Our guest on the latest episode of the J-Lab podcast is Martina Lees, a senior writer for the Sunday Times. Next month sees the sixth anniversary of the Grenfell Tower disaster, when fire destroyed a 23-storey tower block in West London, killing 72 people. Martina has spent much of the last few years seeking answers to why the disaster really happe…

Our J-Lab guest this episode is Hannah Barnes, investigations producer for the BBC’s Newsnight programme.Hannah’s reports with science correspondent Deborah Cohen and her subsequent book about the rise and fall of the Gender Identity Development Service (Gids) for children at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in north London are the re…

Around 4,300 cases a week are heard in the family courts in England and Wales and the number of applications for children to be taken into council care has is around 13,000 each year. And yet remarkably little is known by most people about what goes on in family courts.In this latest episode, our guest is Louise Tickle, a multi-award winning freela…

New laws banning independent coverage of the invasion of Ukraine have forced many news outlets to leave Russia.Meduza claims to be Russia’s biggest independent media outlet even though its editors have been based, in exile, in neighbouring Latvia for most of the last 10 years.In recent years Meduza’s reporting has ranged from exposing the presence …

Our guest this time is Joshi Herrmann, who began the pandemic intending to write a book in the Czech Republic… but instead launched a venture in Manchester that shows there might after all be a viable future for good quality, local news reporting.In just 18 months, Joshi Herrmann has signed up 16,000 free subscribers (and more than 1,000 paid) to T…

In this episode, our guest is a journalist who has had three features shortlisted for this year’s British Journalism Awards – in one, she meets women who clear landmines in Lebanon, in another she talks to female footballers tackling France’s on-pitch hijab ban, while in the third she reports on the conditions endured by asylum seekers in the contr…

Eliot Higgins is founder of online investigative collective Bellingcat which, over the last 10 years, has used open source investigation techniques to prove that Syria’s regime used chemical weapons against its citizens, find evidence of Russian involvement in the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17, and unmask the “kill teams” who poisoned R…

If you've seen Oscar-winning documentary Icarus, you’ll no doubt have been astounded by the scale of the state-sponsored doping of Russian athletes. And in this episode of J-Lab – a podcast brought to you by the Civic Journalism Lab at Newcastle University – our guest is Nick Harris, one of the two Mail on Sunday investigative journalists who expos…

Annabel Deas, an investigative journalist who works for BBC Radio 5 Live and Radio 4, has just won the Orwell Prize for Hope High, a seven-part podcast documenting the year she spent with a community in Huddersfield where a number of children were being exploited by county lines drug dealers. Judges described Hope High as “British public service jo…

The appetite for showbiz and celebrity news has only increased during the last 12 months and our guest for this episode is Katie Hind, showbiz editor at the Mail on Sunday newspaper. In the last year alone, Katie has broken stories that forced Victoria Beckham to withdraw her application for government furlough money; that blew the whistle on James…

George Arbuthnott and Jonathan Calvert of the Sunday Times Insight team have published the first major book telling the inside story of Britain's battle with coronavirus and exposing failures at the top of government which may have cost thousands of lives.In this episode, George explains the reporting behind the story and discusses the methods used…

Our guest for this episode of the J-Lab podcast is Christina Lamb, award-winning chief foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times. Christina has spent more than 30 years covering wars and conflicts around the world. She has written nine books, including one with Malala Yousafzai, who was shot by the Taliban in northern Pakistan because of her campa…

Our guest for this episode is Zing Tsjeng, the executive editor of VICE UK. Most recently, Zing ruffled a few establishment feathers with her Empires of Dirt short-form video series about British colonialism. Zing is a podcaster too, host of United Zingdom on BBC Sounds. She launched the UK edition of women’s website Broadly, while her four-book se…

Reporting by journalists like the BBC's John Sudworth has revealed the scale and severity of the Chinese government's large network of detention camps, in which more than a million Uighurs and other minorities are thought to have been detained, mistreated and abused.And in the last couple of weeks, in addition to the heavy restrictions already plac…

