting that session, you get to see as many women as men. Using language in that way and getting the scheduling right makes a huge difference.

Yemen

Abdulsalam Alsoudi

A first-time broadcaster at the Games, having worked for over 20 years on football coverage, Abdulsalam Alsoudi will work as an Olympic attaché for the Yemeni delegation and director of the Almohareb satellite channel office in Paris.

What does Yemeni representation look like this year?

Eighteen athletes will participate from Yemen, four of which are women, participating in five sports: boxing, judo, shooting and athletics.

What challenges have they faced?

The Yemeni delegation did not succeed in holding a training camp for the athletes, due to the high costs of accommodation, food, training centres, and the difficulty of finding trainers specialised in the participating games. Our presence confirms the extent of Yemeni’s desire to overcome the suffering of war that has been raging in the country for ten years. The athletes possess a degree of will and determination to honour Yemen.

What opportunities do the Games represent for Yemen?

As a presenter, I look forward to the spirit of determination that athletes show in the face of challenges.

Venezuela

Juan Jose Sayago

Paris 2024 will be Juan Jose Sayago’s fourth Olympic Games, broadcasting for Telemundo – NBC, which is the only Spanish-language network with the rights to the games.

What will Venezuelan athlete representation look like?

Unfortunately, we have gone from a delegation of 108 athletes in Beijing 2008 to only 17 athletes qualifying so far, with possibly only a little over 30 competing. It has been difficult to develop talent in Venezuela.

How do you prepare?

I’ve built my career as a journalist specialising in coverage of the Olympics and the Latin American sporting events around the four-year cycle. It’s almost a way of life to understand the training processes and growth of aspiring medallists.

What is your best memory from previous Olympics?

In London 2012, Ruben Limardo won the gold medal in fencing, being only the second Latin American to win an Olympic medal in the épée discipline in over 100 years. I had the privilege of narrating that medal from the London Excel stage. It was very special because it was a joy that hadn’t happened in my country for a long time, especially in a sport dominated by European athletes. When an athlete from a Latin American country achieves a good result, they’re almost like a hero.

United Kingdom

Nick Hope

The former BBC Olympic reporter and an award-winning broadcaster will be working with the Olympic Broadcasting Service this year, occupying position one, where he will be the first journalist the athletes come to after competing.

What is the key to delivering powerful stories?

Being in the swimming and aquatic movement is a natural place to be because most of the athletes know me. Having that relationship means they are naturally more relaxed but it also means you can ask a tough question because they respect the fact you have been there when they’ve had great moments, and also when they’ve had tough moments.

“The medals, near misses and comebacks are what people care about ”

You have carved your niche of presenting the stories behind the medals: why are these the best to tell?

I’ve found that the moments people relate to the most aren’t always the medal winning moments – it’s the heartbreak, it’s the near misses, it’s the fight backs and all the ones you want to get your teeth into, because they are the ones that people care about.

How do you prepare?

Look at the big names and what they are achieving and talk to other journalists who are on the ground with you. You’re all on different networks – sharing information helps one another.

The Queen of Podcasting on failing upwards

Elizabeth Day tells Millie Jackson and Hannah Rashbass why she’s striking out on her own after the success of How To Fail

Elizabeth Day is late. “I’m so sorry,” she exclaims, genuinely apologetic. We glance at the clock. One minute past our scheduled interview time.

She is glowing and smiley, with a perfectly cropped brown bob, she sips tea from a striped white mug in her Vauxhall home. She’s treated herself to a day off in the midst of a book tour that’s taken her from Australia to Dublin, promoting the paperback version of her 15th book, Friendaholic. Today she’s been to a morning exercise class and is just back from lunch with friends. Tomorrow, she’ll be in front of an adoring audience at the London Palladium.

Despite this, failure – or talking about failure – has come to define her professional career. She divorced her first husband Kamal Ahmed in 2015, catalysed by a miscarriage, or as she puts it: her failure to have children. In 2018, Day decided to launch a podcast titled How to Fail where she interviewed guests about three key failures in their life. Having spent 15 years as a print journalist with the brightest of Hollywood, asking the same questions prescribed by her editors, the whole thing “felt turgid”. So she decided to flip the concept on its head, focusing on the things that hadn’t gone right.

The key to her success? “I actually think when you’re unapologetic about the content you’re putting out there in terms of quality and length, and you can really commit to it, stand behind it and it has integrity, people make a choice to come to you for that. The worst thing you can do is try and be all things to all people.”

It’s easy to see why everyone is willing to open up to her. She’s warm, engaged and remains totally passionate about podcasting and her original concept. However as a solo female host, Day is frequently an anomaly in the top charts, surrounded by a sea of predominantly white men.

This is a source of frustration for her. “I just thought, ‘that can’t be right, because we’ve made so many strides in other parts of our society. It feels like podcasting started out so meritocratic and I want it to be that again’.”

encourages deep excavation and engagement.”

She adds: “We’re in a world where you can feel increasingly atomised and dislocated from other humans so we’re looking for other people to tell us what they make of the world so we can make sense of it.

“That means that there’s always going to be an appetite for longer form content where we get beneath the surface.”

Not everyone is enamoured with Day’s podcast style. Greg James was a guest on the show in March 2023 where he received criticism for his reluctance to open up. It prompted him to write an opinion piece for i News, stating that the real answers to her questions were “for my therapist to hear.”

Day laughs gently in response. “Who says a podcast can’t be a therapy session? Obviously, I’m not a therapist, but I don’t think anyone thinks I am.

“If you come on a podcast called How to Fail, and you know anything about it, then you know that I’m going to ask you questions that aren’t simply, ‘tell me about your happy day’. Because I don’t feel that’s inclusive to the listener who may not have had a happy day.”

Day is keen to defend the depth of her conversations: “It just so happens that the things I find most interesting, and I think my listeners find most interesting, are those deep moments of human connection where we reveal something about ourselves. It doesn’t have to be about trauma and it doesn’t have to be about heartbreak.

“Failure is a fact of life, and it happens to us all, even if we strive to avoid it”

Day launched her own production company in response. Daylight Productions focuses on elevating female and diverse voices. “I really passionately believe that podcasting has given me so much and I want to put some of my own money into giving back,” she says. “That’s one of the more powerful ways to respond to misogyny in the world.”

Some have questioned whether Day is the right person for this, pointing out her privileged private school upbringing and Cambridge education. She mentions the ‘p’ word before we even bring it up: “I have the disposable income and I really love giving platforms to other people who might not have had my privilege or my opportunity,” she explains.

“If I think they have something meaningful to say, and they’re experts in their field, then I want to be able to give them a vehicle that showcases their brilliance.”

With layoffs at Spotify, Sony and other major podcast platforms in 2023, the news looked bleak for podcasting. Yet in a world of clickbait and TikTok, Day remains confident in the power of podcasts: “I think reports of the death of the attention span have been exaggerated. Attention spans differ. Sometimes, I’m in the mood for a 30 second TikTok video, and other times I’m in the mood for a podcast. I think the human impulse for both of those, is a form of connection.

“Conversations can be one of the most intimate, profound forms of connection. I think there’s something about podcasting as an audio medium that really

“Sometimes it is, and those people who choose to talk about that with me are absolute heroes and I salute their courage because I know for a fact how many people they have helped.” She knows from experience that opening up publicly is never easy. The conversations that make How To Fail such a success also expose some of her deepest personal pain. When guests and listeners alike require her authenticity, there can be no hiding. “It can feel really exposing,” she says. “Some things really hurt me when someone willfully misinterprets what I do, or they criticise me in a way that feels unfair or unjust.” The larger her audience becomes, the greater her exposure is, and the more numerous the criticisms.

The most frequent complaint is that the show fetishises failure. Her successful guests often seem cushioned from the full effects of failure as they have reached heights that are unattainable for the ordinary listener. Day sighs with frustration: “I’m really bored of people saying that. Because it doesn’t actually engage with what I’m saying. I am not fetishising failure. I’m saying that failure is a fact of life, and it happens to us all, even if we strive to avoid it.

“We live in a culture of curated perfection, where so often we see these shimmering gods on the red carpet and we think, ‘they must have it all sorted’.

“Of course, in some respects and metrics, they absolutely are lucky, but that doesn’t mean that they’ve been insulated from suffering all of their life. And actually, if we see them in those moments of suffering, and we ask them what they’ve learned from them, then maybe we can think there’s hope for us too.”

There’s a practical necessity for the celebrity cast too. Day admits: “We live in a capitalist society, and I’m aware that in order to keep the podcast going, I need to get advertisers in. Therefore I need to have people who will draw in listens and downloads, and that’s just a fact of life”.

With over 35 million downloads, the listeners have been flocking in. But when it started Day had little idea what she

Courtesy of Joe Magowan

was doing: “I drew my own logo and hired a sound engineer by eBay-ing my old wedding dress from my failed marriage.” Very on brand.

She started the show in July 2018 when “podcasting was still in its infancy, and I didn’t have a clue what I was doing.

“And I actually think I turned that into a virtue, because if you don’t know how something has been done in the past, you forge your own way of doing it, and it means that you can be quite creative.”

She relied on her publishing and journalism connections to source her guests – the first one no less than Emmy award-winner Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Her guest booking secret? Instagram. “I’m still creeping into DMs,” she jokes.

Despite the number of episodes she’s recorded, she still hates to listen back to herself. “I really have to build myself up to it because I know that every time I listen back, I’ll be kicking myself. I’ll think, why didn’t I ask that? Why didn’t I leave space there? The thing that really annoys me about myself is I giggle too much. I sometimes worry that I gush.”

“I am an enthusiast rather than a cynic. And I think I’m okay with that, actually. I think podcasting has given me permission to be okay with that.

“But that doesn’t mean that I don’t listen back and think, ‘Oh, why can’t I be Kirsty Young?’”

While Day’s used to speaking with celebrity guests, the personal and in-depth conversations on the podcast are a far cry from her early experiences of journalism. She recalls: “I came from that school of journalism where it was really disgusting to use a personal pronoun, so the journey to share and be vulnerable and to build a community, part of that has been being visible.”

“I’m very sensitive,” she admits, “and I don’t want to lose that because I believe that empathy is a fundamental principle. It’s really part of me. But it does mean that I need to let things in.”

A friend of Day’s recommended the 80:20 rule to her, and it’s advice she lives by. Essentially, if 80 per cent of your audience are supportive and 20 per cent are not, that is a strong batting average. “The more successful you get, or the bigger your audience gets. If it’s still 80 per cent, that’s amazing. The problem is that the 20 per cent will feel bigger because it’s more people, but proportionally, it’s not bigger. That’s been something I have to really remind myself of.

“But I’m better now at understanding that not everything needs a response, and that in a world of noise, sometimes silence can be an incredibly powerful action.”

“When I started IVF there was nothing I could find that told me the truth”

This also happens to be her top interview tip: “Sometimes you need to leave silence because the best way of honouring what someone says is to give it space. And into that space, they will carry on talking.”

ClearScore CEO Justin Basini calls mid-way through the interview. “That’s my husband. Let me decline that.” He is a fan of The Rest is Politics, where last year one of the show’s hosts Alastair Campbell suggested Day “fluttered her eyelashes” to get an answer from his co-host Rory Stewart.

Day insists the entire drama was a misunderstanding. “I’m not even mad anymore. I find it comically absurd that I, or any woman in a professional situation, flutter their eyelashes to get what they want. It’s easier to believe that than it is to believe that someone has put in the preparation, has the expertise, has been working as an interviewer for however many years and knows what she’s doing.”

Among her roster of famous faces, the one who made her the most nervous was Bernie Sanders. “I knew my challenge as an interviewer was going to be to get him to open up personally. But he was very game for it. After a while he roared with laughter and said: ‘what is this, a therapy session?’ I said: ‘yes, if you want it to be’. Afterwards, his lovely wife said to me: that’s one of the only interviews he’s ever done where I felt like ‘that’s the man that I know’.”

With over 250 episodes, her podcast studio has just received a new look: “[Sony] built that studio from scratch. They asked me what I wanted and the pitch that I gave them was Call Her Daddy meets Kim Kardashian’s bed.”

Beyond Daylight Productions, she has also used her voice to raise awareness of infertility. As a deeply personal and upsetting subject, for Day: “It has become part of my life’s purpose to write and to talk about it. When I started doing IVF 12 years ago, there was nothing that I could find that told me the truth about what I was going to go through.” She says: “There were so many mother baby books, and culturally motherhood was being fetishised and elevated.

“I felt shameful and marginalised, and like my experience, didn’t have space, nor did my suffering, nor did my pain, and nor did my sense of failure. And I didn’t want anyone else to feel like that.”

Becoming her own brand has led to blurred lines when deciding what to share and what to keep private. “I’ve learned through the course of my career that if something difficult personally happens to me, my first impulse is often to share and to write. I know now not to give into that.

Courtesy of Elizabeth Day

Elizabeth Day and Jon Ronson take a selfie

“But I believe in truth-telling. So if I do make a commitment to talk or write about something publicly, I will tell the truth about it.”

“In the past I was working in those sexist newspaper environments”

As a female journalist, did she feel boxed into sharing such raw experiences with her audience? “In the past, when I was working in those sexist newspaper environments, there were some things that I was asked to do where I was like: you’re only asking me because I’m a woman, for example: write about the rise of the skinny jean and the oat milk cappuccino.

“I don’t do that kind of journalism anymore because I don’t have to. And so whenever I write something that comes from my experience as a woman, it’s because I’ve chosen to do so.”

Day’s willingness to share difficult experiences and her ability to create spaces for others to do the same is her guiding light: “I think a lot of what connects my work is an attack on misplaced shame, because so much of our life is governed by shame and guilt, and so much of that is wasted emotion. And the antidote to it is to talk openly.”

How To Fail - Best Bits

Bernie Sanders admitted one of his biggest failures was not getting onto his high school basketball team.

Claudia Winkleman revealed she initially passed on hosting smash-hit reality TV show The Traitors because she “never leaves her bed”.

When one of Miriam Margoyles’ biggest fails turned out to be “not marrying a nice Jewish doctor”.

A game of ‘shag, marry, avoid’ played by Rory Stewart: he would shag Alastair Campbell, marry Rishi Sunak, and avoid Liz Truss.

Courtesy of Elizabeth Day

Elizabeth Day interviews Dan Levy

Illustration by Millie Jackson

Why reporting on Tibet comes at a heavy price

With growing state surveillance in Chinese-occupied Tibet, Dorjee Wangmo investigates how Tibetan journalists in exile struggle to report what’s going on behind closed doors

Two years ago, 33-year-old Tsering Jinpa, a journalist for Tibet Times, a Tibetan-language news publication in India, added one of his most trusted sources in Tibet to a sub-group on the Chinese messaging app, WeChat. The group was set up to share the Dalai Lama’s teachings, and Jinpa’s source wanted to listen, so he entered the group using his VPN, a network that hides his phone’s IP address and location.

Days later, Jinpa’s source went silent – no messages, or reactions to messages others had sent. Jinpa tried contacting him, but got no reply. Having reported on Tibet for eight years, Jinpa says: “I knew something bad was going on. And I decided not to text him anymore.”

Jinpa had known this man for several years. Whenever Jinpa needed to report or verify news happening in the Tibetan plateau, his source would talk to the locals there and report the information back to him.

This was the longest time Jinpa hadn’t heard from him. A year later, he got back in contact, and told Jinpa about what had happened.

“He called me. He said that Chinese officials barged into his house and took him to the police station for interrogation. He was detained for three days. They even asked for his phone passwords, contact lists, and checked his search history. They told him that they would keep his phone for two weeks to monitor it. He was so scared that he waited for a year to call me.” Jinpa still talks to his source every now and then, but only exchanges greetings.

Born and brought up in Tibet until he was 14, Jinpa reports on the frustrations of Tibetan people under Chinese rule as the senior reporter for Tibet Times

Because of his work, Jinpa says that his account on WeChat was “blacklisted” three years ago. “I remember that I was on a WeChat call with my brother in Tibet. It was a casual talk. Nothing political. But there was a loud static noise coming from the phone, and we couldn’t hear each other. I tried to call him again, but it didn’t go through.”

Later, he was told by his cousins in Tibet that Chinese officials had interrogated his brother and that he shouldn’t contact him.

In those days, he used to get a lot of scoops from WeChat sub-groups of his family, neighbours, friends and Tibetan poetry and literature lovers. He would crossreference stories by contacting relevant people inside Tibet, and publish once he had confirmed their veracity. At times, the process would take longer than a month.

“These days,” Jinpa says, “the situation has become so bleak that I have to use just a few secret sources in Tibet and verify the news through them. It’s difficult to involve others as they wouldn’t risk their lives and talk to me. It’s a sacrifice, perhaps, but necessary nonetheless.”

Jinpa’s is an experience shared with many other Tibetan journalists in exile.

“It felt like I was personally taking their safety into my hands”

Known as the “roof of the world”, Tibet is a remote land in the Northern part of the Himalayan mountain range, which was invaded by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the 1950s to access the land’s plentiful natural resources. Ideologically, for the CCP, Tibet has always been a part of China, and those who stand against this claim were labelled “separatist”, including the Dalai Lama. Since then, China’s hold over Tibet has been growing with state surveillance crushing dissent and installing thousands of Han Chinese into Tibet, to change the language, culture and demographics of the land.

For Tibetans, their country has become a closed door. Those who fled the land half a century ago are not able to contact their families and friends on the other side of the door without worrying about their family’s security.

Meanwhile the majority of its population, approximately six million according to its government in exile, lives under Chinese rule and is bound by state surveillance. What’s happening inside Tibet is rarely reported outside of the country, as the media landscape is predominantly controlled by the CCP.

Over the decades, Tibetan journalists in exile have taken it upon themselves to investigate news happening inside Tibet and report it to the world as much as possible. Yet, for these journalists as well as their sources, there have been serious consequences, including threats and imprisonment.

Pema Dhondup (not his real name), a former Tibetan journalist, says he cut off all his connections in Tibet in 2018. “Because of my news reports about Tibetans under Chinese rule, my family has suffered from interrogations by the CCP government. I only have my mother and my two sons in Tibet, and I can’t let them live in fear.”

It wasn’t always as dire for journalists trying to cover Tibet from the inside. In the months building up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Dhondup Wangchen filmed a documentary Leaving Fear Behind that featured interviews with 25 Tibetans on matters ranging from China hosting the Olympics to freedom inside Tibet, from state-sponsored mass surveillance to their faith in the Dalai Lama.

When Wangchen’s revelatory documentary was released, the Chinese government arrested the self-taught filmmaker and one of his cameramen, Golog Jigme, on 20 March 2008.

Flimmaker Dhondup Wangchen

Chinese force march near the Potala Palace in Tibet

Courtesy of Wangchen Courtesy of AP

Wangchen says: “They told me that my documentary is affecting China’s global image and is an attempt to separate Tibet from China. They even called me a separatist.”

In August 2008, Leaving Fear Behind was screened to foreign journalists in a hotel room even as Wangchen was still behind bars. But Chinese officials stopped the screening midway. However, Wangchen says that the documentary later got screened in full at the Dutch embassy in China. The Chinese government’s scrutiny couldn’t prevent Wangchen’s film from being screened at several international film festivals since its release.

Many human rights groups, including Amnesty International, campaigned for Wangchen’s release during his six-year imprisonment. It wasn’t until June 2014 that he was set free. In 2017, he flew to California, reuniting with his wife and four children who have sought asylum in the US.

His cameraman Jigme also escaped Tibet in 2014. But Wangchen says some of his other cameramen who are still in Tibet get detained every few months: “Whenever it’s Tibetan New Year or the Dalai Lama’s birthday or the Tibetan Uprising Day or when a Chinese official is visiting Tibet, they get called in for interrogation and are asked to hand over their camera.”

Out of the 25 interviewees featured in the documentary, two were arrested.

“From the beginning, we knew that the documentary would be a huge security risk for the people involved. It felt like I was personally taking their safety into my hands. I made it clear that there might be serious consequences and I didn’t know what they would be. I told them I wouldn’t be able to guarantee their safety, yet they were persistent in speaking out their frustrations on camera. They wanted the world to know what was happening to them.”

In the documentary, one interviewee says: “If the 2008 Olympic Games take place, then they should stand for freedom and peace. But as a Tibetan, I have neither freedom nor peace.” Another one adds: “I feel uncertain as though I’m wandering in the dark. I don’t know where it’s safe to step. I don’t trust the Chinese at all. Not one bit.”

Some say that their language is in danger as Tibetans themselves become a minority in Tibet: “For every Tibetan, there are 10 to 15 Chinese. Everywhere you look there are Chinese people in our Tibetan land …we are nothing without our culture.”

Wangchen’s documentary offers a glimpse at the grim reality of life in Tibet, where even practising one’s own religion can come at a price.

“As Tibetan Buddhists, we can’t have His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s photo in our homes and monasteries. We even have to sign a formal agreement renouncing our ties with the Dalai Lama and his works. And if we fail to stick to the agreement, we are often punished,” says Wangchen.

He says the situation is much worse now. “If we were to try to make the documentary today, we wouldn’t be able to do it. It’s impossible.”

As state surveillance multiplies in modern-day Tibet, writer and blogger Tsering Woeser uses her Instagram account with nearly 17,000 followers to report on everyday life in her homeland. In April 2010, Woeser became one of three women honoured with the Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women’s Media Foundation.

