Journalism

Journalist and Film Maker Mobeen Azhar speaks to Ruth Pitt about journalism at the RTS Student Masterclasses 2020.

Mobeen Azhar (Hometown, A Black and White Killing: The Case that Shook America, Webcam Boys, Muslims Like Us) shares his tips on how to break into the industry and talks about his 15 years of experience working in journalism, specialising in areas such as religion, extremism and counter extremism, drugs, addiction, sex work, Prince and Pakistan.

The importance of role models

 “I’m a Northerner (Myrie was brought up in Bolton) and didn’t come from a media family. I was a second generation immigrant. (My parents) didn’t want me to become a journalist. 

"They wanted me to be a lawyer or a dentist, a respectable middle-class job for their first-born child born in the United Kingdom.

"Around the age of nine I had a paper round, I read the products that I was lobbing over the garden fences and as a result of that got interested in the world.  

How she became a journalist

“I came to journalism quite late having done sociology at university. I had no idea what I wanted to do. I ended up working for Britain’s first black MP, Bernie Grant, for a number of years.

“Working for him I saw media from the other side and it wasn’t very good. Awful things were written about him, especially in the tabloids. I saw the effect that had on him and his constituents.