I currently write Seven Things on LinkedIn.
Until early 2023 I was on the managing board of the World Economic Forum. My role encompassed public engagement and foundations. WEF is best known for its Annual Meeting in Davos, but I helped make it a global storytelling platform.
Before WEF, I led the Department of Journalism at City University London, where I was also a professor, and a member of the WEF’s first Global Agenda Council on Journalism.
My interest in journalism began at university, editing Cherwell. Broadcast news followed with an internship at CBS News in 1987. A year later they started paying me full-time. I spent four years in international news with CBS watching the world change in front of me: the Lebanese hostage crisis and the Iran-Iraq War; freedom for Nelson Mandela; the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall; the first Gulf War.
In 1992, I joined ITN’s News At Ten which took me from Belfast to Bosnia, and many more places besides. Three years later, I joined the launch team for Five News.
Five went on air in 1997 with the British general election that brought Tony Blair to power. We reported the death of Princess Diana, and every story from Kosovo to 9/11 and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In between journalism, I multi-skilled newsrooms, pioneered digital news production, and did an MBA at London Business School.
At Five, I was lucky enough to spend a few years sitting alongside one of the world’s finest broadcasters – Kirsty Young – and a bunch of very creative and talented people doing a job which – as all journalists know – “beats working for a living.”
Along the way, things I did at ITN picked up Royal Television Society awards. A report on aid to Rwanda won gold at the New York Festivals and overall Festival prize.
Before joining City University London, I had a brief, but enjoyable, spell at Sky News. The British general election of May 2005 – Tony Blair’s last – was also my farewell to TV news.
A teenage mother brought me into the world in the back bedroom of her in-laws’ terrace house in Great Yarmouth. It was the 60s. But not for us.
I have co-authored a couple of books, reviewed by the Financial Times, Slate etc. My views on the news business have appeared everywhere from the New York Times to Al Jazeera.