According to the foundation, Woeser has emerged as the main source of news regarding Tibet under Chinese rule. Her books are censored, while her blogs are frequently hijacked. Even her Skype accounts have been compromised, leading to unauthorised access, and her contacts across Tibet and China have reported receiving deceptive messages falsely attributed to her.

“With her new book coming out,” Woeser’s friend Dechen Penpa says, “I wish she could do book tours around the world. But she was never able to get a passport or travel. She is always under surveillance. It’s very worrying.

“Last year when I spoke to her, she said ‘I’m here today talking to you. Tomorrow, I don’t know what will happen. So, it’s better to hear from me now’.”

Growing up in the UK in the 1980s, Penpa never heard about what was going on inside Tibet. The only cultural connection she had to her homeland was a Tibetan newspaper that was parcelled all the way from India to the UK every couple of weeks.

“The further away we get from the land with every new generation, we need a bridge to connect us to the inside. There will never be a time when people are not going to need a good translation or context – and I want to be ready to play my part.”

For over a decade, Penpa has been translating Woeser’s blog posts and poems, along with other writings on Tibet, from Mandarin Chinese to English for the website High

Courtesy of The Tibet Post International

Tibetans are forcefully taken away by Chinese security forces

Peaks Pure Earth. She says that there are hardly any voices from inside Tibet: “You read about all these articles on Tibet and it’s all Western experts talking. It’s a shame if Woeser’s ground reports, along with others, go unheard of to the general public. It’s a rare documentation of our history.”

To get stories out in the world is difficult, Penpa admits. “Sometimes, the words and symbols we use are important or the things that are not being said are important. So, every time we share a story we have to spell out why each and every thing is important and tie it with our political history. But again, if I can’t explain it, there’s no point.”

Apart from this laborious work, Tibetan journalists also have to look out for the safety of their sources. Washington DC-based Tsering Kyi, a journalist for Voice of Tibet, an independent radio news station airing in Tibet, China, India, Bhutan and Nepal, says she is often unable to comprehensively report on news coming from Tibet while being confined to a “western journalistic standard”.

“In our situation, we can’t show anything. It’s a lot like North Korea”

“With the Israel and Palestine conflict, there is lots of video footage documenting everything. But in our situation, we can’t show anything. It’s very much like North Korea.

“Even when we have video footage, it’s really hard for me as I can’t reveal my sources. And I know it dilutes the credibility of the stories, but I just can’t risk my sources. It is just depressing.”

A journalist for 15 years, Kyi is always personally concerned about the safety of her Tibetan insiders. With approximately 160 cases of Tibetans who torched themselves alive in protest against China, she says most of this news reaches the journalists in exile after months or even years from the actual date of the incident: “For instance, there were two cousins who immolated themselves and were initially not counted in the list of other selfimmolators because there was not enough information about them, including where and when they torched themselves.”

She says it was only in 2014 that the Tibetan government in exile was able to confirm that the incident happened in 2012, and only then were they added to the official list of Tibetan martyrs.

The bodies of many of the self-immolators are not even returned to their family members, according to Kyi. The government officials only inform the family that the Tibetan has died without information as to where and when they died. Kyi says there are several such cases.

“When I talk to other journalists from the Washington Post or the New York Times, they ask for evidence or sources. But all I can say is that the family of the dead said so. Because nobody knows. Not even people from the same village.”

Kyi feels it’s her duty to report Tibetan news factually, but she says China has “deprived” her of the equipment to do so: “They have made it near to impossible to share photos and videos of people inside Tibet, and without these, I am not able to express the severity of the situation.

“I want to show the world what’s happening inside Tibet through my reporting, but I also know that whatever I write has direct implications on my sources. It’s a huge risk.”

From the top: writer and blogger Tsering Woeser, journalist Tsering Kyi and translator Dechen Penpa

Courtesy of themselves

Mismatched manicures and tiger bread tans: The realities of beauty journalism

Scarlett Coughlan rummages in the beauty cupboard and discovers the grim reality behind freebie cosmetics

Encased in a frosted glass bottle, the new musthave foundation whispers “buy me” as it sits seductively on the shelf. A quick tap of a credit card and the treasure is placed inside a pristine white bag. As soon as the lucky new owner gets home, they race upstairs to try it and … it’s patchy. More tiger bread than Tyra Banks.

These small calamities happen from time to time. But what about the beauty journalists who test these products day in and day out? Thanks to PR packages, they might not have to gamble their hard-earned cash trialling something new. Instead, peeling skin, bad fake tan and accidental green hair are the price to pay for a spot in the £500 billion beauty industry.

“Sometimes you have to look stupid,” says Elena Chabo, a beauty writer at Cosmopolitan. On any given day, the beauty cupboard at the office is overflowing with products to be tested and reviewed – and when it’s time for the Cosmo Beauty Awards, the team can have up to 40 products each to sample within a couple of weeks.

While having a box of freebies might sound glamorous, Chabo disagrees. On one occasion, she was asked to try out six different sets of nail art in just one week. To give each type a fair trial, Chabo wore one or two out of each pack at the same time. “Some of them were short, cute ones, some of them were long talons,” she recalls. “I looked completely crazy. I was doing returns in a shop and I was trying to hand the shop assistant the return without them seeing.”

Chabo is no stranger to these slightly embarrassing encounters, however. Besides parcels being shipped to the office, cosmetics are also sent directly to her home, meaning she’s been interrupted by the postman during a product-testing session on more than one occasion. “There have definitely been times where I’ve answered the door in pyjamas,” she says. “But then I’ve got crazy

red eyeshadow, or foundation swatches on my face and I open the door to a slightly startled postman.”

These incidents aren’t confined to makeup, however. Chabo has had some equally uncomfortable experiences with hair tools. Once, the beauty writer attended an event where stylists used a new contraption to preen the guests’ hair. “I ended up looking like something between a poodle and one of those creepy Victorian dolls,” Chabo says.

“My hair went a Fairy Liquid green”

Humeara Mohamed, a freelance beauty journalist for Marie Claire, Glamour and Refinery29, has also had her struggles with trialling new hair products. “I tried blue hair dye once,” she says. “And my hair went a Fairy Liquid green. It was awful. It was right near Halloween and people just thought I’d really committed to it.”

Green could be an unlucky colour for Mohamed. After taking a certain kale cleanser on holiday – a time when skin can naturally be more sensitive due to factors like flying or swimming– her skin became “like sandpaper”. “My husband thought I had food around my mouth,” she says. “And I was like, ‘I don’t, it’s dry skin’. My skin was peeling.”

With these beauty faux pas, however, come the added pressure of having to write about the product. Doing that in a way that maintains those all-important relationships with PRs can be tricky. “A lot of beauty journalism is building friendships with PRs,” Mohamed explains. “You can try a product and it might be really bad, but I can’t just say that because it will ruin PR relationships – it’s quite a weird line that you have to tiptoe.”

literally stopped there,” she says, pointing to her décolletage. “I was doing lots of work events and stuff. I had to wear turtle necks because my face was lovely and tanned, but there was literally a harsh line.”

Sometimes hiding the results of a beauty experiment isn’t even an option. “Often if we’re reviewing a treatment, it’ll be in the middle of the day,” Crowther says. “You have to go to work. I’ve had to walk into the office before while bright red and looking pretty worse for wear.”

While it’s always a gamble which products will be fantastic and which will flop, one thing is for certain – beauty journalists can rest assured that they’re all in the same boat when it comes to testing out new merchandise.

“I’d be more embarrassed going to a dinner with a huge group of mates with my face peeling from a treatment than a beauty dinner,” Crowther says. “Because, there, at least everyone knows why your face is peeling. It’s not like other beauty editors judge everyone else. We’re all exactly the same.”

If Mohamed has simply been sent a product she doesn’t like from a PR, she can choose not to feature it. If she has been commissioned for a review, however, that’s where the balancing act comes into play. A publication once asked her to review a serum she didn’t love, “but because they asked me to, I had to review it,” she recalls. “I was trying to do it in a way that explained what the benefits of this serum are but then why I personally wouldn’t buy it again. You’re giving the pros and the cons.”

“I had to walk into the office bright red”

Despite her best efforts to review lacklustre products as fairly as possible, Mohamed admits, “beauty journalism isn’t as honest as I would like it to be”.

Some of the beauty mishaps beauty writers experience, however, are less down to the products themselves than getting a little bit distracted while testing them. Even though Tori Crowther, a health and beauty writer for the likes of ELLE and Allure, has been wearing fake tan since the age of 13, accidents with new variations of the stuff still crop up.

“The number one thing I’ve had many mishaps with is fake tan,” Crowther says. “Once I used a tanning mist that you apply in the shower so you don’t get it everywhere. Unbeknownst to me, all the tan fell to the floor, and I was walking around in it.” The result? A pair of dark brown soles that took two weeks to scrub off. “I had to cancel a pedicure appointment because I was too embarrassed,” she adds.

While feet are reasonably easy to hide, covering a bodge job with face tanning drops is slightly harder to conceal. “Normally, I use a stippling brush to try and blend it down my neck,” Crowther explains. “I completely forgot to do that. It

Courtesy of Humeara Mohamed, Elena Chabo and Canva

Left: Humeara Mohamed with her dog, Peanut. Right: Elena Chabo with pin curls. Bottom: Chabo’s mismatched manicure

Thinking outside the box: The neurodivergent glass ceiling

Though neurodivergent journalists are everywhere, equality in the newsroom is still but a pipedream, writes Erin Dearlove

Kat Brown’s career as an in-house journalist with undiagnosed ADHD was fuelled by coffee, panic and tears. Only diagnosed with ADHD in 2020 at 37, Brown spent the majority of her wide-ranging career in the dark about her hidden neurodivergence.

“I genuinely just felt like an avatar in a meat suit,” she says. “In order to achieve the base level of being a human being that all my colleagues and friends seemed to take for granted, I really had to try harder.”

Brown’s story hints at the issues faced by neurodivergent journalists, from imposter syndrome and compensatory strategies to higher instances of burnout. Neurodivergence also impacts more people than may you think, with one in seven people thought to be so, according to the NHS.

Now an author and self-described ‘freelance Swiss Army Knife’, Brown has been on the cover of Stylist and in The Times, writing about ADHD in the build-up to the launch of her book It’s Not a Bloody Trend

Beyond Brown, publications are increasing their output of neurodiversity-themed content and internal neurodivergence policies are becoming the norm. But is the industry as progressive around neurodivergence as current content feeds might suggest? We spoke to neurodivergent journalists on the ground to find out.

A bumpy playing field

Finding a job in the industry can be difficult but publications are obliged by law to provide reasonable adjustments to

However, for journalists who have applied for reasonable adjustments, the reality tends to fall short of expectations, as was the case for Lydia Wilkins. “Reasonable adjustments at an interview? Don’t make me laugh,” she says. Diagnosed as autistic at 15, Wilkins’ entire journalism career has been freelance: “Due to terrible practices at the point of interview.” Wilkins only recalls accessing reasonable adjustments on two occasions.

Savan-Chandni Gandecha, a 33-year-old content creator who is autistic, has also seen the concept of adjustments at onboarding go up in smoke. “I asked for it several times but never received an interview,” they say. “So I don’t ask for it for jobs that I feel most qualified for.”

Don’t judge a journalist by their spelling

Journalism students everywhere have been told perpetually that they won’t be taken seriously if they can’t spell. But what if you’re dyslexic?

Lois Shearing is a Senior Sex and Relationship writer at Cosmopolitan UK. They are also dyslexic. “It was actually an editor in my first job who noticed I wasn’t making random typos or spelling mistakes, but rather that there was a pattern to them,” they say.

Lois’ editor recognised the symptoms of dyslexia leading to their diagnosis at 21, but this often isn’t the case. “There’s so much ableism around the idea that spelling and grammar

is a reflection of your intelligence, so I think I have to get past people’s first impressions of me.

“People are often really surprised that I’m a ‘dyslexic writer’, but I don’t think it’s surprising at all. People with dyslexia are creative, we’re great problem solvers and strong storytellers; who wouldn’t want those skills in their newsroom?”

Lauren Cole-Lomas, a Multimedia Reporter at Surrey Live, is dyslexic and dyspraxic. She only started working in the industry in 2021. “I’ve been yelled at and told my hard work was shit,” she says. “It was really difficult, but I walked out and didn’t let it drag me down.”

What even are reasonable adjustments?

When Eleanor Noyce was diagnosed with ADHD in 2022 while working in-house, nothing really changed. “I don’t think I knew how to manage my own ADHD with my work,” she says. “So I just carried on how I’d always carried on.”

“I had one boss who wanted me to give a talk about my condition”

Brown has had similar conversations in the industry. “So often, I speak to people who say: ‘I don’t know what accommodations to ask for. I know I can. But I’m literally just here googling what an accommodation is.”

Support in finding suitable reasonable adjustments, like assistive technology or flexible working arrangements, exists via a government scheme called ‘Access to Work’ – but the wait for an assessment can be up to 12 weeks. “It’s an absolute pain in the ass to access, ironically,” says Brown. “But there is some good stuff in there.”

“It is just about being able to do good work, and get that work done on time,” she adds. “Most of mine are ones that I subconsciously do, they’re just ones that might not go down very well in an incredibly corporate place of work.”

“That’s something that is really empowering about being freelance,” says Noyce. “You can set your own rules and your own boundaries when it comes to work and doing what needs to work for you.”

In the hustle and bustle

On the other side of the coin, some people need the environment of a newsroom. “Sometimes I’m not the best at self-motivation,” says Morgan Hanshaw, a third-year journalism student who is autistic. “I need that structure, that routine of nine to five.”

In 2019, the BBC implemented a Disability Passport Scheme to write adjustments down to communicate to new managers. Main broadcasting companies followed suit in 2022, and the BBC added internal communications to get everyone in the organisation on board.

Neurodivergence: when people’s thinking patterns, behaviours, or learning styles diverge from what is considered ‘typical’, such as with ADHD.

Neurodivergent: a way to describe a person who has a neurodivergence.

Neurodiversity: the fact that within society as a whole, people think, learn and experience the world differently.

Reasonable adjustments: tweaks to ways of working meant to minimise the disadvantages neurodivergent people face in the workplace.

Types of neurodivergence: include attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) – largely to do with inconsistency in attention, and autism (ASD) – largely to do with differences in communicating and interacting with the world.

Specific learning differences (SpLD): also types of neurodivergence but more to do with learning such as dyslexia (typically difficulties with words), dyspraxia (largely to do with movement), dyscalcula (to do with numbers), dysgraphia (to do with writing) etc.

*Note that not all people prefer the same terminology. There is also lots of overlap between conditions so it’s common for neurodivergent people to be diagnosed with more than one type of neurodivergence.*

Alex Collins, a BBC broadcast journalist with ADHD, has found understanding varied. “I had one boss that wanted me to give a talk about my condition to everyone in the office,” he says. “I’ve also had bosses say, ‘we should have a meeting about this,’ and then it never really materialised.”

Scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours

“Sustainable systems for inclusion are not likely to arise unless there is representation in leadership,” says Ludmila Praslova, a Professor of Psychology who is autistic.

In her new book The Canary Code: A Guide to Neurodiversity, Dignity, and Intersectional Belonging at Work, Prof Praslova writes: “Inclusive leadership requires getting to know people and enabling them to work their best, even when their needs are very different from ours.”

She says this is not easy, intuitive or automatic, a message reiterated by neurodivergent journalists in suggestions for more training for managers on how to work with neurodivergent people.

This is particularly important as neurodivergent people have what Prof Praslova calls in her book ‘spiky’ skill profiles; she says job roles not aligned with this can be akin to trying to fit star-shaped pegs into round holes.

When neurodivergent skills and challenges aren’t properly understood and matched to jobs, this can lead to missed promotions.

For example, according to

the Office for National Statistics, there exists a 33 per cent pay gap for autistic workers in the UK, who often work below their skill level and have untapped potential.

In his 19-year journalism career, Alex Collins has never had a manager tell him they also have ADHD – a common experience for neurodivergent people. As well as a lack of leadership opportunities, Prof Praslova says many likely do not feel safe enough to disclose neurodivergence at work.

It means those who often have the best understanding of the importance of getting to know individual needs tend not to be considered for roles where this would benefit others. They are also less likely to be involved in the decisionmaking process and ensuring policies are working.

On top of this, neurodivergent journalists are less likely

to be on the corporate ladder at all, as self-employment can provide a better or the only option. There exists an army of neurodivergent freelancers thought to make up as much as 35 per cent of the estimated 4 million freelance population in the UK.

This is increasingly recognised as problematic for organisations. “The success of neurodiversity inclusion is twofold: the value neurodiverse employees provide the company and the value the company can provide neurodiverse employees,” writes Pamela Furr for Forbes

At a time when the industry is going through a period of rapid change and publications must evolve fast to stay afloat, the vast talents and perspectives neurodivergent people bring to the table seem more important than ever.

How reporting on ADHD has changed since the pandemic

Analysis, visualisation and reporting by

Emily Manock

If it feels like ADHD is in the news more often than it used to be – you’re not wrong. The number of news articles including the acronym has nearly doubled since 2020, and now those with the condition are starting to call for more ethical oversight. Matthew Parris’s recent article for The Times, for example, attracted controversy because he wrote that “autism is a much abused diagnosis” and that he “did not believe in ADHD at all.”

Disability journalist Rachel Charlton-Dailey wrote in a recent Mirror article, “The media needs to be focusing and putting pressure on pharmaceutical companies and politicians in order to save lives, not make it even harder for people with ADHD to speak up.”

patterns emerged in the types of articles being published and by whom.

Surprisingly, the left-leaning Daily Mirror is responsible for the largest number of articles mentioning the condition between 2020 and 2023. However, focus on the subject has remained steady over the past few years. The most dramatic increase, by contrast, comes from the BBC, whose ADHD-related output has increased almost fourfold over the past two years.

Opinion pieces do seem like the loudest voices in the conversation, whether they come from those with ADHD or not.

Scientific medical reporting on ADHD generally takes a more neutral tone.

Putting numbers into context has also been an issue, with some outlets publishing statistics such as the ‘fiftyfold’ increase in ADHD prescriptions since 2000 without the context that this is still less than 3 per cent of the UK adult population.

When XCity scraped web data from their sites at a sample of 10 leading UK publications, some clear

When a first person piece doesn’t have to argue about whether ADHD exists, it can be useful in illustrating what day-to-day life with it looks like. This has proven useful for those living with ADHD or those who have loved ones with the same symptoms.

A steady reporting increase is to be expected because of how much more prevalent the topic is in the public consciousness. However, if that increase does not benefit those most affected, it may be time for a rewrite.

Kamal Ahmed Q&A

Co-Founder and Editor-inChief of The News Movement

speaks to Nivedita Nayak

Were you always interested in business news?

Being head of news at The Observer, I broadened my understanding of areas outside the specific vertical of different disciplines. That increased my interest in other areas. The financial crisis of 2007-08 revealed in real technicolour that people had been failing to understand finance. So when I was asked to join The Sunday Telegraph as Business Editor, I was excited by the opportunity to work in an area that is vital for audiences to understand.

I also went to Cass (now Bayes Business School) and learned about bond markets, public markets and some of the key parts of economics. I was in my mid-30s, but I was very glad to go back to school and train because it’s all about having a degree of expertise in an area.

What was the best part of leading this beat?

Dealing with the aftermath of the 2007-08 financial crisis.

We worked on a big project looking at why the Royal Bank of Scotland failed. It was the biggest bank to blow up that genuinely brought the UK economy to its knees, and affected people. I was the editor of the project and I was so proud of what The Telegraph team achieved. That was a real highlight for me and shows journalism’s potential to hold power to account and uncover what is happening.

I was also very proud that myself and the BBC broke open the story about real incomes going backward for most of the UK since the financial crisis. The central tenor of capitalism is ‘if I work hard and play by the rules, by the year’s end, I’ll be a bit richer than I was at the beginning’. That promise has not been true and we made that conversation mainstream.

Do you think business news has become more accessible with explainers and TV specials, or does it continue to be intimidating for some?

We did a lot on that aspect and the BBC is to be praised for it. We ensure that we always use straightforward language. When I was the BBC’s Economics Editor, instead of talking about ‘unemployment’ and ‘inflation’, they talked about ‘jobs’ and ‘price rises’. I have a rule – if you’re using a word with three syllables, is there a simpler word instead?

On the BBC website, the material that could be called business or economics coverage is also called ‘cost of living’ or ‘how much is my salary worth’, etc. It’s the issues that are important for people because without business coverage, your audience simply wouldn’t understand how the world works and why things work or don’t work.

You’ve been around a few Chancellors of the Exchequer in your career, do any stick in your mind in particular? Alistair Darling was somebody who gave you time. He wouldn’t always like what we did at The Telegraph. But he always wanted to give me time to understand what he was trying to do. And in the aftermath of the [2008] financial crisis, that was vital. Darling, along with many others, was

one of the key players in saving the UK financial system.

When I was the BBC’s Economics Editor, I got to know George Osborne during the Brexit referendum. We clashed and often had robust arguments. But we always had honest and grown-up conversations, which I appreciated.”

You were a Business and Economics Editor for a decade, then you co-founded your own news startup. How has that transition been?

I have loved it. I think we got to a point where we asked, what are the real problems in journalism? Are we doing enough for those audiences that are not engaging in large enough numbers in how a lot of news is covered?

