Graduate Rich Preston at BBC World Service

The challenge of reporting world stories for international audiences

 

Rich Preston graduated from Stirling University in 2007.  He now works as a Senior Broadcast Journalist for BBC World Service News. Here, he tells about his love of his job, his career progression, and the constant challenge of reporting international stories to world audiences.

 

My very first job with the BBC was with the World Service.  It was in 2007, during the Kenyan election riots, and I distinctly remember the profound feeling of being in a newsroom in London and having people in Kenya want to talk to me about what was happening in their streets.

 

Over the next few years, I moved around within the BBC, including working in documentaries, producing arts programmes, magazine shows, and reporting technology stories.

 

In 2014, I returned to the World Service to work with an American correspondent from NPR covering western Europe for audiences in the US.  This was during an incredibly busy time, with a flurry of major stories in the region.  In just two years I covered the Scottish Independence Referendum, the UK 2015 general election, the Charlie Hebdo attacks, the November Paris attacks, the Brussels attacks, and the Brexit vote.

 

I recently went back to the World Service to work in a team that reports international stories for the BBC’s partner stations around the world predominantly in the US but also Africa, Australia, New Zealand and various parts of Asia.

 

The BBC has incredible resources, which makes covering world events an exciting job.  When a story breaks, we have people there.  We have more than 30 language services (and are about to go to more than 40…), so our regional expertise is phenomenal.  We have teams like BBC Monitoring – journalists keeping an eye on local media around the world, including Islamist extremist experts, North Korea experts, China experts, Russia experts…  All of these components add to what we do.

 

But it is still a tough challenge; reporting international news to audiences that may have little or no prior knowledge of the story you’re trying to tell them.

 

One of my daily jobs is to write and sometimes host something called ‘BBC Topline.’  This is a bulletin produced specifically for audiences in America to be broadcast during their breakfast news shows.  In it, we give audiences the top BBC’s international news that hour, and usually aim for about three stories, including illustration, analysis and on-the-ground reporting.  We have 90 seconds in total.

 

This requires sharp, snappy writing, good technical skills (for cutting audio to deadline), a good general knowledge of world affairs, and – above all – excellent editorial judgement.  It’s a huge privilege to work for such an internationally-respected brand like the BBC, but with that comes a massive responsibility.  If I go on-air, under the BBC’s name, and report something that is not true or not accurate, the consequences could be huge.

There are a few quirks of the job which you often don’t realise until you’re doing it.  You might be speaking the same language, but you can still find translation issues.  Trying to tell an American audience how many kilometres of something there is?  Forget it.  Try miles.  Likewise, you need dollars rather than pounds. MPs become lawmakers, lorry becomes truck, and so on…  These things make a difference.  We have 90 seconds to tell a story so that it makes sense.  If our audience has to pause halfway through to try and figure out what 10km is, they’re not going to hear the rest of what you say.  And that matters.

 

I love the feeling of having eyes and ears around the world.  In the same day, I can be talking to correspondents in Seoul, Sydney, Berlin, Nairobi, and New York.  The next day it can be a completely new mix.  It’s wonderful to have that global grasp, and to be able to pick out what you think is important and to share that.  Our audiences want to know what’s going on in their world, and they’ve put their trust in us to tell them.

 

My time at Stirling University played a crucial role in building my career – including in ways you might not imagine.  The skills and knowledge gained through the normal academic process was, of course, important.  But the environment in which I learned also mattered.  I was surrounded by a diverse mix of course mates, whose own passions and experiences broadened my horizons.  And the tutors, lecturers and visiting guests were encouraging, experienced, and – perhaps most importantly of all – patient.  Despite all the pressures of essays, exams and deadlines, there was always time to experiment, ask questions and (sometimes…) make mistakes.  The media landscape is vast and can be difficult to navigate.  It requires a hell of a lot of self-motivation – but behind that, I couldn’t have done it without my degree.