Stephanie Kirchgaessner’s exclusive investigative report of January 2020 about a multi-billionaire, a royal prince, phone hacking and murder was jaw-dropping. And it won the Guardian’s investigations correspondent in Washington DC a British Journalism Award in recent months.In this latest episode of J-Lab – a podcast brought to you by the Civic Jou…

In a year that has seen very little live sport, the Telegraph’s chief football writer, Sam Wallace, unearthed a story that rocked the world of football: plans to reduce the size of the top division in England, scrap or modify some of the cup competitions and introduce B teams.In this episode, Sam gives some insight into how he got hold of these con…

Alexandra Heal is an investigative reporter whose work for the Bureau of Investigative Journalism on domestic abuse by police officers won her the Private Eye Paul Foot Award 2020. Alexandra’s reporting has also led to lawyers submitting a nationwide "super-complaint" with police regulators.In this episode, Alexandra explains how her research and r…

Vox pops are much maligned, seen by some as the lowest form of journalism. Just filler at the end of a news package on TV or radio bulletins. A tick box exercise to include different voices. But over the last 10 years, the Guardian’s John Harris and John Domokos have discovered that vox pops, done thoughtfully, given time and conducted with an open…

Nick Martin of Sky News was one of the first journalists to report the coronavirus crisis inside care homes. His reporting was eventually praised by health secretary Matt Hancock, who promised to increase access to testing and send more PPE to care homes.In this episode of the J-Lab podcast, Nick – who began his career on the Whitley Bay Guardan, N…

It was one of the biggest news stories of the year: an important insight into our country’s handling of the coronavirus and a slightly bizarre tale of politics and power in a pandemic.The flouting of lockdown rules had already cost a government scientist and Scotland's chief medical officer their jobs. So when the prime minister’s controversial chi…

In this episode, we focus on how journalists are meeting the challenges of reporting the coronavirus crisis. We talk to Nico Piro, a foreign correspondent for Italian TV station TG3, about how he is using mobile journalism skills — learned while reporting conflicts in Sierra Leone and Afghanistan, the ebola epidemic of 2015 and refugee crises in Gr…

Official Secrets is the name of a film released at the end of last year, which tells the true story of Katharine Gun, a GCHQ whistleblower who leaked information to the Observer newspaper about a dirty tricks campaign by US and UK intelligence agencies as they tried to justify invading Iraq. On this episode, we speak with Yvonne Ridley, the journal…

Unlike broadcasters, the UK press – in print or online – has no state regulator like Ofcom requiring it to be impartial. There are many implications to this – and the press must balance this freedom to probe, investigate and criticize with a responsibility to report accurately, ethically, fairly and sensitively.In some people's eyes, there is littl…

Duncan Campbell was the crime correspondent of the Guardian and chairman of the Crime Reporters’ Association. He has written four books on crime, including his latest, We’ll All Be Murdered in Our Beds, the Shocking History of Crime Reporting in Britain. Most recently, he acted as consultant on King of Thieves, the 2018 film starring Michael Caine …

HuffPost UK executive editor Jess Brammar, who’s a former deputy editor of Newsnight, gives us her thoughts on investigative reporting in a digital age. And HuffPost UK special correspondent Emma Youle — who is a previous winner of the Paul Foot award — describes how she and colleagues discovered that Kensington and Chelsea council made £129 millio…

In this episode, we hear from someone who has probably done more than anyone else in the last couple of years to highlight pay discrimination. As the BBC’s China editor, Carrie Gracie clashed with the broadcaster over gender-pay inequality and left her role after learning she was being paid much less than her male counterparts. But she continued to…

In this episode on the persona of journalists on social media, we'll hear the thoughts and experiences of Ash Sarkar, senior editor at Novara Media, contributor to the Guardian and Independent and regular commentator on politics and society on BBC Question Time, Newsnight and Have I Got News For You; Susie Boniface, journalist and author who uses t…