Even though William Lewis [Formerly CEO of The News Movement] and I are officially old in our careers, we are still those two young 21-year-olds leaving City, wanting to make a difference through journalism. It’s an amazing privilege and staying curious is the real lesson here.

Kamal Ahmed

Dating across the disciplines

Caitlin Barr sent six lucky MA students on an interview assignment like no other, with the hopes of setting up at least one new City journalism romance

Adina Florea (Erasmus)

Did you have any prejudices about the Broadcast course before your date?

I did work for a broadcaster beforehand, and it’s difficult for me to understand its appeal. But nothing against the people who are better suited for that kind of work than I am.

What were your first impressions of Will?

Too young for me. He’s 22, I’m almost 29.

What were the headlines?

Will working on a radio documentary about the collapse of the Liberal Democrat party in the UK.

I think I said to him: “Who cares about the Liberal Democrats anyway?”

Best thing about Will?

He’s tall. Also, he’s not from London.

Would you chase him up for another date?

No. I don’t actually think we’re at the same stage of life, and I wouldn’t want to waste anybody’s time.

Will Tyrrell (Broadcast)

Did you have any prejudices about the Erasmus course before your date?

I’m always impressed by people who can study abroad in a second language.

What were your first impressions of Adina?

She had cool energy!

What were the headlines?

We spoke about what drew her to London and life in Romania. She worked in the industry for a long time which was fun to learn about, given the constant placement grind in this department.

Best thing about Adina?

It’s very cool that she decided to move to a new country to study rather than continue the job in Romania that she had been doing for seven years.

Would you chase her up for another date?

I was glad I met her but there wasn’t any spark.

Tommy Gilhooly (Magazine)

Did you have any prejudices about the Global Financial course before your date?

Someone on the course complimented my scarf once in the Dame Alice Owen, so I like them all.

What were your first impressions of Maya?

Glad to see another Guinness appreciator!

What were the headlines?

The variation in Guinness quality across London pubs. Wilfred Owen. We ended up leaving to go to another pub where there was a live jazz band playing.

Best thing about Maya?

We were never short of things to talk or laugh about.

Would you chase her up for another date?

We agreed to wave from opposite ends of the Pool.

Yasmin Vince (Magazine)

Did you have any prejudices about the International course before your date?

I think it was pretty clear that I was not aware this was a thing, nor what was involved in doing the course.

What were your first impressions of Claudia?

She was really pretty and cool. We arrived at the coffee shop at same time, and I was standing behind her in the queue. I had my fingers crossed she would be the date, and she was!

What were the headlines?

The quiet child theory – quiet children become chaotic adults, while chaotic children end up being a bit more stable. She was run over a few months ago. IKEA and why it makes a great venue for a birthday party.

Best thing about Claudia?

She was really funny. Also, she had a super cute sweater vest. Looked real cosy.

Would you chase her up for another date?

Yes. We forgot to exchange numbers, so now I’m in a bit of limbo on how to go about it.

Might have to chase via email, which is a bit cringe but I’d be into it if I got a date email so why not?

Maya Sall (Global Financial)

Did you have any prejudices about the Magazine course before your date?

I didn’t realise there was a separate Magazine and Newspaper course.

What were your first impressions of Tommy?

Great curly hair, friendly but quite shy.

What were the headlines?

We talked about novels we’ve read, the romantic poets, and the highs and lows of living in London.

Best thing about Tommy? His hair!

Would you chase him up for another date? Sadly, no. It felt a bit like going for a drink with a younger sibling...

Claudia Schergna (International)

Did you have any prejudices about the Magazine course before your date?

No journo-lust for this unlucky lot...

So there we have it. No disasters, but no success stories either. Perhaps the tradition of City journalism marriages dies with our graduating class, unless anyone is planning on making a move at the Media Law retake …

What can we take away from this experiment? Only eight men across the entire MA cohort were willing to do this. They can’t be faulted, though – in a break with the tradition of their sex, they were actually highly committed to the cause, responsive to emails, and grateful throughout (for love, or at least a cheeky network).

Magazine students were most up for this (proving we’re

Not really, except that you people are probably going to make way more money than I ever will! Also, I’ve worked in magazine journalism for two years, so no prejudices at all!

What were your first impressions of Yasmin?

She seemed friendly and slightly shy (so am I) but we got more comfortable as we started talking about films.

What were the headlines? Dreams, career aspirations and doubts for the future, and the best birthday party story I’ve ever heard (which I’m going to steal for sure) – a treasure hunt at IKEA!

Best thing about Yasmin? She was attentive, a great listener and she connected with one of my passions in life: film.

Would you chase her up for another date?

I had a lovely time but if I’m honest I didn’t feel much chemistry between us.

the most fun MA), and no one from Podcasting applied. Probably too busy talking to themselves in darkened, soundproof rooms. Global Financial journalists were super keen too, as were students on the International course. Over the course of the process, seven people dropped out (all women apart from one) which just goes to show that people talk a lot of game about wanting to meet in-person, but we’d actually all prefer a night off …

Of course, most of the point of this article was to unite the disciplines, get people talking, and prove that there’s more to a journalism MA than the Potter Box and McNae.

BUSINESS 2 BREAKING Inside the trade magazines pursuing major investigations

From the Post Office scandal to the Grenfell fire, Katie Baxter and Josh Osman talk to the B2B journalists behind some of the decade’s biggest scoops

In 2004, subpostmaster Alan Bates wrote a letter to Tony Collins, then executive editor of Computer Weekly – a B2B magazine targeted at IT professionals with a circulation of around 90,000 in the tech industry. Bates wanted to alert him to an issue with Horizon computer software. At the time, nothing could be done with only one source, but Collins held onto the letter. Fast forward four years and Lee Castleton, another victim of the scandal, wrote to them. His and Bates’s letters were passed to Rebecca Thomson, a 25-year-old journalist.

After months of phone calls and investigations into the Post Office’s misconduct through the paper trails, Thomson wrote and published the first story. This began the exposure of the Post Office scandal on 11 May 2009, where faulty Horizon software led to wrongful accusations of misconduct against thousands of Post Office workers. The Post Office denied everything, swept the story under the rug, and publicly discredited her journalism. At the time, little more came of it. “I did have a sense of how big it could be,” Thomson says. “We had limited time and resources, but if I could uncover so many postmasters who had been wrongly prosecuted on my own, I felt it must’ve been much bigger.”

Now, thanks to an ITV drama, the Post Office scandal has dominated national news desks during 2024 for weeks on end. So, how often do nationals lag behind trade magazines on these big investigations, and what about B2Bs allows them to pick up on these injustices so quickly?

A month before the Grenfell Tower fire on 14 June 2017, Peter Apps, contributing editor at Inside Housing, wrote a piece about the danger of combustible cladding on high-rise buildings. The article was a response to the Shepherd’s Bush tower block fire in August 2016, where more than a 100 firefighters were required to extinguish the fire. For the past seven years since Grenfell, Apps, a specialist on social housing and building safety, has continued to report on the aftermath of the fire and the public inquiry into it.

After the Shepherd’s Bush fire, Apps investigated the incident: “As a magazine, we know about the principles of fire safety in high-rise buildings, and that fire shouldn’t spread on the outside of one.” He sent FOIs to local authorities and the London fire brigade, eventually getting hold of a report showing that the building in question had polystyrene and plywood boards attached on the outside that had carried the fire further along the upside of it.

Apps’ article has been credited for “foreshadowing” Grenfell, but he believes the trade press’ privilege is its ability to fixate on its niche: “The trade press and B2B market is a good place to do that because we, along with our readers, are very interested in one niche area. We know about it, and we know there’s a question there. We aren’t just swept along by the news cycle, so we can stay patient.”

Writing for a B2B as a specialist journalist is clearly what allowed Apps to pursue and question something neglected by the mainstream press. With specialist writers and the ability to hone in on a niche, B2B magazines like Inside Housing have considerably more room to go into greater depth on individual investigations in their sector than a national publication would grant.

At the same time, there’s a major misunderstanding in the industry about exactly what the B2B sector is. “B2Bs are like a local newspaper for an economic sector, rather than geographical,” says Apps. “Suddenly when a big story breaks that happens to be on your patch, the area is more familiar to you because you know the dynamics, politics and relevant actors, and you have that all on your fingertips from doing it regardless, day in, day out.”

This misunderstanding seems to lead to an occasional lack of respect for B2Bs. One time, Apps had an irritating experience while being interviewed at the BBC, and having to cut his interview short to compile and proofread his bulletin before sending it out: “The BBC journalist was astonished, and asked ‘what goes in them?’ I said, ‘today’s news!’ He couldn’t get his head around the idea that Inside Housing does that.”

At times, he finds himself treated like an “expert, a source or a practitioner”, which can be equally frustrating. “A lot of journalists don’t realise they are my competition,” he says. “For one thing, I’m a journalist, not an expert – I find out what’s going on in the same way they do: open source research, or finding and calling contacts to question.”

Not all B2B journalists share Apps’s annoyances though – Alastair McLellan, Editor of Health Service Journal (HSJ) and BSME’s trade press editor of the year in 2021, doesn’t mind sometimes being seen as a source more than a journalist. “I am a specialist, I’ve been reporting on the NHS for 20 years,” he says. “If the story someone’s working on is not directly competing with the ones we’re writing, then I’m very happy to help them. You just need to be savvy about what you’re getting out of it. Are you getting named, are you going to get a share of it?”

“The Daily Telegraph described us as a scoop machine”

HSJ’s ideas and stories are so commonly used elsewhere that they have a weekly newsletter called HSJ Elsewhere, which collates all their work that has been picked up by other media outlets. In each newsletter, there are at least three to four entries, some of which have been picked up multiple times. Throughout the pandemic, HSJ broke an immense number of health-related stories. “The Daily Telegraph described us as a ‘scoop machine’ when actually reporting on our reporting,” McLellan says.

“We’re a source for them, they rely on us,” he says. Eight times out of ten he finds news agencies are reliable in attributing their source when they follow up on stories from HSJ. However, sometimes the treatment from bigger news organisations can be dismissive – he states that the BBC is the most galling and regular offender: “They go and check the story out themselves, and then think it’s their story, even though they got the idea from reading ours.

“I sort of understand it, but I think there is a degree of BBC exceptionalism, ‘we are the BBC, we don’t need to accredit!’ It does depend though – the BBC health editor, Hugh Pym, is good with accreditation. It’s usually the more junior BBC staff who don’t feel the need to stick a credit.”

Usually, McLellan finds that it isn’t a big deal, even if it is irritating: “HSJ reports on the NHS in such a detailed manner that almost everything you read in a national newspaper has been reported in HSJ first,” he says. “For my own sanity, I don’t tend to worry about it too much. The most common occurrence is that they publish a story saying exactly what we did six weeks ago, but very rarely does somebody take one of our stories and pass it off as their own.”

Jaimie Kaffash, editor of the GP trade magazine Pulse, says that most of the national newspapers are good at giving Pulse credit where it’s due. “We’re pretty close to the health journalists on the nationals,” he says. “We’re a source of stories for them.”

However, like McLellan, Kaffash has

Courtesy of featured publications

found that the BBC fails to give sufficient credit to reporters from trade magazines. In 2020, Pulse carried out an investigation into ambulance waiting times from GP practices, which was underscored by exclusive and original data. “We had great data to show that when you call an ambulance from a GP practice, you’re going to be waiting a lot longer than if you phone from outside, because they think you’re already under medical attention,” Kaffash explains.

The BBC then produced a six-minute segment on this research, without once mentioning Pulse. “I was speaking to a producer, helping him find case studies, and the following morning during the segment they didn’t mention our name once,” he says. “All they said was ‘research has shown’. A small publication has dedicated a lot of resources to doing this research. It’s common courtesy to cite the source.”

But in the grand scheme of things, Kaffash explains that working at Pulse isn’t about getting credit – ultimately, it comes down to getting inside scoops, and B2Bs are in a unique position to do that. “We’re a decent-sized B2B but we’re quite agile. We can really decide what we want to focus on – if we want to do an investigation, we do,” he says.

“We’re not getting pressure from above to just do stuff that drives traffic. We’re also so close to our audience that we know exactly what we should be pursuing. Our readers are the same people as our contacts,” Kaffash explains. “That’s something that is very particular to trade journalism. The people feeding your stories are actually your readers.

“At B2Bs we know exactly what to look for when we’re investigating and which questions are unanswered.

We know what we don’t know – and what needs to be uncovered.”

For Pulse, the amount of national coverage a story ends up getting depends massively on the news agenda of the day. “There are some times when general practice is in fashion – by that I mean it’s in the headlines all the time. During Covid it was always about GPs not seeing patients,” Kaffash adds. “We’re not in the news much right now because of the strikes across secondary care, so that’s really affected us.”

Understandably, Covid was a period of significant challenge and reward for Pulse, as it had been for HSJ. “Pre-Covid we were doing two breaking news stories a week. During Covid, it was three breaking stories a day –and that’s no exaggeration. It was a crazy time,” he says.

“We raised our profile and got press coverage. Our traffic went through the roof, and we broke our biggest story ever in November 2020. We were the first to announce that there was going to be a vaccine ready within months – that knocked the US election off the front pages.”

Throughout 2020 and 2021, Kaffash won multiple awards on behalf of Pulse, including the PPA independent editor of the year, 2021, and the BSME editor of the year (trade and professional) award for the magazine’s Covid-19 coverage throughout 2020. “We were very much thrust into the limelight during that time.”

ComputerWeekly likewise found themselves in the public eye when national interest was sparked by the ITV series, despite having persistently reported on the Post Office scandal since Thomson’s first article was published. If it weren’t for Computer Weekly’s thorough and tireless investigation, the story may never have come to light.

Karl Flinders is a chief reporter for Computer Weekly who took on the Post Office investigation when Rebecca Thomson left in 2010. In the eight-year build-up to the 2018 court case, Flinders wrote around 70 stories on the scandal. “It seems like a lot, but in the six years since I’ve written over 300 stories because more information has been in the public domain,” he says. “Before, I’d get leaks from people, but you just can’t stand it up. You need evidence – that was the hard thing back then.”

Prior to the court case, reporting on the issues with

Courtesy of PULSE

Jaimie Kaffash won BSME’s ‘Editor of the Year’ in 2019

Pulse was the first magazine to report on the COVID-19 vaccine

Courtesy of Alberto Pezzali/AP

Horizon software proved much more difficult, due to a lack of concrete evidence and a barrage of lies and threats coming from the Post Office. But due to his network of Computer Weekly contacts, ranging from sub-postmasters to IT experts, and the sustained interest of their readers in the tech side of the story, Flinders was able to push the investigation forward in those early years. “I wrote about it because my readers were interested,” Flinders explains.

“We had everything –the evidence, the public inquiry – all we needed was public anger”

Despite the fact it took an ITV drama for the story to truly capture the national interest, Flinders is relieved his work has finally started to pay off. “I’m really glad the drama had the impact we’ve been trying to have for years. We had everything – the evidence, the public inquiry – all we needed was public anger.” And now, harnessing that anger, the wider

media has latched onto the story with all its might.

Thomson agrees that the news cycle dictates the coverage a particular story gets – the Post Office drama has caused an explosion of national interest in Computer Weekly’s story and her role within it. “It’s very bizarre. I’m obviously glad it’s happened but it’s just completely weird to observe what an unpredictable beast the news agenda is.

“You can have really decent stories – and there are loads out there – that are just as worthy of attention as this one, that never quite cut through. Investigative journalism is largely thankless.”

But despite it all, garnering credit and recognition was never the crux of Computer Weekly’s Post Office investigation. Even when no one else was picking up the story, the persistence of Thomson and her colleagues gave the sub-postmasters strength to go on, as they knew someone believed in them. “In the early days, you are that person who will listen to them when nobody else will.”

20 years on since Computer Weekly received that first letter from Alan Bates, the feeling of finally seeing justice unfold is surreal. “Obviously there’s still a long way to go. The compensation schemes are a mess, loads of people have had their lives completely overwhelmed by the whole thing,” Thomson explains. “It’s all very odd. It feels very weird to accept any praise for essentially just doing my job 15 years ago.”

Inside Housing continued reporting on the inquiry into the Grenfell Tower fire long after the incident

Courtesy of Matt Dunham/AP

Does journalism (still) have a drinking problem?

Booze was a staple for writers in the days of Fleet Street but Millie Jackson asks if the sober generation will put a cork in it

In 2008, American journalist Jack Shafer wrote a piece for Slate proclaiming that whisky and cigarettes are essential for good journalism. “It was very common for newsrooms to keep a bottle around in the office,” he says, reflecting on the industry in the 80s. “Retreating to a bar after a long day’s work – or even a short day’s work –was commonplace, with journalists having favourite bars to attend where they would get spiritually lubricated.”

For those of us fledglings joining the industry, the looming spectre of the bottle feels like a thing of the past.

Martin Deeson was an editor at Loaded during its frenzied peak in the 90s. He describes the pressure-cooker environment: “You’ve got a page layout that has to be filled, features drop out, photo shoots don’t turn up, constantly things going wrong. So there’s not an awful lot of time to sit back and go: ‘what would be some great ideas for covers in the next six months?’”

Like Shafer, Deeson attributes generating creative ideas to alcohol. “Those conversations tended to happen in the pub. After a couple of drinks, everyone’s a little more loose and less afraid of saying something that might get shot down. It genuinely seemed intrinsic to creative process,” he says. But the youth are ditching Moët in favour of Lucky Saint. This year, trend forecaster Mintel branded Gen Z (those born from 1997-2012) the “sober-curious generation”. Their study found that “a third of people aged 18-24 don’t drink alcohol at all, but those who do tend to drink primarily as a treat, to relax or to mark a special occasion.”

Chloe Combi, futurist and expert on all things Gen Z, attributes the cost-of-living crisis, the pandemic and corporate culture to the decline in journalism’s drinking habits. But do young journalists have anything to do with it?

“In the 80s, journalism was soaked in booze”

“You hear some stories about Fleet Street back in the day being very boozy,” says Jack Taylor, News Editor at Sky. “But it’s not a part of the industry I recognise anymore, especially in my young cohort.”

Sophie Dickinson, travel writer at The Telegraph, admits that the drinking culture at a previous place of work was “stressful” and contributed towards her leaving the job. I really did feel that I was propping up other people’s alcoholism,” she says. “There was a fridge in the office;

people would start drinking at lunchtime. I don’t want to be moralising about it because I do like to have a drink, but I’m not sure anyone’s best work happens when they’re drunk at 3pm on a Wednesday.”

Of the drinking culture, she says: “People would go to the pub every single night, sometimes starting from 4pm until the pub closed, then would go out for a curry, then stumble home at 2am, and be back at work for 8am. I just felt ill; I hated doing that and there was a lot of pressure to do it.”

Dickinson attributes social pressure and her junior position to her decision to join in. She wanted to prove that she was willing to get stuck in, as she felt this was a key attribute of a journalist.

“I was a really young member of staff. I think if you’d spoken to the older editorial people who were there who really perpetuated that culture they would have said: ‘Well, we’re all just mates and it’s bonding’, but it doesn’t feel like bonding. You also don’t have that much money – they know your salary. They know it’s quite low.”

For Jungmin Seo, a reporter at The Caterer, drinking can feel like an essential for career progression and she

often attends events where alcohol is provided. “It’s seen as a tool for networking really, and if you don’t take that opportunity, you don’t want to feel left out.”

If you choose not to drink, it doesn’t always go unnoticed. “You might get a few comments [about not drinking] here and there at an industry dinner,” says Seo. “There are the CEOs of all these big companies, and they probably think it’s funny to make some comments.”

Taylor argues that the pressure is not journalism-focused: “As with any job, in any industry, there is a pressure to socialise with your colleagues, and I think just because of

“The pen and pint are undergoing a divorce”

society in Britain, that normally means the pub.”

For Taylor, it’s the act of getting together and talking, which doesn’t need to involve alcohol: “I think journalists also love a coffee in the middle of the day. In my experience, I’ve gossiped and chatted as much nonsense over a coffee at work as I have in the pub.”

Futurist and Gen Z expert Chloe Combi explains: “Journalism is becoming less well paid by the year. It’s also a more diverse profession than in the 70s and 80s where it was absolutely soaked in booze, very white, and male. There’s no getting away from the fact that journalism is heavily tied up with London culture, and drinking is disappearing quite quickly from that.”

COVID saw the death of office culture, which is the first time many Gen Z joined the workforce.

Combi says: “Whether it’s social or personal, when habits break, it’s really hard to reform them.

The year or two that was the break in socialising, pub culture and going to the office has essentially broken the spell of very set-instone habits that we had.”

This, combined with a restrained attitude to alcohol and regular drinking, means

that the heady days of boozy work lunches and pints every day will only be remembered by those who knew them.

“If I was drinking heavily every single night, my friends would ask: ‘What’s wrong?’, and if I just said ‘Oh, that’s how you do it at work’, people would be concerned for me. Maybe in the 80s, it was a cultural thing.

“You wouldn’t have people looking out for you in that way,” says Dickinson.

How do the old guard feel about the new guard? “Social pressures have expanded in the last 40 years, and people are much more judgmental about those who might be a little bit tipsy,” says Shafer, over a decade on from his article in defence of booze in the newsroom.

In defence of the Fleet Street era, former Loaded Editor Deeson recalls: “In Haiti, I got chased through a cemetery by a hundred gang members from New York who wanted to kill me and the photographer. When you’ve done that for your job, you fancy a drink in the hotel bar.”

