1) What is your current position?
Social Affairs Editor at Sky News
2) What are your proudest achievements?
All the young people I have helped get a leg up, who make me proud of their creativity and achievements. I got a lot of people from people who gave me work experience or opportunities when I was young, so it’s important for me to continue the cycle of helping eachother.
3) What inspires you?
People who make personal sacrifices because they believe in a cause bigger than their own life.
4) What has been the biggest obstacle in your career?
People underestimating me – although I have learned to use this to my advantage!
5) Who has been the biggest influence on your career to date?
My mother – she raised us as women to believe that whilst there is no ‘having it all’ and that wanting to combine having a family with having a career comes at a cost, there is nothing I can’t do if I set my mind to it.
6) What is the best aspect about your current role?
As a print journalist a lot of interviews and research could be done by phone or email, whereas as a broadcast journalist you have to physically be there to get people and places on camera. It’s a logistical headache but the end result is that you experience things first hand, meet people in person in their own environment, and really live incredible moments. There is no substitute.
7) And the worst?
Realising that the end product of three months’ work is often reduced into one 3 or 8 minute piece of television. It might be a very powerful few minutes, but it can be hard to accept.
8) What are your long term goals?
To find ways of waking people up to things happening all around them that they don’t see, and make them care about injustice they have not cared about.
9) If you were Prime Minister, what one aspect would you change?
I would insist on an honest assessment of our history of and continuing legacy of inequality. I don’t think we have truly confronted our past as a nation and as a result our perspectives and policies on how to make positive change are skewed.
10) If you were marooned on a desert island, which historical figure would you like to spend your time with and why?
Lucy – the Australopithecus humanoid whose skeleton was found in the Afar Triangle in Ethiopia. I’m really fascinated by the history of early humankind, and how we made the transition from animals to having human consciousness. I read a lot about it and I’ve always wished I could go back and see what those early humans were like.