In this episode on the reporting of Brexit, we'll hear the thoughts and experiences of LEWIS GOODALL, political correspondent for Sky News; LISA O'CARROLL, Brexit correspondent for The Guardian; FERGUS HEWISON, political correspondent for BBC North East; and DR DARREN KELSEY, author of Media and Affective MythologiesHas the media done a better job …

The focus of this podcast episode is artificial intelligence and how it might shape the future of journalism. Taken from our Can Technology Reboot Journalism? event, we hear the thoughts and experiences of PETE DAYKIN, CEO of Wordnerds, whose career has taken him from writing for football fanzines to teaching computers to understand humans.(If you …

Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have been a huge disrupter for news organisations – and it’s where millions of people now get their fix of daily news.In this podcast episode - taken from our Can Technology Reboot Journalism? event – we hear the thoughts and experiences of KATIE CARROLL, managing editor of the US and UK Da…

As part of our Can Technology Reboot Journalism? event, we hear the thoughts and experiences of Paul Gallagher, who is digital innovations editor at Reach plc, formerly Trinity Mirror, which is the UK’s largest news publisher.(If you want to watch a version of this podcast and see Paul's slides, visit https://youtu.be/3oj4hX_EoQM)For much of the la…

In this episode we hear the thoughts and experiences of ADAM CANTWELL-CORN, one of the co-founders of The Bristol Cable, on the opportunities and challenges for community-based journalism. (If you want to watch a version of this podcast and see Adam's slides, visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9m41rcgaEw)The crisis in the news industry has in m…

Jo-Anne McArthur, award-winning Canadian photojournalist, campaigner and authorIn this podcast episode, Newcastle University's Civic Journalism Lab meets Jo-Anne McArthur, best known for her We Animals initiative, a photography project documenting human relationships with animals. Jo-Anne was herself the subject of a 2013 documentary, The Ghosts in…

In this episode, Guardian reporter Amelia Gentleman describes how she uncovered the so-called Windrush scandal – the wrongful detention and deportation of scores of British citizens whose families came to the UK from the Caribbean in the late 1940s and 50s to help rebuild post-war Britain.Amelia’s reporting led ultimately to the resignation of the …

In this episode you’ll hear highlights from a May 2018 panel discussion which we titled Comedy + Journalism = ??We’re all familiar with satirical magazines, websites and TV shows like Private Eye, The Daily Mash and Have I Got News For You that deal with national and global news, but what are the opportunities for mixing comedy with local journalis…

In this episode you’ll hear highlights from an April 2018 panel discussion which we titled Tuning In, or Turning Off: What Next For Local TV News?Where does local TV news fit in the digital age?How can local TV news be reinvented for the Millennial generation?What are the opportunities for collaboration and innovation?Our panellists:MICHAELA BYRNE,…

Podcasting is having a major impact on the way we “do” journalism, whether we work in radio or other types of media. In this episode we hear from Lina Prestwood, a former commissioning editor of documentaries at Channel 4 and producer of Fathers and Sons, winner of "Podcast of The Year 2017; Peter Jukes, investigative journalist and co-creator of p…

How do we bring new voices and new experiences into journalism? In this episode we talk to Joshi Hermann, editor-in-chief at The Tab, Jamie Clifton, editor of Vice UK, Helen Amess, who is outreach manager at BBC North and Michael Segalov, news editor at Huck, about how they each seek to satisfy audiences that other media organisations struggle to r…

What are the challenges and opportunities for local journalism in the north east...and elsewhere?In this episode we hear the views of Helen Dalby, editor of ChronicleLive, and regional head of digital for Trinity Mirror; Gavin Foster, managing editor of the Sunderland Echo, Shields Gazette and Hartlepool Mail; Megan Lucero, head of Google-funded Th…