The magazines of today feel very distant from that time. Combi says: “Sometimes you do get that sense of ‘my God, they’re all so puritanical; they just need to go out and get drunk and relax’, but there is also this admiration for the Gen Z restraint, and a curiosity about the culture.”

Whichever place you fall on the spectrum of work-related drinking, it’s clear that the pen and the pint are undergoing a divorce. The grounds? Unreasonable behaviour and some serious adultery with 0.0% Peroni.

Sixteen years after Shafer’s article came out, he considers what’s changed: “I won’t say that there aren’t any drunks in the newsroom anymore, but you probably couldn’t find enough of them to play a decent game of soccer now.”

People drinking in a pub on Fleet Street Courtesy of AP

BREAKING NEWS

Remember when Boris Johnson’s advisers’ WhatsApp messages revealed the ‘chaos’ behind Downing Street’s response to COVID? Or when the discord among the Tories about Suella Braverman’s pro-Palestine stance was exposed with their WhatsApp chats? Imagine receiving the news about WhatsApp leaks on WhatsApp. That’s exactly what is starting to happen.

Digital and print media companies are putting in more effort to shift from social media platforms like Facebook and X to WhatsApp to share news, according to a recent report by The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

Through WhatsApp Channels, launched in June 2023, users can follow a brand, react to posts using emojis, and forward them into private chats but there is no open commenting.

Using the ‘communities’ feature, publishers will be able to interact more closely with their audience. Publishers are now using WhatsApp Channels in 150 countries.

The Daily Mail’s Channel has 3.8 million followers, and it delivers news about the Kardashians. The New York Times has found success in using WhatsApp

the app is gradually becoming the avenue for dispersing news as restrictions by Facebook and X increase. The Guardian is currently in a test-and-learn phase where they assess its effectiveness.

But what makes WhatsApp so popular among media companies? Part of the attraction is that it is an effective way of brand loyalty, being part of a package, and easy accessibility. The channels provide ad-free, unpaid brief news for those who want to know the daily headlines. Forwarding allows people to share news with their contacts. Most companies follow a pattern of posting the headline with a lead image, followed by a link to the full article. Some, like The Telegraph and Metro, frequently post polls to engage with the audience by asking their views on certain topics.

The Daily WhatsApp

Move over newspapers – WhatsApp is the news distributor of the future, writes Devangi Sharma

Channels to cater to niche interests, launching separate channels for NY Opinion and NY Games. The Financial Times has a channel dedicated to the Israel-Hamas conflict, followed by 47,000 people.

The Telegraph also launched its WhatsApp Channel earlier this year and in two months it has reached a following of almost 6,000. Claire Hubble, head of social media at the newspaper says: “Currently, our goal is to establish ourselves on the platform and find out which content the audience is most interested in, using these metrics to grow our follower count and engagement.”

She adds: “Meta has explicitly said it’s chosen to deprioritise news and political content shared by both publishers and users on products including Facebook, Instagram and Threads.

“In tandem, X user figures have decreased and under Elon Musk, getting people to convert has become more challenging. So yes, it’s logical that news publishers are looking for new opportunities to build audiences elsewhere.”

Many publications, including The Guardian, have started experimenting with WhatsApp to explore a new avenue for engaging with readers and reaching a wider audience. Launched as a secure medium of communication for people,

Reach, who own OK! and The Mirror has been getting millions of views, thanks to their extensive use of WhatsApp Channels. With over 120 brands under its umbrella, it is able to get clickthroughs not by sending the links to their stories, but from the constant forwarding of those links.

The company won the innovation prize at the Press Gazette Future of Media Awards in 2023 for its work on WhatsApp communities. It has around 80 communities with approximately 100,000 subscribers. By building new communities, Reach is diverting a significant amount of traffic to its own site, having an open rate of 90 per cent.

Drapers, the fashion retail industry magazine, is using WhatsApp differently compared to other publications. It has a broadcast list, free for anyone to join. Each day they send out the latest news to all their followers, with links to their website. Any time they send out breaking news over WhatsApp, there is a spike in views on the news story.

Sabina Weston, content writer at Drapers, explains: “WhatsApp cuts through the noise of social media apps where you might have to scroll for a while to find the news you are looking for. People who are experiencing social media fatigue might delete Instagram or Facebook, but keep WhatsApp for communication purposes,” she adds.

According to the Reuters report, media organisations believe WhatsApp could be a bright light for the future of news reporting. As the publisher of one European digital start-up told Reuters these Channels could, over time, have the “same power as push notifications and newsletters”.

Gaza: The graveyard of journalism

The Strip is the deadliest place to be a journalist. Mariam Amini and Aniqa Lasker investigate how reporters are struggling with access and misinformation

The harsh thunder of shelling mingles with birdsong; this is the symphony that freelance writer Younes Elhallaq wakes up to. It’s been the same chorus for months. Since the start of Israel’s bombardment in October, Elhallaq and his family have been displaced several times.

“It was early morning on Saturday 7 October [2023]. I was asleep in my bedroom when they started bombing the neighbourhood. They targeted houses, mosques and a lot of public spaces. We started packing our belongings, the passports and some money.”

For the next few days, the family remained encamped together in their living room. It wasn’t until Israel dropped flyers over northern Gaza on 13 October ordering residents to evacuate that the Elhallaq household left their home.

From Gaza City, they followed the Salah al-Din Road South to Khan Yunis. During this time, Elhallaq admits he struggled to write. “We didn’t have a good Internet connection and the electricity was cut off,” he says. “Also, the situation itself is not prime for working when you hear bombs dropping everywhere around the clock. The anxiety, the screams of your family when the bombs are near; it was really hard.”

Beyond the constant threat to his life, the lack of basic necessities has also hindered his work. “This time is completely different to the previous wars: this is the first time I have evacuated my home; it’s my first time drinking salty water. Sometimes I sleep without eating because we are not able to get any food. People are dying of starvation.”

The 25-year-old eventually connected with media companies like Islam Channel and ABC News to share his story and shine a light on the ongoing situation. However, aside from these limited encounters, he expresses difficulty in getting his voice across.

“It’s definitely not easy getting my articles out of Gaza. Not all channels want to accept what I’m saying or writing about. I remember I wrote something about how our humanity is affected by America’s support of Israel, but it wasn’t accepted or allowed to be published.”

Unfortunately, at this stage, censorship is the least of Elhallaq’s worries. Journalists operating in conflict zones are

protected under international humanitarian law; yet, since 7 October, Gaza’s Government Media Office has reported the killing of at least 126 Palestinian media workers. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has recorded the mortality rate as 7.5 per cent, higher than the death rate of US soldiers in World War Two, Korea, Vietnam, and the first Gulf War combined.

“Do I think Israel is deliberately targeting journalists? Yes”

“We are afraid of being targeted or killed,” says Elhallaq. “We in Gaza have been under occupation for more than 15 years. Israel refuses to let international journalists enter Gaza because they are afraid they’ll see the truth.”

“Do I think Israel is deliberately targeting journalists? Yes, and to an extent that’s never been seen before,” says Canadian broadcaster and Al Jazeera presenter Richard Gizbert. “If you look at the number of journalists killed, it goes beyond anything we’ve seen in the early months of any conflict.”

“Thirty-thousand people have been killed in this war. And yet more journalists have been killed in Gaza [than in World War Two]. We’ve seen evidence of Israeli operatives phoning journalists, warning them to stop working. Some of these journalists have captured those phone calls on their cameras and phones.”

Despite this, news and information have not stopped streaming out of Gaza. More than ever, ordinary Palestinians have begun documenting their experience and sharing video content online. “One of the lessons the Israelis have learned is that their problem isn’t the journalists, it’s the technology,” continues Gizbert. “There’s so much citizen journalism taking place, but the people churning it out are

Courtesy of Hatem Moussa

AP

not native English speakers and are speaking to people with accents.

“That really shouldn’t have an impact with the way news is received and interpreted by audiences, but it does. These audiences are used to seeing certain kinds of people report the news to them.”

Indeed, over the past six months, only a handful of international reporters have entered Gaza, mainly through Israeli military embeds. Correspondents who are locked out resort to long-shot coverage from nearby Parish Hill, nicknamed the Hill of Shame during past wars. This has led almost 60 UK journalists, including BBC’s Jeremy Bowen and Lyse Doucet, to sign an open letter calling on Israel and Egypt to provide unfiltered access to foreign media.

“The reporters are no longer the gatekeepers of information”

The threat that this absence creates to news accuracy is a grievance felt strongly by Channel 4 News’ International Editor Lindsey Hilsum. “For us – the international journalists – it’s incredibly frustrating not to be there. It also means there’s an incredible burden on our Palestinian colleagues. I just can’t believe how long they’ve kept going while under fire. We, who have better resources, better protective gear, not the same responsibilities to people on the ground, need to go in and do our reporting.”

As one of the first journalists to enter Khan Yunis with the Israeli army, Bunkall believes such embeds “provide a controlled and limited experience”, not matching “unilateral access”, but not “entirely fruitless” either. “I was able to see the destruction for myself – we drove for over an hour through Gaza and I didn’t see a single building left intact. I was also able to go down into the Hamas tunnels and see the prison cells where Israeli hostages were kept.”

For Mohamed Hassan, Middle East Eye’s Head of Video, the lack of press access marks an existential crisis for journalism. “The reason there was so much great reporting coming out of Ukraine was because there were a lot of international reporters there from the beginning,” he says. “That is the difference. The situation in Gaza is unique in that for the first time we are engaging with a conflict with so much unfiltered access to the people most impacted.

“The reporters are no longer the gatekeepers of information,” Hassan continues. “That has created a challenge for outlets to figure out how to report on a conflict when their voice is not the most authoritative. The onus is on them to prove their worth, win back the confidence of audiences, and carve a space for themselves where they can really own the coverage.”

Recently back from Israel, she has her own hunch he says. “In the absence of international journalists, they have brought us pictures daily so that we can tell the world what is happening. Without them, scenes of hunger and the aftermath of airstrikes would not have made it to the outside world.”

Ultimately, social media seems to have levelled the playing field; media companies no longer have exclusive control over the narrative. According to the Pew Research Center, almost a third of adults in the US under 30 now get their news on TikTok. This does create a risk as far as fake news is concerned – however, misinformation is certainly not exclusive to social media. One instance of misreporting was by The Times, which headlined an image of Palestinian children injured after an Israeli airstrike with “Israel Shows Mutilated Babies”. This ties into a key takeaway from the Centre for Media Monitoring’s (CfMM) Media

Bias: Gaza 2023-24 report, which found that Israelis are 11 times more likely to be referred to as victims of attacks compared to Palestinians.

The CfMM was set up by the Muslim Council of Britain to constructively tackle Islamophobic media trends in Muslim representation. Its recent report also found that in the four weeks following 7 October, out of 98,500 mentions of Gaza, only 28 of these acknowledged the territory is occupied. Of these 28, 14 were on Al

Such omissions in representation, whether intentional or unintentional, hint at a deeper reality: traditional news sources are frequently getting it wrong.

However, for Channel 4’s Hilsum, generalisations are Channel 4 News is different from, say, GB is different from The Guardian. I try to do the best I can. I try not to be biased. I try to be honest.” She also touches on the pressure to pick sides, and how this has led to polarisation within newsrooms. “I’m used to being screamed at by everybody – that goes with the territory. But you get shouted at more on this conflict than anything else. People say if I don’t use the word genocide, then I’m a terrible person who’s not sympathetic to Palestinians. Other people tell me if I don’t use the word

Associated Press photographer Hatem Moussa holds

terrorist to describe Hamas, then I’m anti-Semitic and want to kill Jews. All this stuff washes over me as I try, and I try hard. I’m not saying I will succeed, but I will do my best to be fair and report what I understand is going on.”

“Editors are very nervous. I don’t think they feel they’re doing a good job”

The inability to take a clear editorial standpoint is also raised by Middle East Eye’s Hassan. “A lot of people feel that something is missing. We saw what coverage of the invasion of Ukraine looked like, and how these news organisations can have very confident voices when covering a war. Why can’t we see that same level of decisiveness with Gaza?”

According to Hassan, the unprecedented speed of escalation in Israel’s bombardment and the humanitarian crisis it has created is part of the reason media coverage has been so unclear and scattered.

“Editors are very nervous. I don’t think they feel they’re doing a good job. They’re afraid of getting something wrong, and so, they’ve chosen to be as safe as humanly possible. Some of these headlines are so devoid of any kind of information that it just gets to the point where do you even want someone to read this? It’s telling us nothing.

“Are newsrooms going to be receptive to criticism?” says Hassan. “There seems to be a lot of hesitation in finding solutions, but it’s only to the detriment of journalism if we don’t find an answer quickly.”

Given the ongoing press ban, Hassan believes “on this occasion, the reporter needs to be somebody who platforms the voices on the ground in Gaza.

“They’re our eyes, our ears, and they are reporting from a conflict zone they and their families live in, that they are often in the firing line for. If we’re not protecting and standing up for them as colleagues, then I think that not only leaves their lives at tremendous risk, but it also undermines the authority their voices need to carry in conflicts like these.”

There is currently another open letter by Protect Journalists, signed by almost 1,500 media workers condemning “Israel’s killing of journalists in Gaza” and urging “integrity in Western media coverage”.

In January, The Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem also challenged the media ban within Gaza, but this was rejected by the Israeli High Court of Justice.

“Although these moves haven’t changed the reality, it is important to keep the pressure up,” says Sky News’ Bunkall. “We are, rightly, heavily scrutinised on every platform and so our reputation and credibility depend on us getting it right. You’ll never be perfect, but with diligence and some time to consider the significance of things, mistakes or misinterpretation can be avoided.

“The bottom line is that if you can’t witness an event with your own eyes or interrogate an interviewee with your own questions, then you’re at a disadvantage. [The ban] is a threat to journalism because it is effectively censorship. It means we have to work harder to get to the truth in different ways.”

Reflecting on her experience in Israel recently, dissonance between Israeli and British media coverage. “Israeli television doesn’t show the

Israel because people seem quite detached from what is being done in their name and that’s quite an

torment on the ground in Gaza, she remains adamant in her stance: “I very much want to be there, and I hope my editors would agree. I hope the Israeli and Egyptian governments optimistic it will happen

Al Jazeera journalist Wael Dahdouh holds his daughter over his deceased son Hamza, also an Al Jazeera journalist who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Rafah, Gaza Strip

Courtesy of Hatem Ali / AP

Can’t I just play the face card?

Camille Bavera and Maria Papakleanthous look at the extent to which fashion reporters must be their own brand

Most of us who want to work in fashion are a little guilty of wanting to be the centre of attention. To be the Carrie Bradshaw, Rebecca Bloomwood, or Miranda Priestly of the story: smart, savvy, and stylish.

Their wildly successful journalism careers and enviable sense of style brought about a second generation of fashion bloggers: the Tavi Gevinson, Chiara Ferragni variety, who suddenly had Facebook and Instagram at their disposal. But, with the rise of Gevinson’s generation came a social pressure to be more than a writer: a media personality who would inspire and influence audiences.

With the emergence of digital journalism, came a significant expectation of fashion journalists to share highlycurated versions of their lives, thereby blurring the line between writer and influencer. Today’s audiences want an insight into the person behind the wardrobe, and in order to meet the demand for authenticity, fashion publications have built this into their business model. Large publishing houses such as Hearst and News UK now have in-house talent organisations to cultivate budding influencers, but it was SheerLuxe (SL) who were the trailblazers.

Launched in 2007 as an online retailer, SL has since become a successful fashion and lifestyle publication. By hiring journalists with thousands of followers, SL gets

immediate access to a new audience who already align with their brand.

“They’re onto something in the way that they nurture in-house talent, grow them, and are creating a team of influencers rather than journalists,” says a freelance journalist who previously applied to SL and would prefer to remain anonymous. According to her, the SheerLuxe business model focuses on hiring writers with a pre-existing social media presence.

This idea of cultivating in-house social talent is widespread in the world of fashion, which is one of the biggest content pillars across Instagram and TikTok. But for some young fashion journalists, they’re worried that both magazines and their advertisers are more focused on hiring attractive people rather than skilled journalists.

It is impossible to imagine a fashion industry today without the presence of social media, so it’s no surprise that digital broadcasting platforms like SheerLuxe have become popular places to work. However, even prior to the creation of TikTok, when Instagram was little more than a pictorial version of Facebook, successful fashion journalists understood how important using social media would become in their career.

“From when I started, I realised it’s really important to have an Instagram presence,” says Natalie Salmon, the newly appointed Editor-in-Chief of Hello! Fashion glam, and out of place in the drab hallway of City’s College Building, exuding an Alexa Chung-level of confidence in an ecru boilersuit.

Salmon has garnered 25k Instagram followers from her upscale lifestyle content that corresponds with Hello! magazine issues. “My first job in journalism was at ES magazine and I saw that the journalists that I really admired, like Vogue’s Sarah Harris, all had a strong Instagram profile.”

One year into the job, she left Harper’s Bazaar, where she assumed the role of social media editor. Salmon’s career is built on a framework of skilled journalism, yet she knows the importance of curating a strong following on social media too.

In an increasingly digital age where print magazine sales are undoubtedly falling, a large majority of young people are consuming their fashion and beauty content via social media.

“I found that the more time I spent on Instagram promoting my writing, especially in the world of fashion journalism, the more traction I got in my career,” says Salmon. She’s realised that in the realm of fashion, playing the ‘face card’ – advertising an aesthetic lifestyle – brings followers from Instagram to the pages of a magazine. “I don’t spend as much time on my content as an influencer probably would, but I feel like content has become part of my job.”

For Salmon and other editors, making influencer-calibre content often happens on the job, which can entail going to designer parties at Mayfair restaurants, attending LFW runway shows, and press trips to Paris.

Sarah Jardine, a senior strategist

at social marketing agency SEEN Connects, is no stranger to PR invitations. “As a fashion journalist, you’re going to be invited to Fashion Week and some fancy meals.”

Jardine currently works with influencers across a range of industries. “It goes hand in hand; I think there’s an expectation that journalists are going to be in these situations and at these magazine parties. It doesn’t discredit their writing just because they’re also an influencer.”

It’s seemingly a win-win situation for those who get free drinks and shoes from their sponsors, as well as the privilege to write about them on their own platform or for their publication. However, promoting such a glamorous lifestyle can mislead readers if not done with rules in mind.

While influencers are subject to certain rules, such as adding #sponsoredcontent, or #brandpartner to sponsored posts, fashion journalists aren’t currently held to the same standards. With PR companies sending free products for employees to try out, there is a lack of transparency on whether something they are wearing or are featuring in their content was gifted to them.

Freelance fashion journalist Johanna Payton believes there should be a distinct difference between acting as an influencer and journalist, and that becoming too social or lighthearted could lead to future employers underestimating

“I’m not sure that editors particularly want their journalists to be influencers. They might like to work with influencers, and treat them similarly to celebrity columnists, but if you’re serious about journalism, building a profile as an influencer isn’t going to be

“Anything I’m doing for work, whether that’s a press event for Longchamp or Chanel, I’ll tend to promote on my socials,” says Hello! Fashion’s Salmon. “It’s almost part of my job, and I think it’s interesting for other people to see because it’s something that interested me when I was an aspiring journalist.”

Traditional fashion influencers are known for their candidness, providing followers with a look into their lives that knows no bounds. Journalists with a social media presence are more discerning

“The content on my side doesn’t change depending on which magazine I work on. It’s still pretty fashion focused,” says Salmon, who refrains from posting about her personal life.

Even before becoming an editor, she knew the difference between a true influencer, and a fashion journalist who simply uses their personal social channels to cross-promote their work.

“I would never post photos of my family for example, let’s say if I were to have children.

I do post about my sister, because she’s in a similar industry. When it comes to my close friends, I tend to keep those relationships private.”

Fashion journalism has transcended words on a page and high-budget photoshoots. Writers can no longer hide behind their byline – face-tocamera is essential – and success often goes hand-in-hand with a strong social media presence. That might just mean becoming an influencer.

Illustration courtesy of Camille Bavera

Tightening the chokehold: inside

Iran’s escalating press crackdown

Hamza Shehryar and Sophie Holloway investigate Iran’s systemic repression, surveillance and intimidation of reporters, two years on from the women-led uprising that jolted the country

It is 13 September 2022. A 22-year-old woman has just been arrested by the Guidance Patrol – Iran’s Morality

Police – for not wearing a headscarf. Eyewitnesses say that she is beaten as she is picked up. Three days later, news emerges that this woman has died in a hospital in Tehran. Her name, Mahsa Amini.

The police say that she succumbed to a heart problem. However, leaked medical scans show she suffered severe head trauma and a cerebral haemorrhage. Amini was killed in a harrowing case of state-sanctioned brutality.

As soon as the news broke, unrelenting fury erupted across Iran. Swathes of women burned their headscarves and many took to cutting their hair in public, directing their outrage at Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ruhollah Khomeini.

The Iranian government came down on these protestors with unprecedented aggression. Oslo-based non-profit organisation Iran Human Rights reported that by December 2022, the Iranian security forces had killed at least 476 people directly at the protests, arresting many others and sentencing at least 14 to death.

Authorities also started targeting journalists with striking animosity. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, a non-profit press freedom organisation, more than 100 journalists were arrested during the wave of protests. Elaheh Mohammadi and Niloufar Hamedi, both of whom were at the forefront of breaking the story of Amini’s killing, were sentenced to 12 and 13 years of imprisonment, before being released on bail in January 2024. Many others have not been as fortunate and continue to languish in jail, facing decade-long sentences.

Iran has always been a hostile place for reporters, even before the revolution in 1979, however, press freedoms have only decayed further since. In 2016, Iran ranked 164th out of 180 countries in Reporters without Borders’ annually published Press Freedom Index. In 2022, Iran ranked 178th, with only Eritrea and North Korea below it.

Two years later, in 2024, even as the protests have subsided, the Iranian government continues to attack protestors and the press, so much so that Iranian reporters, as well as foreign correspondents, are forced to put their lives at risk to simply do their jobs.

Isobel Yeung is a British journalist who has won multiple Emmy awards for her reporting on human rights violations, repression, and corruption from some of the most dangerous places in the world. She has reported from Yemen, Ukraine, Xinjiang, Afghanistan, Gaza, and, in 2023, Iran, becoming part of the first US TV crew to report from the country after Amini’s death. The experience came with a unique set of challenges, including extensive surveillance which ultimately culminated with her being arrested at gunpoint by security agents.

“It became apparent that half the hotel was occupied by intelligence and security personnel, and that we’d been followed and that they knew the rooms we were in, and they knew the nature of our reporting, and where we’d been all the time,” she recalls. “The surveillance was more sophisticated than other places I’d been.

“In Russia and China, you know you are being surveyed and watched very carefully,” she explains. “But in Iran, I suspected but didn’t know for sure that we were being followed the entire time.”

In January 2023, three months after

Amini’s killing and eight months before Yeung travelled to Iran, the country’s annual budget was announced. The bill saw a 43 per cent increase in the Ministry of Intelligence’s budget, and a 37 per cent increase for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps – a branch of the Iranian Armed Forces, tasked with crushing “deviant movements” that harm the ideological legacy of the Islamic Revolution.

Following the protests and widespread unrest, Iran was desperate to repair its deteriorating reputation and international standing. According to Yeung, her team were given visas for this very reason: “I think they wanted to talk about how the country has moved on since the protests. That they weren’t using a heavy hand to crack down on things because that wasn’t necessary.” However, this façade was being shattered by Yeung’s reporting, and so the Iranian authorities decided it was time for her to leave.

“The surveillance was more sophisticated than other places I’d been”

Just a day after interviewing Ensieh Khazali, Iran’s Minister of Women’s Affairs, and pressing her on the circumstances surrounding Amini’s death, Yeung and her crew were abruptly surrounded by Iran’s security forces and detained at gunpoint for over 16 hours. “Around eight guys stopped us and took us back to our hotel room,” says Yeung. “Some of them were tasked with asking us questions and interrogating us, some were tasked with just making sure we didn’t leave their sight, and some were tasked with getting the footage from us and going through it.”

What struck Yeung most was the bewildering and disarming experience of Taarof – the Iranian concept of civility and etiquette – while in detention, mere hours after being forced into a hotel room at gunpoint.

“It was really bizarre. We were sitting in this room, and they were bringing us tea and cakes, saying things like: ‘Why are you not eating? You look really sad. What’s wrong with you?’ And I was thinking: ‘Well, you’re pointing a gun at my head and said you’re going to kill me’,” she recalls. “It’s such a hilarious and ridiculous contrast, and a very surreal experience to be in.”

British journalist Isobel Yeung in Qom, Iran

Courtesy of Vahid Salemi / AP

Courtesy of Isobel Yeung

During Yeung’s time in Iran, interventions were constant. Her camera crew was ushered away from protests, interviews were cut short, and where she could go and who she could talk to were carefully arranged and methodically monitored by authorities.

“You have to do this dance, where you’re communicating with the regime,” says Yeung. “In a lot of ways, you’re organising things through them.”

When it became clear that Yeung would not restrict her reporting to the arbitrary boundaries imposed by the government, and that she was shattering the false notion that things had returned to normal, her time in Iran was cut short. She was told, in no uncertain terms, that it was time to go.

“The authorities are paranoid about foreign interference”

Not only is it within Iran’s borders that reporters and activists face challenges. Sanam Mahoozi, an environmental journalist who has written for Forbes, The Washington Post, Al Jazeera and Reuters, was forced to leave Iran six years ago, fearing retribution for her reporting. She says that if she had written the very stories she writes now from Iran, she would have been arrested – like many of her friends and colleagues. Mahoozi has not seen her family since leaving Iran and believes she can never return.

Reporting from the UK and in English offers Mahoozi a degree of protection, but this protection is not categorical. Mahoozi alleges that increasing numbers of Iranian surveillance agents have begun operating abroad in recent years to suppress criticism, with many of them becoming perceptibly more militaristic after Amini’s killing.

“What’s very scary is that the [Iranian] government has agents inside the United Kingdom, which is something that is unacceptable,” Mahoozi says. “I find it very upsetting to know that a country like the UK is letting these people threaten journalists,” she claims.

According to Mahoozi, some of her colleagues received assassination threats whilst covering the protests in 2022. “There was actually somebody hired within the UK to go to their house and kill them with a knife,” she alleges.

In 2023, investigations by Iran International and The Guardian revealed that expat campaigners, activists and journalists were being systematically threatened with harassment, surveillance, kidnap plots and death threats for organising and participating in protests after Amini’s killing. “The Iranian authorities are very paranoid about any sort of foreign interference,” Mahoozi says.

Yeung echoes the same concerns about the looming

threat of Iranian surveillance agents abroad. “There are obviously agents that are responsible for severe harassment of particularly Iranian British and Iranian American journalists, which has really upended their lives,” she says. “I feel a massive amount of empathy for them. It’s insane the level of pushback that they face just for trying to report on their home country.”

The presence of Iranian agents abroad has a particularly chilling effect on those who have fled the Islamic Republic. Mahoozi recalls the categorical fear she experienced when her work was first translated into Farsi. Even though the piece centred on the environment and not the Iranian government itself, Mahoozi says that her “hands were shaking” when she became aware of the translation.

In spite of the challenges faced by those covering Iran from abroad, many claim that it still remains much safer than reporting from within the Islamic Republic itself, and choose to leave. Bahar Ramazani (name changed for anonymity) is one such journalist. She reported extensively from Iran, covering a range of issues, including women’s rights and the education sector for over a decade, before leaving Iran in 2019. Despite having left the country of her birth, she remains uncomfortable disclosing her identity.

Courtesy of AP

Now based in the UK, Ramazani highlights the importance of social media as a means of understanding what is going on inside Iran. “It is crucial for those outside of Iran – especially those focused on current affairs and news coverage – not to be swayed by propaganda,” she says. “False information can, of course, affect those inside the country, as much as those outside of it – and social media is a vital tool for disrupting government narratives and exposing cracks in propaganda.

“In Iran, the use of social media for journalistic purposes mirrors that in other countries – it is both valuable and extensively utilised, but it does not come without its challenges,” she adds.

Online activity and posts are regularly referenced in interrogations and court hearings, as in the case of Iranian sports journalist, Ehsan Pirbornash, who was arrested at his home in October 2022 and subjected to hours of questioning for posts he made on X (formerly Twitter) about the demonstrations. Initially sentenced to 18 years in prison, Pirbornash was later released in February 2023. He was one of dozens of journalists arbitrarily detained in the protests.

In an interview with IranWire, Pibornash said that he was physically and mentally tortured and that his captors

acted with impunity, even considering extrajudicially executing him.

Ten years ago, only about 40 per cent of Iranians had access to the internet – around 50 million were without it. But the internet’s rapid growth since then has allowed Iranians to voice their discontent – on their own terms – circumventing the overbearing restrictions of state-controlled media.

“I’m impressed with the way some of the journalists are reporting on X, criticising [the government] on a daily basis,” says Mahoozi. “I don’t know how they have the balls to do it.”

With most of Iran now online and on social media, internet shutdowns have become an enduring part of the authorities’ strategy to suppress information and act with impunity. In November 2019, 321 people, including women and children, were killed across the country for protesting a rise in fuel prices, after which an internal shutdown was imposed. To this day, no officials have been held accountable. The facts and figures were only unearthed by Amnesty International after extensive investigations.

This strategy has persisted in the years since, snowballing after Amini’s killing. In 2022, Iran imposed internet shutdowns on 18 different occasions –the third most in the world, behind only India and Russia.

“Somebody was hired in the UK to kill journalists”

However, cracks are starting to emerge among Iran’s clerical elite, and the current generation of Iranian journalists and activists continue to lay their lives on the line to report, broadcast and challenge the presiding government and their policies.

“[There is] a younger generation who really want their voices to be heard,” says Yeung, “a generation who really understand the risks, given what they’ve seen, but still want to speak up and still want people to understand what it is they’re going through.”

Iran’s Revolutionary Government, taken aback by the unrelenting perseverance of the movement for emancipation after Amini’s murder, faces an unprecedented threat which has seen it target journalists, both within Iran and around the world, with greater intensity than ever before.

Neither Ramazani nor Mahoozi will likely ever be able to return to the country of their birth – at least as long as the authoritarian crackdown on journalism persists. Even Yeung, who has reported from some of the most dangerous places in the world, recalls her time in Iran as particularly chilling.

Yet, like many Iranian youth activists and campaigners, they remain brave, defiant and committed to unveiling the truth about Iran’s authoritarian government. “I’m kind of scared all the time,” says Mahoozi. “But you get used to it.”

The legacy of gal-dem

Urmi Pandit and Nana Okosi speak to the team behind the publication that revolutionised the British media landscape

In its own words, gal-dem was “so much more than a magazine”. The closure of the online and print publication sent a wave of shock and sadness through the community it had created. Over a period of eight years, gal-dem covered topics spanning politics, culture, lifestyle, first-person essays and more, through the lens of people of colour from marginalised genders. In an industry that lacks representation and diversity, gal-dem served as an outlet for underrepresented voices to not just be heard, but spotlighted. Beyond this, though, it was – at its core – a home for a host of talented creatives, fresh, innovative discussions, and shared experiences. We spoke to the journalists behind gal-dem to learn about what it meant to them, and its lasting legacy.

Chapter one: The beginning of galdem

Suyin Haynes, Head of Editorial:

“It was in 2015 that I first joined gal-dem, in my last year of university. I saw it in a Facebook group and joined as a subeditor from there. It was very spontaneous and collaborative, and it was all voluntary in those days. After I did that for about a year, I helped to produce the first print edition. It became a company in 2019, which meant it could pay people, so I came back in 2021."

Halimah Manan, Chief Sub-Editor:

“I saw the [Facebook] post and I was so excited by the prospect of having a space for people like me. I expressed my interest and got added, starting in May 2015. I think the philosophy of giving a voice to women of colour – and later non-binary people too – is great because I discovered I am non-binary while at gal-dem!"

Suyin Haynes:

"It took on a different energy – it didn’t really feel like work in the early days. But, then it became something much bigger. When gal-dem started, there was a report by the Sutton Trust that said 97 per cent of British journalists were white and 55 per cent were male. I think it’s so important that journalism is reflective of society and of world in which we live today. The feeling – especially at the beginning – of knowing that this could be really big was exciting."

Halimah Manan:

"When we were all learning how to create a magazine together, some of us had more experience than others, but a lot of us were university students. There were maybe 10 people, which grew as the magazine grew. Back then, you would rarely see fully-fledged Black and brown people in the media, not stereotypical portrayals. People in the team would feel pigeon-holed into writing certain kinds of articles

The gal-dem team at a London event

Courtesy of Ailsa Fineron

for mainstream publications. So, it was really freeing to be part of gal-dem where we could write and create articles about anything that interested us, touching on personal stories but also exploring whatever else we wanted.”

Chapter two: What set gal-dem apart

Naomi Larsson Piñeda, Senior Politics Editor:

“It was always a space that I really admired and saw as important – especially going from working in a newsroom like The Guardian’s. In my role at gal-dem, it was called the Politics section, but it was actually dealing with a lot of social issues – human rights topics, a lot about communities. Everything is political, and everything is related to the policies that the government is making and implementing. What our Politics section did was frame it as how this is affecting different people around the country and abroad."

Lakeisha Goedluck, Freelancer:

“gal-dem was a breakaway from traditional journalism. It offered me an opportunity to share my truth and tell gritty, heartfelt stories that had an inherently personal element to them. I wrote pieces about my name and its use in pop culture, called ‘My Name is Keisha and Pop Culture Ruined My Name’, and a piece about drug use, Black female agency and abuse, based on the BBC show, I May Destroy You. I felt like I was making more of a difference with the stories I wrote for gal-dem because they were steeped in my own lived experiences, or at the very least, highlighted the plight of Black people in a collective.”

Suyin Haynes:

“One really important thing about gal-dem was the autonomy and the freedom and playfulness – the tone of voice. I can’t think of another publication anywhere else, where I could publish an opinion piece titled ‘F*ck Tim Westwood’ or ‘Now The Queen’s Dead, It’s Time We Bury The Monarchy’. I think that tone is really important because leftist, progressive media that represents the perspective of people of colour from marginalised genders is all too rare. Being that place, that destination – I’m really proud of that.”

Chapter three: The impact of galdem's storytelling

Kayleigh Watson, Music Contributor:

“For 'The Hyper-Scrutiny Of Black Women’s Bodies In The Music Industry’, I ended up talking with Aluna Francis, Jillian from Lion Babe, and Rahaven. I’m still very proud of that. Also, in an interview with Laura Mvula when Pink Noise came out, I felt she could speak more openly about racism in the music industry because she was talking to gal-dem.”

Lakeisha Goedluck:

“My favourite piece was the article I wrote about Black loneliness. It got into the discourse around class relations in the UK and the closure of public spaces, which is having negative ramifications for all citizens but especially those of colour – both young and old. There was a lot of discussion from the Black community about feeling this but not being

A collage of gal-dem print covers

Singer Emeli Sandé with Editor-in-Chief, Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff Courtesy of Rose Eskafi Courtesy

able to put words to it. It’s a largely unspoken about issue that’s gotten worse since the pandemic, so I was glad that I was able to help bring it into public consciousness.”

Rose Eskafi, Head of People and Wellbeing:

“We wanted to do something different in January 2023. Our team was culturally diverse and I love learning about people’s backgrounds, so I suggested we write about the long-held traditions that bring us comfort. The team shared some meaningful traditions that have kept them connected to heritage, family, friends and childhood memories throughout the years. It was a beautiful way to learn more about the team and to connect on a deeper level.”

Chapter four: The legacy of gal-dem

Riann Phillip, Editorial Assistant:

“[It was] paving the way and showing other publications that our stories are important, people do want to read them, and brands will invest in us. I think without gal-dem, the media would not look the way it does right now. gal-dem opened doors, but it also broke down doors. ‘Representation’ is such a buzzword these days and it gets thrown around a lot. But no one is doing it, or has done it, like gal-dem.”

Suyin Haynes:

“It was the key aim of the project to change the narrative and have communities writing their stories themselves, not being written about. I think that continues to be really important. I'm really sad that the project doesn't exist in that same way, but I do feel that the spirit does, and I'm proud of having played a small role in building that legacy.”

Chapter five: The state of British media post-gal-dem

Kayleigh Watson:

"I think the sense of loss that out-poured on social media following gal-dem’s closure says a lot about both readers and the industry, and how the publication impacted the media landscape. In order to move toward a healthier, united society, people need to connect with the experiences and struggles of others from similar and different backgrounds. I don’t think traditional media has caught up.”

Suyin Haynes:

"I think gal-dem punched so far above its weight, and wasn’t like some sectors of British media, which continues to be very elitist and very cliquey. I often felt that gal-dem was not taken seriously – in many ways, independent media is still not taken seriously. So, I was really proud to oversee significant projects and collaborations that built on the work that went before me, and helped cement our name as a force to be reckoned with."

Naomi Larsson Piñeda:

“We live in a very diverse multicultural society, and it's glaringly obvious that that still isn’t reflected in the news or media that we're consuming. So, that is a very fundamental reason as to why it was important for spaces like gal-dem to exist, because it definitely digs at the heart of that.”

Riann Phillip:

“It's my responsibility to keep gal-dem alive through the work I do elsewhere. I think it's on all of us. The state of British media at the moment is pretty bleak. If anything, this is the time for new things to start. gal-dem started with no resources – there wasn't a magic pot of money that just appeared and so came the magazine. It started because a group of friends wanted to start a magazine and they did it. Anyone can do that, and anyone should do that.”

The 'gal-hood' issue from 2016

The gal-dem team in their office

Courtesy of Suyin Haynes

Courtesy of Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff

Fuel for thought: The female presenters driving change at Formula 1

Since its inception in 1950, F1 has been a man's domain. Katie Baxter and Ottilie Blackhall talk to the trailblazers steering the circuit scene in a new direction

Five women lie on sun loungers, their tanned and toned bodies wrapped in neon bikinis. Beneath them, a race car speeds past as they soak up the Monaco sun. This scene may sound like something straight out of a problematic 1980s Miami mobster movie, but believe it or not, it’s actually a clip from series one episode three of Netflix’s Drive to Survive. And it sets the tone for the show – throughout all 60 episodes of the hit Formula 1 documentary series, women speak for just over an hour in total, less than three per cent of the total run time.

And yet, this representation fails to reflect the drastically changing landscape of F1. Once markedly void of women, with just five female motor racing drivers in the history of the sport, today we are witnessing a remarkable transformation around the F1 paddock and grandstands alike.

Up until relatively recently, the absence of women has extended far beyond the race track itself. According to F1 CEO Stefano Domenicali, around 40 per cent of Formula 1 fans are now women, but women journalists and presenters are still having to work to keep up to speed with their male counterparts in the adrenaline-fuelled world of Formula 1.

New WTF1 presenter Amber Jones, who has also presented for the Aston Martin F1 Team and GT Cup Championship, is no stranger to the pressures of presenting sport in a male-dominated industry. “Your male presenter can show up, but you need to show up and have all the facts and all the research, and if you don’t, you’ll get penalised,” she says. “If there’s one incorrect thing you say, you’ve got the whole fanbase or people in the industry saying ‘Why is she here? Why is a woman talking?’”

Whilst presenting, Jones has also encountered remarks about her appearance from those in the industry. “I got a comment one time from a director who said, ‘It’s great that you’re coming into this industry, because the drivers will love you,’” she says. “And I thought, ‘OK, it’s a compliment I guess, but please don’t say you’ve hired me just because you think I’m attractive. You’ve hired me because I have a particular skill.’”

Comments like these, and the expectation of knowledge, have led Jones to realise there is no room for errors for female broadcasters, and she often feels the need to be on “better form” than her male counterparts. “It’s definitely more of a challenge, but women now are very upcoming in the industry,” she says.

However, Jones appreciates that the influx of women entering the industry has given her a circle of people to talk to if she feels overwhelmed. “You just need to be strong enough to know that you’re going to get there eventually.”

When Immy Barclay, presenter for F1TV, first started out in broadcasting over a decade ago, the media landscape looked very different. Nowadays, sports presenters must also contend with the dizzying world of social media.

Cultivating a personal brand on social media is a valuable tool for presenters to show behind-the-scenes snippets to fans. However, Barclay explains that it is important to

strike a balance between posting professional and personal content: “I do proceed with caution online. I love using socials and sharing what’s going on, and I mostly keep things relevant to work with a hint of lifestyle.”

“Sex sells. We all know it, but don’t feel pressured to go near that pond”

“There’s an F1 photographer who I became good friends with that once told me: ‘Sex sells. We all know it, but don’t ever feel pressured to go near that pond. Just keep running a tight ship like you do.’ That makes perfect sense to me and if there’s ever an inkling of doubt that something I post could possibly be construed in that way, for any abstract reason at all, then I don’t do it,” she says. “It’s important to me to protect how I am perceived.”

Toeing this line is, generally, a uniquely female dilemma. “It could damage how you’re perceived and knock your credibility down – it appears to me that is something only women have to watch out for. I prefer to be more careful.”

When Jones first signed with WTF1, she received a wave of negative comments. “A lot of the comments were like, ‘Why is a woman on it? Bring back Matt and Tommy’,” she recalls. “People wrote, ‘No, it should be a man, it should be two men, it should be two white males.’ Why is that?”

Jones continues to be met with the occasional misogynistic comment. A commenter once labelled her as a “Barbie” who had no place presenting on Formula 1. One particular comment came through during a livestream while she was presenting at the GT Cup: “It said, ‘Wow, it’s so refreshing to see a woman actually know what she’s talking about, not like these other women at the GT races who are just there because of their looks’.”

However, social media is proving to be a force for good when it comes to encouraging more female participation in F1 presenting. “It’s

Courtesy of Amber Jones

Courtesy of Immy Barclay

Amber Jones/Courtesy of Aidan Edgar

Barclay interviewing George Russell and Lewis Hamilton

definitely more the content creation side that’s got that push for women,” she says.

“Once you see women in motorsport doing well, younger people aspiring to be presenters, it makes them think, ‘I can do it now because I’ve got someone else above me doing that. I’m going to get to where they are eventually’.”

When Drive to Survive was first released on Netflix five years ago, it opened up the floodgates to a new tidal wave of Formula 1 fans, many of whom had never encountered motorsports before. The hit series created an unprecedented buzz around F1, inviting more people into a world that had felt cordoned off.

While the show is not directly targeted at women, it has undoubtedly played a role in the rise of female F1 viewership. Andrew Westacott, CEO of the Australian Grand Prix, credited the series for a rise in female ticket purchasing.

But unfortunately, traces of that exclusivity continue to linger. Barclay believes that in some instances, female fans can be underestimated and dismissed. “The criticism I’ve overheard is that they’re in it for the thrill of seeing the drivers, as if they’re crazy for a boyband, with the race as an accessory. But there are many sides to a fan, and I’ve absolutely seen young girls that really want to get properly up to speed with F1 and engage with it in an informed way.”

“We need to stop thinking of it as them versus us”

Female presenters are in a unique position to recognise this problem, and try to address it. “If you watch a TV series and jump in at episode eight, of course you need to be caught up on what’s going on. F1 newbies could probably do with a handbook. I’d love to provide a dossier of everything you need to know about F1 to help launch their fandom. But at the end of the day it’s a race – and part of the pleasure of being a fan is that you can enjoy it for what it is at any level.”

And, Barclay explains, this pressure for women to prove themselves as “real fans” to the older male fanbase extends to female presenters, too. “There’s this idea of feeling like you have to say to people, ‘I’ve watched F1 since day dot’. I wasn’t brought up in a household watching it – I come from a background working in MotoGP and I got into F1 because I saw it as an adult and felt compelled towards it. And as a presenter, I applied myself in a particular way,” she says.

“But to be a fan you don’t have to have started watching F1 with your dad at five-years-old, as lovely as that sounds! You can start at the next race – now.”

Bernie Collins, who began her career at McLaren as a strategy engineer and worked with Aston Martin as Head of Race Strategy and now presents as a strategy analyst for Sky Sports and F1TV, agrees that there is a divide between older and newer fans in the Formula 1 fan base.

“We are trying to encourage female participation and viewership because our fanbase is changing. We don’t necessarily want to lose the old fans that have been there forever, but it is about encouraging new fans, especially new female fans. We need to stop thinking of it as ‘them versus us’,” she says.

Collins wants to make motorsport more accessible to those who didn’t grow up watching it. “The thing I’m trying to encourage is that there are no stupid questions. I’d rather someone just ask me a question than not.”

But ultimately, Barclay explains, the F1 landscape has already evolved significantly beyond recognition in recent years – thanks to the women who came before her and made their mark on the circuit scene. “I can relax into my role thanks to the other women before me who really paved the way,” she explains.

“I talk to other people who have been in F1 for decades, and they talk about how much it has changed, how in those days you wouldn’t see a woman there. I’m walking around the paddock now, and it’s like being in a mixed high school.

“Beeping through the turnstiles is always a big thrill. Getting the paddock pass is like a golden ticket to the heart of F1. I will never get over that.”

A much-needed makeover for Formula 1

A recent sponsorship has created a buzz among female sports journalists and fans, as Charlotte Tilbury has made history as the first female-founded brand to sponsor Formula 1. The beauty brand, one of the most popular worldwide, is entering the sport in sponsorship of F1 Academy, the new all-female single-seater championship.

“I saw the email embargo come in, and I actually let out a little squeak of excitement,” says Helena Hicks, founder and Editor-In-Chief of Females in Motorsport. “If you want to target women and get more women involved, you need to market to women.”

The car is Charlotte Tilbury’s signature crimson shade and features the brand’s Hot Lips icon. Along the side of the livery is the tagline ‘Makeup Your Destiny!’

“We’ve got to that stage now, supporting women in motorsport, where we can have a car that’s covered in lips and lipstick,” says Hicks. “That’s so cool.”

“Imagine if that was five years ago. We’re at a stage where society is like, ‘That car is amazing.’ That does show we’ve made progress – definitely.”

F1 Academy will be televised on Sky Sports, and Hicks is confident that it will inspire women drivers and journalists alike to get involved in motorsport. Collins asks: “Why have we not got more female-focused sponsorships?” With a growing and evolving female fanbase and more female presenters than ever on the circuit scene, it makes sense to advertise to that new group. “When that starts to cascade, it will rocket,” says Collins. “It’s going to be massive.”

Immy Barclay interviewing Charles Leclerc

Courtesy of Luca Bruno/Associated

Courtesy of Immy Barclay

Can crypto make podcasts pay?

Hannah Rashbass explores whether a Bitcoin-based platform could be an audio game changer

In 2008, Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired magazine, wrote an essay titled “1000 True Fans”. The essay champions the idea that creators can sustain themselves by cultivating a dedicated fan base who pay a small amount for content, rather than chasing mass appeal.

When Sam Sethi read the article, it struck a chord, so much so that he went on to launch a new podcast platform called PodFans in 2022, later renaming it TrueFans in honour of the article.

“I had a firm belief that people’s time and attention had value, a long time before I developed TrueFans,” he says. The problem was, Sethi couldn’t see a clear way to reward users for their time and attention. Until a light bulb went off: cryptocurrency.

Monetising podcasts is a tricky business. For most, the primary revenue stream is advertising, but securing lucrative deals can be competitive, especially for lesserknown creators. Advertisers often prefer to invest in shows with large and engaged audiences, but even for those with celebrities, advertising revenue can be fickle.

Alice Enders, Director of Research at media advisory firm Enders Analysis, said in a note in 2023 that “monetisation is extremely difficult” for large companies seeking to make sizable revenues in podcasting. This is due to shortcomings in the digital advertising market as listens are not converting to sufficient sales. Enders added that “one solution is to build paid-for subscription bases, but this is difficult when much of the content is free.”

TrueFans, along with other podcast platforms such as Fountain, are attempting to transform that by creating a content space with a payment model powered by crypto. With the smallest denomination of bitcoin, known as sats (equivalent to £0.00054 as of March 2024), users can reward creators through tiny transactions.

It’s essentially like digital tipping. The bitcoin payments, used on Sethi’s site, are grounded in a new monetisation model known as ‘value for value’. The idea is for all content to be freely accessible. Those who find the information enjoyable are asked to pay what they think the content is worth, but there’s no obligation to do so.

So how do you do it? Well, crypto novices have to set up a lighting wallet to send and receive bitcoin. It takes a bit of admin and is similar to setting up a Revolut account, minus the physical card. Sethi adds: “You top up your account from your bank and exchange that to whatever currency you want to spend. When you’re finished, you can take it off your card and put it back into your bank account. Nothing’s changed here. The currency just happens to be called bitcoin and sats.” Once set up, fans can pay small amounts directly to podcast creators for each minute of audio consumed.

At its core, TrueFans functions like other well-known streaming platforms such as Spotify or Apple. However, it marries micropayments with a host of other features, poised to “make podcasts pay”, according to Sethi.

Many will know the subscription-based platform, Patreon, where creators are directly funded by fans. One of the most

successful podcasts on the site is Chapo Trap House which makes $175,996 (£138,904) per month from subscriptions.

While Patreon sets the amount for monthly subscriptions, the ‘value for value’ model gives greater power to listeners to determine the content’s worth. Cryptopayments also transfer directly from listener to creator – there is no cut taken by a third party. Sites like Patreon will take up to 12 per cent and Apple and Spotify take almost 30 per cent.

The model is based on bitcoin, rather than more familiar currencies because of the limitations in traditional payment systems. “We’re always paying someone, somewhere to take money from us, just for transferring,” says Sethi.

possible, so listeners can support with gestures of appreciation.

Ultra-small payments are not viable through traditional banking systems because transaction fees take up a large percentage of the cost. In contrast, the fees associated with cryptocurrency make little payments

While all this sounds good, micropayments have often been met with scepticism in traditional media circles. Blendle, an online news platform, pioneered a payper-article service for users when it launched in 2013. By September 2023 all micropayment services had been shut down due to a failure to generate profit. The system does not seem to be gaining widespread popularity either, as just 6 per cent of publishers surveyed by the Reuter’s Institute this year said micropayments would be important revenue streams for their company in 2024.

However, there are some early signs of success in the social media world. Nostr, the rapidly growing alternative to X (formerly Twitter), launched in 2020 and introduced micropayments in 2023. The platform allows users to send bitcoin to each other through “zaps” rather than likes and comments. It currently has 18 million users who have sent each other 895,000 “zaps” worth $3.6m (£2.8m).

Kyrin Down hosts his podcast, Mere Mortals, on TrueFans, as well as other platforms that support crypto, and has seen a gradual improvement in the amount of money he is bringing in through micropayments. Since mid-2021, the show earned 7,437,911 sats, equivalent to £4,017 as of March 2024. He explains: “the podcast definitely doesn’t make enough to sustain a full-time income, but I don’t work full time hours on it either. It’s important to highlight that with micropayments, it’s very much a slow growth and it takes a long

time to build up a solid audience.” Down also adds that “the actual value of it is going up, in bitcoin terms, which is nice”.

He puts the failure of micropayments in traditional media down to a lack of recognition. “There’s no point sending out a micropayment to someone if they don’t acknowledge it, because then it just feels like you’re sending money into the void,” he says. “It really should feel like you’re directly supporting someone.”

“It’s a hard gap to jump because we will have to educate the market”

From the listener’s perspective, encouraging uptake may be more challenging. Sethi admits a key hurdle is making micropayments accessible. Although most people have heard of bitcoin, many aren’t familiar with sats or crypto wallets: “The audience that initially will use TrueFans is that geeky, early adopter audience and sadly they are mostly old men,” he says. “It is a hard gap to jump because we’re going to have to use new terminology and educate the market.”

Similarly, Neal Veglio, who runs a podcast marketing agency, explains the uphill struggle. “When you’ve got micropayments involved, you’ve not only got to educate, but you’ve also got safety concerns,” he says. “There are horror stories around bitcoin so there are a lot of conversations necessary for a mainstream audience.”

Despite this, Sethi remains confident that users can be persuaded, partly through the platform’s social media-like features that aim to reward users for their engagement.

By combining micropayments with interactivity, TrueFans aims to create close relationships between fans and podcast creators, closing the gap between listeners and creators inherent to most hosting platforms.

Together, these features have underlying aims in the name of metrics. Christopher Heard, from Message Heard – a podcast production and growth company wrote in PodPod magazine in September, there is a “lack of richness in podcast data”. This is largely because other hosting platforms do not provide detailed figures and download numbers have been highly inflated due to Apple’s automatic download feature, which was removed in September 2023.

TrueFans aims to offer more detailed and reliable numbers through the activity words built into the platform, allowing them to measure how long the listener tunes in for.

Sethi hopes this will be particularly valuable to advertisers. He explains: ”We all know that when a listener comes across an advert, most of the time they will skip, but advertisers will pay to advertise in podcasts that have 10,000 downloads, in the hope that one third of those downloads are people who have listened to the advert.”

However, there’s no guarantee that the podcast had that many listeners, or that people even heard the advert. To combat this, TrueFans is introducing negative sats, small amounts of bitcoin that would flow back into the listener’s wallet while the advert is playing. The advertiser would pay these sats into the listener’s wallet in exchange for their attention. Sethi adds: “Suddenly, with micropayments we have a way to determine whether the time and attention the listener is willing to give to the advert is worth the amount the advertiser is willing to pay the listener.”

While micropayments might be a way to bridge the gap between creators, advertisers and their audiences, only time will tell whether mainstream audiences will find real value in these digital wallets.

LIST ING

“Justin Bieber

was cool. We did a photoshoot in a hotel room and he did loads of skateboard tricks

around the room”

“I’d like to say I’m like Bridget Jones (and I am a bit of a klutz) but sadly I don’t get to skydive on the job”

“A dirty martini is my guilty pleasure to help me unwind after work”

“People are obsessed with reading about sex”

“I spend all my time mulling the doom of humanity”

“Not gagging at the sound of my voice will pay dividends!”

“News stories on supposed feuding female celebrities are overdone”

Periodical

Author by Ceci Browning

Penny Farmer 1983

Have you ever experienced any sexism in the industry?

No, but I mostly worked on a women’s magazine and the majority were women. Actually, I can think of something. There was a guy who was on the local council. I met him through work. He decided to pin me against the wall, but I just slapped him down, basically told him to f**k off.

What’s the most useful thing that you learned at City?

Shorthand. It’s stayed with me. When I first left City, I got a job on a paper in North London, and it was very useful for court reporting, news stories, etc. It was a really good launchpad. I don’t think I would have gotten into journalism very easily without City’s training behind me.

Who is a person that you find inspiring?

News reporters who report in Afghanistan, Israel, and Gaza, Lyse Doucet and Secunder Kermani. They’re unbelievably professional and brave.

Rizwana Hamid 1989

Newspaper Director, Reputation Builders PR

by Dorjee Wangmo

International Director, Centre for Media Monitoring

by Tommy Gilhooly

What fictional journalist are you most like or would like to be?

Jane Fonda in The China Syndrome – a clever and ambitious female reporter who stumbled upon a cover up at a Pennsylvanian nuclear power plant. There were few female-led journalist films at the time, so it was great to see a female main character uncovering truths.

Who is the best person you have interviewed?

Robert Mugabe had banned all foreign journalists and interviews at the time. I managed to get the senior government to allow me to do a ‘hard talk’ – a real coup in those days as he just wasn’t doing interviews.

Who is your favourite up and coming journalist and why?

Tim Prizeman 1986

Nabihah Parkar, a video journalist at Vice World News, produces really good TikTok videos covering the complex news of underrepresented communities. Her content shows how young people do have an appetite for news, if it is presented on platforms they use. Her work is accessible and still serious and meaningful.

What is the best part of the job you do now?

I have run a public relations business for over 25 years, and I’m now also launching a cafe and takeaway chain. I also run a small music festival catering business. The best part of the latter two is interacting with members of the public – well, most of them – especially the banter.

Why did you decide to shift from journalism to PR?

I was too arrogant to want to spend years as an underpaid regional journalist covering parish pump stories before getting a shot at some crappy shifts on a national. I became a junior press officer in the City and doubled my salary.

What’s the best piece of advice from City that you still use today?

From the iconic Harry Butler: “What is the most important tool of a journalist? Sharp elbows.” It also applies to other walks of life.

1990

Leigh Chambers

Periodical Freelance Journalist and Author

by Emily Manock

Who’s the most famous person you’ve ever interviewed?

The interviews that I remember most are non-famous people who are going through extraordinary things. I interviewed a couple after the death of their baby daughter, for example, and that had a major impact on me.

And it’s talking to people like that, who were most memorable, because those are the ones where you can find yourself getting involved. They’re not spinning out lines because they’ve not been briefed on what to say by a PR.

Have you ever experienced any sexism in your career?

I mean, show me a woman who hasn’t. When I was at City, we did the placement at the Hull Daily Mail. And while I was there, there was another guy there from the Cardiff course. I think I hardly ever left that office; he was sent out with the blokes all the time to cover stories. It was so overt, even he noticed that it wasn’t fair.

1990

Gillian Joseph

Broadcast Presenter, Sky

News

1991

Newspaper

by Sudrisha Goswami Shelley Jofre

Senior News Editor, BBC Scotland

What skill do you wish you would have learned earlier in your career?

It takes a while to become skilled at interviewing. The big skill in interviewing is listening. If you are doing an interview, you can spend an awful lot of time preparing all your questions. But if you are not listening, they can say something remarkable and you are so busy thinking about the next question that you do not pick up on it.

What is the single worst piece of advice you were given in journalism?

Early on in my career, a manager said to me, “I do not think you will ever get a job as a reporter because your voice is not quite right.” I went on to have a successful career, not just in BBC Scotland’s investigation strand but also as a correspondent in Panorama for 15 years.

by Nana Okosi

What’s the most memorable interview you’ve ever done?

My most memorable interview was with Luther Vandross. I was and still am his biggest fan! I interviewed him at the then Top of the Pops studios in Elstree. Luther was a delight, he sang for me and allowed me to take a photo with him. In those days there were no phones with cameras, so I bought a throw-away camera from a chemist and got his assistant to take the shot. I made sure I did the interview first and then apologised for my unprofessionalism in being such a fangirl.

Have you ever experienced racism/ microaggressions in your career?

Sadly, I have experienced racism and microaggressions, although I will say that no aggression is micro if it affects the other person. We shouldn’t minimise it. My approach is to acknowledge it, call it out where and when appropriate and deal with it. And how I do that is by pursuing excellence. There is no better way to deal with detractors than by succeeding.

Harriet Quick

Periodical

Contributing Editor, Financial Times and British Vogue

by Sarah Kennelly

Who is the most famous person you’ve ever interviewed?

I interviewed Yayoi Kusama at her studio in Tokyo. She’s phenomenal. She is a hero for documenting her battle with mental health with her art. Her artistic language is a visual hallucination. The dots, the infinity mirror rooms, the pumpkins –it’s utterly memorable.

What is the worst advice you were ever given?

A powerful editor on a newspaper where I worked once told me I couldn’t write. And I said: “Well that’s ironic because you awarded me the Jackie Moore Award for fashion journalism in the 1990s.” She blushed so hard and was furious.

What story is overdone?

SEO clickbait stories which are constructed around trending click data – often that means it’s a non-story. People often mistake fake news and native advertising for truth and reality. It’s so dangerous when it comes to voting, politics, and representation.

Vicky Graham

Newspaper

Deputy Digital Editor, The Guardian

by Katie Baxter

What is the best on-the-job perk you’ve ever received as a journalist?

I was a freelance sub at Screen International and we produced a daily edition for the Cannes film festival in a nearby printers in the south of France every year in the 1990s. There wasn’t a whole lot of glamour but the food, drink and camaraderie was amazing and it was all on expenses.

What is the single worst piece of advice you were given in journalism?

I was really struggling early in my career; I’d been in a super successful year at City and all my friends seemed to be doing brilliantly. I’d never visited London until I was 21, I had so much growing up to do generally but I couldn’t see myself getting a break. I had spoken to a friend about changing careers and she said ‘maybe you should’. She meant well but I am so glad I stayed with journalism. Plus, for me, changing from reporting to production made a big difference for my confidence and opportunities.

1992 1994

1997

Richard Price Newspaper Editorial Director, Zeno London

by Dorjee Wangmo

What is the best part of the job you do now?

The same as it was in journalism –telling stories. In comms, you are invited into a company and given a level of access journalists rarely enjoy.

Why did you decide to shift from journalism to PR?

One day, I was doing background on a story and found a cutting from a few years earlier which touched on all the right areas. I needed to talk to the person who wrote the article, as they would have all the knowledge and contacts I needed. But when I looked at the byline, it turned out that the writer was me. Over a decade had passed and here I was writing the same story. Nothing had changed, yet everything had changed. In the intervening years, the newspaper industry had been dying a death by a thousand cuts and at that moment I realised I’d had enough. It was time for a new challenge.

Newspaper Freelance Journalist

by Camille Bavera Sophie Walker

What did you learn at City?

Sherna Noah 1998 1999

It taught me how to construct a great news story, the basics of which are still the same. And also how to find a good story. I still remember very clearly the ‘off-diary’ exercises. We were basically given a page of the A-Z in London and told to go there and find a story, and write it up by 5 o’clock.

Have you ever had a journalism related dream/nightmare?

Constantly! When I was first posted to Paris for Reuters, I dreamed that my desk and chair had been put in the outside courtyard until I was good enough to be put inside with the others.

Phone, face-to-face or Zoom interview?

Is it annoying to say that I think it depends on the interviewee? I’ve found that phone calls often yield a better conversation, and people feel under less scrutiny than if you were staring them down on a Zoom call. I think it really depends on what kind of conversation you want to have.

Newspaper

Factual TV Commissioning Editor, Radio Times Magazine

by Niamh Kelly

Who is the most famous person you have interviewed?

Sir Elton John, when he lent photographs from his vast collection to the Tate Modern. Also David Hockney and Sir Salman Rushdie, who I interviewed twice and were as brilliant as you’d imagine.

What is the best on-the-job perk you’ve ever received as a journalist?

Covering the Cannes and Venice film festivals, an eye-opening experience, has to be up there. Or exploring Vietnam, India and Namibia for travel pieces. Dinner at Andrew Lloyd Webber’s house in the run-up to his TV talent show Any Dream Will Do was fun. One perk I did turn down was the offer of free Botox!

What type of story do you think is overdone? News stories on supposed feuding female celebrities. Thankfully there’s less of that now.

Ben Spriggs

Periodical Editor-in-chief, ELLE Decoration

by Scarlett Coughlan

What is your guilty pleasure that helps you unwind after work?

That’s easy, a dirty martini. Either vodka or gin depending what kind of mood I’m in, but always with an olive and in a cold glass.

What is the best on-the-job perk you’ve received as a journalist?

Paola Navone, an Italian designer, was clearing out her Milan studio and doing a raffle to get rid of her stuff. She gave me free access and I got this kitsch ceramic fish light that’s bigger than my head. She must have found it in some junk shop somewhere, but because she’s an icon in the design world, to have something that belonged to her is really special.

If you were interviewing people for a job at your company, what would be the most important skills you were looking for?

It’s about enthusiasm, that can-do attitude, experience. It’s very nerve-wracking coming into the industry – not everyone is going to be the most confident and flamboyant in an interview – but it’s about coming across as yourself.

What is a bad habit you picked up as a journalist?

When you’re a journalist you just interview everyone. I remember going on dates with people in the past and interviewing them. You never have any awkward pauses but you sometimes overly grill people.

Lucy Lyon

Freelance Filmmaker, Lion’s Tale Films

by Mariam Amini

What are your career highlights since graduating from City?

Writing this from Tripoli and Libya where I am currently filming, it’s hard to separate all the experiences into specific highlights. But up there would be: making a onehour documentary looking into opium use in Afghanistan with an all-female team; finding my way as a freelance filmmaker, photographer and feature writer with three young children; being lucky enough to film all over Gaza and the West Bank in Palestine.

How do you typically unwind after work?

Playing with our children and our dog and guinea pigs. Reading, cooking with my husband and having friends over, watching films. I could keep writing – I have never found it hard to unwind!

Jon Kelly

Newspaper

Senior Journalist, BBC

by Hamza Shehryar

2002

What is your guilty pleasure to help you unwind after work?

I really enjoy watching non-league football. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become less enamoured with the idea of spending £60 to watch a game, so I’ve gotten into watching my local non-league team, Lewisham Borough FC. I don’t feel guilty for it, but it’s the kind of off-thewall thing I do outside of work.

Who is the most famous person you’ve interviewed?

The most starstruck I’ve ever been was when I was told to ring Michael Palin – a huge hero of mine. He was kind, gracious and funny – and not at all bothered about being called up by an annoying young reporter.

Kate Maxwell Magazine

Author and Freelance Editor, Condé Nast Traveller

by Katie Baxter

What fictional journalist are you most like?

I lived in a teeny apartment in Manhattan in my thirties, stored my shoes in the oven and ate a lot of Magnolia cupcakes – inevitably my friends back home compared me to Carrie Bradshaw, though I would have preferred Joan Didion.

What is the best on-the-job perk you’ve ever received as a journalist?

I’ve been lucky enough to have some amazing travel-writing assignments. Most recently a road trip around Sicily taking in Ancient Greek ruins, Baroque cities and the White Lotus hotel for the Financial Times. But it’s the access to extraordinary people that’s the biggest perk for me.

Ruth Barnett

Miranda Collinge

Periodical Deputy Editor, Esquire Magazine

by Luke Bradley

Who is the most famous person you’ve interviewed?

I’ve interviewed a fair few movie star types for Esquire covers, most recently Cillian Murphy and Paul Mescal. The most famous person I’ve interviewed is Tom Hardy: I’ve profiled him four times and, as you might expect, he always makes it interesting, though one time he did take me to Homebase.

What is the best on-the-job perk you’ve ever received as a journalist?

It sounds cheesy but the best perk of my job has been the adventures. Recently I went to Nazaré, Portugal, to watch Matt Formston, who is a blind surfer, take on the giant waves there. My favourite ever experience was probably going to the desert in New Mexico with some unhinged treasure hunters, even if – would you believe it – we didn’t find the gold. I’ve been gifted the odd pair of socks, too.

If you were interviewing people for a job at your company, what would be the most important skills you were looking for?

For me it still comes down to writing ability, then an eye for a story, a good work ethic and a sense of humour. In fact, that might be first.

2005

Newspaper Director of Communications, Sequoia

by Lotte Brundle

What do you remember about applying for City?

“Tom Hardy once took me to Homebase”

2006

A feisty row I had with Linda Christmas – the then-head of the course – at my interview. She was a little … the word that comes to mind is ‘disdainful’, but I don’t want to be unfair to her. She very firmly put me in my place about student journalism not counting as proper journalism, and I was incensed. I wrote her a note afterwards. I never heard back from her, but I got a place. I could never work out if it was in spite of the note or because of it.

Any good anecdotes from your time as a journalist?

At Sky, I helped to produce a TV news show where we had guests who were bloggers. I remember having an email from a university student who had set up a political blog and asked to come on the show. I basically said: “Go away and get some readers.” Pretty dismissive. But, this guy came back about six months later and had built a real following. So, I was like: “Fair enough.” It was Harry Cole, Political Editor of The Sun

You now work in comms. Why did you decide to change career?

It wasn’t planned as a permanent move. I think I felt like it would be nice to have a year where I didn’t do shifts, as banal a reason as that is. My plan was always to come back. That was how I left it at Sky: “Come back when you’re done.” But that was more than 10 years ago. I think they’ve probably realised I’m not going to come back.

Judy Terrell

International Director of Global Health Communications, Public Hospitals Authority BAHAMAS,

by Nasia Colebrooke

Who is the most famous person you’ve interviewed?

I met and interviewed former South African President Nelson Mandela in December 1993 at that year’s Junkanoo parade when he visited The Bahamas. I remember him saying the parade was so saturated with African drum beats that his heart was happy.

Have you ever experienced racism, classism, or sexism as a journalist?

Yes. There have been many times I’ve been taken off an assignment because a male reporter was preferred, or times I was passed on from covering an event that included travel because it was a ‘boy’s trip’.

What inequalities do you think the industry needs to address?

The protection of journalists and their families. There was a time I was stalked by someone who also threatened my family because it’s easy to do in The Bahamas, where we don’t have specific jurisdictions for the protection of journalists.

Adam Westbrook

Helen Lewis

Newspaper Staff Writer, The Atlantic

by Yasmin Vince

2005 2005 2007

What’s the best on-the-job perk you’ve received as a journalist?

I did a piece about Ron De Santis, the governor of Florida, and I got to go to Disney World. I got a hot dog, went on a steamboat and tried the ‘It’s a Small World’ ride.

What is your guilty pleasure to help you unwind after work?

I wish I could say something cool like polyamory, but I just put on a scented candle. I work from home so I use different scents to separate work mode from at-home mode. My favourite scented candle is ‘Cracking Wood Fire’ by Yankee Candle. They’ve discontinued it now so I’m on a mission to buy every remaining one.

Broadcast Producer, New York Times Opinion Video

by Sydney Evans

What skill do you wish you could have learned earlier in your career?

Reinvention. I intended to become a TV journalist, but found myself working in social media. Then I taught journalism before becoming a YouTuber and ending up at a newspaper. Generative AI is about to force me to reinvent myself again. It’s a cliché but most people graduating from City this year will make their career in a job that doesn’t exist yet.

What is a bad habit you picked up as a journalist?

Pessimism. As journalists, we’re asked to seek out and witness all that is wrong and horrible in the world, of which there is no shortage. I spend all my time mulling the doom of humanity instead of imagining a better future.

Any particular tips to avoiding that middle of the day fatigue?

My secret life hack is a mid-afternoon nap. Twenty minutes around 2pm or so. A piece of chocolate and a cup of tea will perk you right back up afterwards.

Tom Howard

2008 Magazine

Head of Editorial, Royal Horticultural Society

by Claudia Cox

Who is the most famous person you’ve interviewed?

Justin Bieber was cool. We did a photoshoot in a hotel room and he had a skateboard on him. He was happy to do loads of skateboard tricks around the hotel room. I was feeling quite paternal at the time, and I felt worried for him because it didn’t seem like his life was very fun. Outside the hotel were loads of Beliebers, and it didn’t feel like he could just pop out and go to the pub.

What skill do you wish you would have learned earlier in your career?

The art of dealing with people. When you get thrown into an actual publication, working as a team is a key part of it. It’s a lot easier to make good magazines with a happy, functional, highperforming team.

A big skill is the visual element of magazines. If you’re a freelance writer or staff writer, you only need to worry about the words. But if you’re an editor, then you have to think about how the entire magazine feels and looks.

What is the best on-the-job perk you’ve received?

A big perk of working at a gardening magazine is that you get loads of plants. Our Features Editor Michelle will always bring in houseplant babies for everyone on the team to take home.

“I felt worried for Justin Bieber. His life didn’t seem very fun”

by Faye Curran

Who is your favourite up-and-coming journalist and why?

I’ve been really impressed by the team that produces the Manchester Mill (an online newspaper covering Greater Manchester) and its sibling titles. I grew up near Bradford, so I love that this mini renaissance of local and regional journalism is happening in the North, especially given the headwinds facing the broader industry.

What skill do you wish you would have learned earlier in your career?

When you file a story, print it out, and go through it with a highlighter pen and underline anything that qualifies as a fact – a name, an age, a percentage change, a job title. Then check each one and tick them off as you go. This really helped me avoid some errors and it also gave me the peace of mind to go home at night after finishing a difficult piece on deadline, knowing I’d double-checked everything.

What is the best on-the-job perk you’ve ever received as a journalist?

As a grad trainee, I spent six months in The FT’s Paris bureau. I travelled to a vineyard in the Rhône Valley, where climate change was already affecting the soil and the grape harvest. The couple who owned and ran the vineyard took me to look at the grapes, which were ripening early, and I interviewed them over lunch in their garden. They served me a glass of the wine they produced – a Condrieu. Drinking a chilled glass of this incredibly delicious wine in a sun-drenched French garden was a delight.

Anne Faber

TV and Current Affairs

Creator, Presenter and Producer, Anne’s Kitchen cookery TV Show

by Marina Rabin

Who is your favourite up and coming journalist and why?

I follow a lot of food writers and generally I find that the UK has the most interesting voices and also creators. I really like what Elly Curshen (@ellypear) is doing on her socials, as her content is really relevant, unpretentious and hands-on. Her ‘rolling leftovers’ series was super inspiring, when she showed her daily cooking of using leftovers – a matter that is very close to my heart.

What is the best on-the-job perk you’ve ever received as a journalist?

Press trips for food journalists are just incredible. It’s like having a dream food trip organised for you, where you meet producers, eat the best food in the most remote places and that in the company of fellow food journalists.

What type of story do you think is overdone?

Viral TikTok recipes. Recipe videos where ingredients are just being chucked around and 30 seconds later you have a ‘delicious meal’. No info. Just pure ‘food porn’.

2009 2009

Ruth Lewy

Magazine

Deputy Editor, The Guardian Saturday Magazine

by Alexandra Parren

What skill do you wish you had learned earlier in your career?

The art of saying no. Early in my career, I wasted a lot of time trying to make things come to fruition because I was being polite. Now I know that part of being a good editor is saying yes to brilliant ideas, and saying no when something is not going to work.

Who is the most famous person you’ve interviewed?

When I was just starting out, I was given a really fun assignment where I went backstage at the BAFTAs and had to persuade people to talk to me while they were getting ready. That included people like Tom Hiddleston. They were all in their underwear and it was really embarrassing, but good fun as well.

What is a good habit that you picked up as a journalist?

Maintaining contacts. Perhaps it doesn’t turn into anything the first time you meet, but keeping in touch and maintaining a good relationship is a good habit and it’s led to some great stories.

Chris Jeffries

Newspaper

Head of Digital, Chelsea Magazine Company

by Aniqa Lasker

What is the best on-the-job perk you’ve ever received as a journalist?

When I was in marine journalism, I went to a lot of boat shows around the world – Monaco, Miami, Cannes, the Netherlands – and the hospitality is always pretty generous. I also helped out with product testing. Some of it you got to test and keep – like an inflatable kayak which the client was happy for me to keep.

Who is your favourite up and coming journalist and why?

James McNicholas is a writer, podcaster, got a YouTube channel, an actor and he’s written a book – so he’s really multi-talented.

International Sports Desk Anchor and Correspondent, Fox

by Ben Jureidini

What is the single worst piece of advice you were given in journalism?

That I was “too ambitious”. Ambition is not a bad word – none of us would make it out of the gate if we didn’t have drive or dreams. This type of thinking is aimed at women more than men: if one of my male colleagues went in and asked for a raise, or to be put on a project, he’d be a ‘gogetter’ and forward-thinking. That’s rarely the case when a woman does it. People don’t just become successful, they have to work extremely hard at it.

“quote”

What is an issue that the journalism industry needs to address?

Srivastava

2009

International UK Bureau Chief and the International Executive Editor, Business Insider

by Tommy Gilhooly Spriha

What skill do you wish you would have learned earlier in your career?

I wish I had learnt shorthand. I’ve been fine without it, but at press conferences or during interviews, I often see how quickly other journalists are taking notes. Of course, now you have AI-enabled apps like Otter for transcription.

Who is your favourite person you have interviewed during your career?

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, I interviewed two Israeli women. One had been held hostage in Gaza for 55 days. You feel very small but also very powerful in getting their story out.

If you were interviewing people for a job at your company, what would you look for?

Someone who is curious about everything, questioning every story and also questioning why something is happening.

Julie Stewart-Binks 2010 2011

There’s now an emphasis on ‘building your brand’ to the point that journalists spend more time on TikTok and Instagram Reels capturing ‘a day-in-the-life’ than actually doing their jobs. We’re expected to have a huge audience and to bring them with us wherever we go – very alluring for prospective networks, but sometimes extremely distracting and counterproductive to creating good work.

Tineka Smith

International Senior Content Advisor, UN Environment Program Finance Initiative

by Camille Bavera

Who is your favourite up and coming journalist and why? I’d say Natalie Morris, she was at the Metro and now a freelancer. She also had a book out about being biracial, and I really like that she focuses on topics concerning racism while giving a balanced view. She wrote a book called Mixed/Other

What skill do you wish you would’ve learned earlier in your career?

Being comfortable saying no, and therefore learning to set realistic expectations with people – whether that’s a colleague, editor or boss. It’s hard to say no sometimes.

Stephanie Prentice

TV and Current Affairs

Broadcast Journalist, Reporter and Host, BBC

by Nivedita Nayak

What skill do you wish you would have learned earlier in your career?

Radical self-belief. I was always very driven and focused when trying to get opportunities, but, I wondered if I was good enough amongst all of the competition from my peers. Those feelings are essentially useless and boring so my advice is to quiet those voices as soon as you can.

Who is the most famous person you have interviewed?

Interviewing Boris Johnson at the opening of M&M’s World when he was the mayor of London was surreal. He was trying to seriously discuss commerce while flanked by two huge M&Ms.

What is a bad habit you picked up as a journalist?

Scripting in a formulaic way or in ways that have worked for you before because you are in a rush. It is better sometimes to hold off, watch everything you have and listen to all the material before you start furiously scribbling away.

Harriet Thurley 2011

Magazine Senior Producer, Loose Women

by Alexandra Parren

What skill do you wish you had learned earlier in your career? Confidence. Doing this course gave me the confidence to say “I am a journalist” and I have permission to ask these questions or do this interview. Throughout my career my confidence has grown. I wish I could have had more of it in the beginning. I try to help junior members of my team and help them build their own confidence.

What is a good habit that you picked up as a journalist? Listening, and what comes with that while you’re interviewing. Often you need to change the direction of the interview, or your questions, because of an answer. If you had a set question that you were going to ask next, but you just heard something that you think is interesting, pull on that string.

Abby Young-Powell 2010

Journalist

by Hannah Rashbass

What skill do you wish you could have learned earlier in your career?

I wish that I had learned more about how to freelance and everything that goes along with that. Things like how to set yourself up as self-employed, and how to navigate negotiating rates. This is because, currently, most freelance journalists are not just doing straight reporting all the time, but also getting funding applications and doing some copywriting. I wish I’d known more of the practical skills to deal with that.

What type of story do you think is overdone?

I think personal essays are run a lot because they get a lot of attention. Often, I don’t think there is a lot of consideration for the person who is writing. It often feels like they set someone up to be slammed online which I don’t think is very fair.

Sara Hemrajani

International

Producer, Bloomberg by Josh Osman

What is the single worst piece of advice you were given in journalism?

I was told that people should stay in their lane, early in my career, but that doesn’t give any longevity. It felt like people weren’t always honest about the changes happening in the industry. We have to be like a Swiss army knife – versatile, adaptable, agile and multi-skilled.

Which fictional journalist would you most like to be?

Guy Hamilton, from The Year of Living Dangerously. He’s a pre-internet, pre-modern technology, old-fashioned journalist. That kind of conflict zone reporter, it’s something you aspire to be. I never thought I was cut out for it.

What skill do you wish you would have learned earlier in your career?

Using a professional camera properly. I wish I’d acquired more technical camera skills early on. We didn’t focus on it much before. Nowadays there’s a shift towards doing everything in one go. Before, you could be a producer who only organised interviews, but now you have to be able arrange lights, edit scripts, and shoot.

BA

by Lizzy O’Riordan Cassie

Werber

Stephen Robert Morse 2011 2011 2011

Global Journalism Freelance Journalist

What was writing your first novel like? Long. I started seriously writing novels in 2012, alongside a full-time job. I’d do one evening a week and half a day at the weekend. By 2016, I’d finished a full draft. But that book didn’t get published and I had to start again, this time with very young children. I love writing fiction, and had great support; those things kept me going.

Which fictional journalist do you think you’re most like?

I almost said Luisa Rey in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. Then I realised I don’t truly identify with any, probably because we romanticise journalists in fiction all the time, making them fearless, morally perfect and tireless. I’m writing a journalist character in my next book. I can feel the pull to do the same, because it’s such an attractive idea.

Erasmus Mundus, Financial Filmmaker

by Sophie Holloway

What transferable skills did you learn from journalism?

I always say that every documentary starts with journalism, whether it’s me or someone else bringing the story. There’s journalism in every project. In fact, my first journalism job was fact-checking for Netflix.

What is your guilty pleasure to help you unwind from work?

I love taking long walks, and long baths. I try to keep everything simple in my life. There’s one specific notable red light in my bathtub. People say red does this for you, blue does that for you. But this is probably irrelevant information!

Radhika Sanghani

Newspaper

Freelance journalist and author, The Telegraph

by Erin Dearlove

How did your journalism training set you up for your career?

My first novel was published the year after I left City. My editors knew I was quite young but were impressed with how tight my structure and sentences were. I’ve always credited that to journalism.

How do you stay motivated throughout the day?

I know I’m more productive in the morning, so I try to dedicate my mornings to getting loads done. Then I’ll go to yoga. In the afternoons, I do the gentler, easier stuff as I know I have less concentration.

What fictional journalist are you most like?

I remember reading Olivia Joules when I was quite young. It’s about a journalist who’s a bit mad. I related to her sense of having a lot of fun but also managing to get the work done.

Esther Opoku Gyeni 2012

Broadcast

Associate Manager, Spotify

by Jaheim Karim

What is the single worst piece of advice you were given in journalism?

I was once told my surname was too African so I should consider shortening it. I think nowadays [racism] tends to be a lot more subtle and nuanced. For example, very rarely will someone explicitly tell you to accept the behaviour of a bullying boss or to tolerate poor or abusive behaviour from talent, but you’ll instinctively get a sense of how you’re expected to behave in those situations by the culture and environment that you’re in.

What is a bad habit you picked up as a journalist?

I can be very impatient because my work has been so deadline focused, so I expect a reply in five seconds for everything.

“All I would hear from people higher up was ‘we won’t have an industry’”

Health Editor, Women’s Health by Hannah Rashbass

Which fictional journalist would you most like to be and why?

I’d like to be Andie Anderson from How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days because she is given three months to file one paid feature and she writes features about things that weren’t signed off.

What’s the single worst piece of advice you’ve been given as a journalist?

To quit! I started working in 2012 during an era when journalism was moving online and all I would hear from people higher up was ‘we won’t have an industry’ and ‘it will change beyond recognition’. I’m not saying it’s easy, and things are still tough, but I have been able to make a career out of this and I adore it.

Shehnaz Khan

Broadcast Journalist, BBC News

by Caitlin Barr

What skill do you wish you would have learned earlier in your career?

I used to do a lot of cold pitching as a freelancer. And I used to get a bit worried because I was like, ‘am I allowed to go and email an editor that I’ve just found on Twitter?’. I wish I’d known that you’re entitled to do that.

What is a bad habit you picked up as a journalist?

I’m continuously checking the news. I have an inability to switch off sometimes, even on holiday. Even with a seven-hour time difference, I’m still there checking Twitter, checking news websites, and speaking about news articles to my friends.

What inequalities do you think the journalism industry needs to address?

We need more diversity, especially from different socioeconomic groups. That would open up the playing field, and we’d be getting to hear a lot more stories that we don’t tend to get to. There are loads of communities that we could be speaking to more.

2014

Broadcast Editor, Hello! Fashion

by Maria Papakleanthous Natalie Salmon

What fictional journalist are you most like or would like to be?

Definitely Lois Lane from Superman. She is a news reporter and gets to hang out with Superman, which must be pretty fun. I studied politics for my undergraduate degree, so I always secretly wanted to report about news, but I just kind of fell into fashion.

What is your guilty pleasure to help you unwind after work?

I have this thing called Sci-Fi Sundays where I watch a new science fiction film weekly. My favourite one so far is Star Wars, all of the new films they’ve made and put on Disney+, The Mandalorian, I just love it. I also love rewatching old Ridley Scott movies, like Alien. I just go on a massive sci-fi binge and watch whatever is on Netflix.

What skill do you wish you would have learned earlier in your career?

I would have loved to learn more video editing skills and graphic design sooner. They are equally extremely important for a career in journalism. Especially for my job role, I am constantly on Canva designing posts.

Matteo Civillini

Investigative

Reporter,

Climate Home News

by Sudrisha Goswami

What is the most memorable interview you have ever done?

I did an investigation into an Italian fugitive who was trying to set up an autonomous state on a barge in international waters. Things got even more bizarre when the man published his own articles defaming me and calling me a ‘fake journalist’, claiming he couldn’t find any evidence that I graduated from City. The man tragically died when his barge got destroyed in a storm.

What is a bad habit you picked up as a journalist?

I have developed a fairly inquisitive and somewhat skeptical mind. I sometimes find it hard to turn that off, to the annoyance of my friends and family. If someone tells me their landlord is dodgy I will get to the bottom of it, whether they want me to or not.

Jack Cummings 2015

Newspaper

Editorial Director, Multiplatform, VICE News

by Sarah Kennelly

What skill do you wish you would have learned earlier in your career?

I think adaptability and the confidence to adapt. Because when I started, I was very set on wanting to write for newspapers. The working world changed that very quickly. And I realised that to grow and survive, adaptability is probably key.

Who is the most famous person you’ve interviewed?

While I was at City, during the entertainment specialism, I interviewed Barbara Windsor who played Peggy Mitchell from Eastenders. She was opening a cancer unit at Whittington hospital. It was related to her character’s cancer storyline so she had a personal stake in it. I’d grown up watching her on TV. In news journalism, you don’t usually interact with super famous people. I was very starstruck.

“He published his own articles defaming me and calling me a ‘fake journalist” 2016

Aimée McLaughlin Magazine

Associate Editor, Creative Review

by Olivia Vaile

Who is your favourite up-andcoming journalist and why?

Marianna Spring, the BBC’s disinformation and social media correspondent, is doing some really interesting and important work, and has just released her first book about the rise of trolls on social media.

What is the worst piece of advice you were given in journalism? That I needed to learn shorthand while studying at City. I’m semijoking, but I do regret the early morning starts and haven’t used it at all since graduating!

Marianna Giusti

International Audience Engagement Journalist, Financial Times

by Devangi Sharma

What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

How you conduct yourself, the way you manage your ego, your expectations and your emotions is just as important as the quality of the work you’re able to deliver.

What’s the best on the job perk you’ve ever received as a journalist?

Going skiing in Switzerland for a story. I was sitting in a chalet in Verbier and we did acroyoga. I ate fondue. It was incredible.

2016

Patrick Clarke

Magazine Deputy Editor, The Quietus

by Emily Moss

Polly Rider

2016

Broadcast Creative Producer, Broadcast Revolution

by Nivedita Nayak

Why did you transition to a different path from journalism?

I have gone more into branded content and broadcast PR. I get to create content but no longer do the night shifts and weekends!

What transferable skills did you learn from journalism?

What makes a good story, multitasking, and working at speed. I also produce editorial content that’s pitched into broadcasters and online platforms, so it helps to be able to think like a news producer.

Do you have any advice for someone who wants to have a career change?

It is good to have an idea of what aspects from your job you want to keep, and what transferable skills you have. A journalism background is a great door-opener for many other careers.

2016

Who is your favourite up-and-coming journalist and why?

Alex Rigotti (Magazine, 2023). They do a lot of work for me at The Quietus and I helped them get in at NME. It’s been really exciting and enjoyable to see them thrive and go at journalism full throttle. They’ve got this passion for music that’s absolutely crazy; they wanna hear every piece of music ever. It’s fun to see someone so committed to music journalism at a time when many people are rightly getting disillusioned with it.

Who is the most famous person you’ve interviewed?

One of the first interviews I did for The Quietus was Green Day. It was an absolute disaster and I got thrown out by their PR team for asking Billie Joe Armstrong about Donald Trump.

Courtesy of Sarah Cohen

Sophia Smith-Galer

Broadcast

Digital Freelance Journalist

by Ottilie Blackhall

What is the best on-the-job perk you’ve ever received as a journalist?

Travel! I’ve been able to travel to at least 15 different places around the world. Everywhere from the Vatican to Laos.

Who is the most famous person you have interviewed?

Possibly Francis Bourgeois.

What is the worst piece of advice you were given in journalism?

That my salary would always be my age in journalism. By that logic, as a 29-year-old I should be on £29,000 – a salary I’d really struggle to afford on top of my London rent and my general life and responsibilities. It’s advice I got as a student that is hopefully no longer given. I think this advice allows companies to pay young people nothing. Value our work!

2017 2017

Sian

Bayley Investigative

Senior News and Online Journalist, Full Fact

by Caitlin Barr

Who is the most famous person you’ve interviewed?

Melissa Lawford

Magazine Economics Reporter, The Telegraph

by Maria Sarabi

Who is the most famous person you’ve interviewed?

Probably Lenny Kravitz. He talked about how he spent years as a cowboy in Brazil and he had this hypnotising way of saying ‘amazing cows’.

What is the best on-the-job perk you’ve ever received as a journalist?

Getting to travel somewhere far-flung for your own story is the best. My favourite was probably a trip to Beijing for a piece I wrote for BA High Life about China’s booming luxury dog economy.

What is the single worst piece of advice you were given in journalism?

Everyone used to say ‘start a blog!’. But the blunt truth is that most people’s blogs when they’re 18 are going to be quite bad. Mine was. And that’s fine, but don’t include the link on your CV.

I used to work for The Bookseller. Once, at the British Book Awards, I didn’t realise I was talking to Richard Armitage, the actor. I thought he was a guy called Richard from Audible, who I emailed sometimes. I was saying thank you so much for your email. And he kind of went along with it, bless him. I have also actually interviewed Queen Camilla, before she was queen, at a children’s book event at a school.

What inequalities do you think the journalism industry needs to address?

I was lucky enough to win a scholarship to City and it changed my life and made my career. But newsrooms need to support journalists as they develop. Salaries and working conditions need to improve, or we will only have journalists who can afford to do the job. And that means losing lots of talent.

Rob Picheta

Magazine

Digital Producer, CNN

by Imogen Williams

2018

Who is your favourite up and coming journalist and why?

I work with a tonne of incredibly talented young journalists but none more so than Sana Noor Haq who has reported so powerfully on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Also Will Lloyd is an incredibly talented and funny writer for The New Statesman I’m quite jealous of how brilliantly he writes.

What is the best on-the-job perk you received as a journalist?

Last year I was in Liverpool covering Eurovision. I was interviewing contestants in their private saunas and dipping in and out of media parties which was a very welcome change of pace from the things I usually have to work on.

Who is the most famous person you’ve interviewed?

When I was quite new to political journalism I interviewed Nigel Farage in Westminster. I was there recording it on my phone and with my pen and notepad and my press pass around my neck looking very young. He absolutely steamrolled me. It was a terrible interview.

2018

“I was interviewing contestants in their private saunas”

Lucas Oakeley

Magazine Senior Content Editor, Mob

by Marina Rabin

What fictional journalist are you most like or would like to be?

While I’d love to be Carrie Bradshaw, I’d say I’m most like Dan Ashcroft from Nathan Barley. His cynicism is something I can relate to – probably a little too much, to be honest.

Who is the most famous person you’ve interviewed?

It’s probably Liam Payne. I did a profile of him for the cover of Esquire Middle East back in June 2019. We spent the day in London hanging out together and he was a pretty open book.

What is the best on-the-job perk you received as a journalist?

I’ve been lucky enough to have been wined and dined multiple times in my career so far. I also got flown over to Monte Carlo once to go and interview Nobuyuki ‘Nobu’ Matsuhisa. That was an interesting experience, to say the least.

Broadcast News Correspondent, Sky

by Mariam Amini

What inequalities do you think the journalism industry needs to address?

Class barriers and accessibility are still a huge problem. Unfortunately, not everyone can afford to undertake journalism qualifications or conduct unpaid work experience or internships, which are typically stepping stones to paid work.

What’s been one of your career highlights since graduating? Leading a world exclusive ahead of the King’s Coronation for Sky News. I had the opportunity to travel to Kingston, Jamaica, where the government informed me of its plans to accelerate republicanism to ‘as early as 2024’ because of the kings reign.

Helen Salter 2019

Georgina Roberts

Magazine

Commissioning Editor, The Times Magazine

by Josh Osman

What fictional journalist are you most like?

I’m most like Carrie Bradshaw: I live in London, love cocktails with the girls and partying. Maybe I’m flattering myself but she’s the one I relate to the most, as a young woman writing about my experiences and baring my soul on the page.

What type of story do you think is overdone?

A lot of publications do too many dating stories. Either ‘I’m off’ or ‘I’m on the apps’ or ‘I went through this break-up’. It’s quite oversaturated. That being said, they’re often performing the best because people are obsessed with reading about sex, love, romance, heartbreak, ghosting, all of it.

What is your guilty pleasure to help you unwind after work?

A big glass of natural wine and an Apple Peach Elf Bar vape. I love writing about it so much that they’ve started calling me the ‘vaping correspondent’ in the office.

Sabah Choudhry 2019 2019

Digital Writer, BBC Good Food Magazine and Olive Magazine

by Niamh Kelly

What is the single worst piece of advice you were given in journalism?

People used to say at City, ‘don’t pigeonhole yourself’ –but that’s how you get jobs. While it’s important to keep an open mind, if you hone in on your own niche, you become an expert instead of a jack-ofall-trades. I knew as soon as I started at City that I wanted to do food journalism, and that made my CV really strong.

What is the best on-the-job perk that you’ve received as a journalist?

I went on a press trip to Trentino in Italy last year with the head chef of Pasta Evangelists. We went to a pasta factory and had so many lovely meals.

Michelle Fredman

International

Business Owner, Casa del Sonder

by Francesca Ionescu

Why didn’t you pursue journalism?

When I completed my masters, I had just undergone an intensive stint in hospital having a stem cell transplant that helped cure me of lymphoma which I was fighting throughout my degree at City. When COVID shut down the world, I soon found myself isolated and alone in my flat for most of the year. The work I was doing, while mentally stimulating, was not inspiring me on a soul level. I felt this was my main priority after almost dying.

When it comes to your personal writing, where do you get your inspiration from?

I like to delve into the psychology of my experiences, what I have learned from the things I have been through and endured, as well as what I am still trying to learn and integrate. I like to explore the ordinary, everyday things that make up the bigger picture, from consumerism, to swimming, to falling in love, to opening a coffee shop. Mostly I like to find the divine in the ordinary.

Max Copeman

Magazine

Sub-Editor, Radio Times

by Niamh Kelly

What is a bad habit you’ve picked up through working as a journalist?

I’m probably too reliant on email. There’s a tendency now to avoid phone conversations. Not just for interviews, but also for forming relationships with PRs. Jason [City lecturer] would encourage us to interview people over the phone, I always ignored his advice but he was right!

What is your guilty pleasure to help you unwind after work?

I have a tendency to watch a lot of incredibly bad action movies. Really mindless, dumb, and fun Scott Adkins films if I really want to switch off, lose a few brain cells, but have a great time.

Magazine Reporter, The Big Issue

by Faye Curran

What is the single worst piece of advice you were given in journalism?

I think sometimes people think you’ve got to play hardball and be tough to be a good journalist, but that wouldn’t work for the type of journalism I do. I’m often speaking to people who are in very vulnerable situations. Being sensitive, compassionate, and open-minded has got me a long way.

If you were interviewing people for a job at your company, what would be the most important skills you were looking for?

A sense that they care about the people they are writing about and that they want to use their journalism to help people and make the world a better place.

What fictional journalist are you most like or would like to be?

I’d like to say Bridget Jones (I am a bit of a klutz) but sadly I don’t get to skydive on the job.

Ed Cunningham

2021 Magazine

News Editor, Time Out London and UK

by Faye Curran

What is the best piece of advice you’ve received as a journalist?

Prioritise the simplest, clearest, quickest way of saying something. That doesn’t necessarily mean that something can be without colour, but your colour should never get in the way of what you’re trying to say. The crucial part is that fine line between colour and conciseness.

What bad habit have you picked up on the job?

You can often get repetitive in how you present a story. You can get quite comfortable in your structure, the jokes you make, the introduction you write.

What is your guilty pleasure to help unwind after work?

I watch a YouTube miniseries called ‘On cinema at the cinema’. It’s a deadpan black comedy review show. It is 15 minutes of these two guys who are extremely funny but don’t mean to be. It gets a chuckle out of me every time.

Jack Taylor 2021

Investigative News Editor, Sky News

by Millie Jackson

What is a bad habit you’ve picked up as a journalist?

Gossiping. Every journalist is a massive gossip.

What is the single worst piece of advice you were given in journalism?

Play it safe. When I finished City, I had an internship offer at Bloomberg, which was very well paid for three months of work, but I didn’t want to be a financial journalist. A lot of people gave me advice: play it safe, it’s hard to get jobs and work sometimes. I didn’t listen to that and rejected it. The day after I got offered one freelance shift a week at Sky News, which then has snowballed into becoming a News Editor.

What is your guilty pleasure to unwind after work?

Walking into the pub with three or four of my best mates and just chatting the night away.

2022

Louis Regan International News Reporter, The

Sun

by Aniqa Lasker

Who is your favourite up-andcoming journalist and why?

Kaamil Ahmed who writes for the Guardian about international development and human rights. He inspired me to start pitching about the Rohingya crisis, which is shamefully underreported.

Who is the most famous person you’ve interviewed?

Me and a friend emailed the assistant to president of Kosovo Vjosa Osmani, because she’d just made comments about her suspicion that Putin was using the Wagner group to infiltrate Serbia in order to try and attack Kosovo. Within 10 minutes they responded. The Sun paid for our flights and we interviewed the president in a grand suite. In a way it was like, “What the hell are we doing here?” We knew very little about the topic and we were interviewing the president. But at the same time, I have to say it was a good experience.

Broadcast

Assistant News Editor, Channel 4 News

by Lotte Brundle

What was your first job after graduation?

I tried really hard to get a job as a researcher in a documentary production company but, despite my efforts, I didn’t manage to. So, I pivoted towards news. I started to target all of the major news organisations and the first people that got back to me were Sky, so I went and I trained with them on the foreign desk.

What is it like working as a freelancer?

I’ve been assistant news editor at Channel 4 News for almost a year now. Because I am freelance, it does involve some quieter periods, which is very hard. Being a freelancer is challenging because you’re essentially on a zero hours contract and, at Channel 4, we’ve made films before about people who work on zero hours contracts and how hard it is to have a life around them. And yet, the industry is so reliant on them. I like to think that you can make this work for you, but it can be really difficult.

Jo Heywood 2022

Orin Carlin

Magazine

Fashion and Beauty writer, HELLO!

by Maria Papakleanthous

2022

What skill do you wish you had learned earlier in your career?

I’m ashamed to admit that I’m a bit of a reluctant broadcaster. Although it is not essential for all journalism jobs, for the fashion and beauty industries it is certainly where things are headed. If you’re talking about styling or the effect of a particular product, audiences want to see it on you, which means getting comfortable with PTC [piece-to-camera] videos and not gagging at the sound of your own voice will pay dividends!

What is the best on-the-job perk you’ve received as a journalist?

Probably a personalised Chanel lab coat. It’s bonkers and completely extra, but it was a gift from my first ever press trip to Pantin, France to Chanel’s Research and Innovation Centre for an exclusive tour of the skincare laboratories. It definitely has a special place in my heart.

What is the worst piece of advice you were given in journalism?

I was once told not to bother listening back to an interview in its entirety. I think this is madness – you could miss out on a great quote or a key piece of colour.

Magazine

News Editor, Livingetc

by Ottilie Blackhall

Lilith Hudson 2022

What is a bad habit you’ve picked up as a journalist?

Tapping my fingers on my laptop, ASMR-style, while I’m thinking. I’m sure it annoys people in the office, but otherwise the silence is deafening. If my fingers aren’t typing they’re not sure what to do.

What is your guilty pleasure to unwind after work?

I’ll probably be crocheting, reading, or cooking. Lately, I’ve been making friendship bracelets for Taylor Swift’s tour, which is incredibly sad, I know.

Gemma Farrell

Interactive

2022

Deputy Head of Social Media, The Telegraph

by Urmi Pandit

What type of story do you think is overdone?

The first thing when something big happens is commissioning reactionary pieces, and no matter what the topic is, you try and find someone with a ‘hot take’. I think bandwagon-jumping is something that’s done to get clicks and sometimes we can be too quick to capitalise on absolutely everything.

What’s a guilty pleasure to help you unwind after work?

I think listening to an audiobook while I’m cooking is one of the most enjoyable activities. I have something I can concentrate on while creating something that has totally nothing to do with my job, and to no purpose other than satisfying a want for something really tasty.

Newspaper

Digital Reporter, Chemist+Druggist

by Luke Bradley

What fictional journalist are you most like, or would you most like to be?

In my head, I think I’m like Mike Rezendes [Mark Ruffalo] from Spotlight. Very serious, very investigative. In real life, I think I’m more like Rebecca Bloomwood from Confessions of a Shopaholic, working for a gardening magazine.

What’s something about working at a B2B that you think people wouldn’t expect?

I think they’re great learning grounds. Because they’re well-financed, generally you’re owned by a larger business. You have more disposable income than other news organisations do. It means your teams are very small but you get a lot of scope.

by Francesca Ionescu

What is the best on-the-job perk you’ve ever received as a journalist?

Quite often it’s when I see a positive impact from journalism. I was writing an article about a new community garden on a council estate in Bristol and the residents came back to me about a TV team painting the estate in a really negative light. I wrote about that and it ended up getting maybe over £1000 compensation for the community.

What fictional journalist are you most like or would like to be?

I think I would be Tintin. I grew up reading The Adventures of Tintin, so much so that when I was younger, I named my toy Snowy after his dog. Perhaps I was inspired by him when I was younger and maybe I have Tintin to thank for where I am today.

Maya Saad

International Video Producer, AFPTV London

by Sophie Holloway

What is a bad habit you’ve picked up as a journalist?

I work in an agency, and it’s made me really obsessed with the news. I can’t start my day without looking at the news, I can’t go a day without checking even when I’m on holiday. The bad habit is not being able to disconnect. It took me a while to be able to disconnect, especially when the war in Gaza started.

What kind of story has been overdone?

When King Charles announced he had cancer, everyone went crazy. There’s a craze for the royals – any little thing that happens, people go and stand outside their house. The UK media is obsessed with anything related to them, and I think there’s more important stuff to waste your energy on!

“I was partying with Maya Jama, Stormzy and FKA Twigs”

Eoghan O’Donnell

Magazine Production coordinator, Vogue Club

by Maria Sarabi

What is the best on-the-job perk you’ve ever received as a journalist?

Our editor merged our staff party with Vogue’s Forces for Change party. I was partying with the likes of Maya Jama, Stormzy, FKA Twigs, the cast of The Crown and Heartstopper on top of the English ladies’ football team. Attending fashion shows is also a good perk, as are press dinners!

What fictional journalist are you most like or would like to be?

Mikael Blomkvist in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – imagine being that competent!

What is your guilty pleasure to help you unwind after work?

Probably like most, a trip to the pub. Or else an endless supply of Calabria Pizza from Pizza Union.

Across

1. What Dolly Alderton knows about love (10)

6. Published by Hearst in the UK, this magazine is also the name of a blonde lawyer (4)

9. The person on the cover of XCity last year (5,5)

11. Last name of the Bostonian journalist played by Mark Ruffalo in Spotlight (8)

13. Natasha Kaplinsky’s best dance on Strictly Come Dancing, hailing from Brazil (5)

14. (and 17 Down) The part of the day when radio broadcasters reach the most people (5,4)

18. Facial feature Ian Hislop keeps private (3)

19. Which LGBTQ+ magazine did Prince William appear on the cover of in 2016? (8)

20. What the ‘Guardian-reading Wokerati’ eat (4)

Down

2. The British version used to be edited by Edward Enninful (5)

3. The only paper Bond ever read (3,5)

4. Pitchfork was incorporated into this magazine (2)

5. Is it a magazine or a carafe? (8)

7. Radio 1 film critic, graduated from City in 2009 (3,5)

8. Tech magazine that films autocomplete interviews, in which celebrities answer questions about themselves from Google (5)

10. The head of the journalism department at City (3,5)

12. Location of MediaCityUK (7)

15. The Bookseller’s Diagram Prize is awarded to books with the oddest what? (5)

16. Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta Jones sued this magazine for publishing photos of their wedding (5)

17. See 14 Across (5,4)

Desert Island Discs

Four journalist castaways share their track, book, and luxury item with XCity

George Parker Political Editor, Financial Times

Track: Rock Lobster by B-52s.

It reminds me of my student disco years and always makes me smile. The unusual combination of exotic sea creatures and surf punk is ideal for a desert island.

Book: The Power Broker by Robert Caro.

A monumental biography of Robert Moses, the architect of modern New York, and a piece I wish I’d written. It’s also about my other lifelong passion: urban geography.

Luxury item: My old Mark III MG Midget. Not very environmentally friendly, but I bought this cute little wreck of a car when I got my first job in journalism.

Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff Managing Editor, SkinDeep

Track: Swimming Pool

It’s a song my parents made - they were musicians. It would be a nice reminder of their voices instead of listening to Beyoncé on loop!

Book: Beloved Toni Morrison.

It has endless layers, so I wouldn’t get tired of reading it for a while.

Luxury item: Chocolate bars.

With their own freezer bag so they wouldn’t melt.

By Josh Osman

Maryam Moshiri Chief Presenter, BBC News

Track: I Giorni, Ludovico Einaudi.

The guy is a musical genius. When I was pregnant with my first child, I kept listening to Einaudi in the hope she would grow up musical – it worked!

Book: An Instance of the Fingerpost, Iain Pears.

I love getting lost in crime fiction. I’d love to write a crime novel set in a newsroom … someone murders the presenter or something!

Luxury item: A radio.

Growing up in 1950s Iran, my father learnt English by listening to BBC World Service.

Nick Levine Freelance LGBTQ+ culture writer

by Donna

Back in 1978, it sounded like the future and it still does – born of disco, rooted in Black and queer nightlife.

Book: Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin. It introduced me to this wild queer world in 70s San Francisco.

Luxury item: An eye mask. One of the ones they give you on a plane.

Illustrated by Maria Papakleanthous