As the face of ITV’s flagship news programme and the moderator of ITV’s political discussion programme The Agenda – an experience he sometimes compares to “refereeing a really bad tempered football game”, Bradby is in the driving seat of television news.
“We have a lot of really high quality people,” he begins. “I am effectively a conductor, saying ‘I’ve got this brilliant cellist, this brilliant violinist.’”
The first big story of the year was the Zika virus. It yielded moving pictures of troubled mothers and their babies, with malformed brains. It prompted near pandemonium, however, when speculation spread that it might disrupt the Olympic Games.
There was also the continuing Ebola virus outbreak which had, in 2014, seen British servicemen and women come to the aid of folk in faraway places. That included the building of hospitals, which were staffed by brave medics, many taking time out from the NHS.
Rohit Kachroo is the Security Editor for ITV News, who previously worked as the broadcaster's Africa Correspondant. He now oversees the coverage of worldwide counter-terrorism and national security issues. Rohit shared his top tips on climbing the ranks as a journalist at our 2016 Student Programme Masterclasses.
Having cut her teeth as a print news journalist, Margaret Emsley has spent the last 18 years at ITV Yorkshire working on the Calendar regional news programme in Leeds. Starting out as a bulletin writer, she worked her way up the ranks and today oversees the entire production of the daily news show.
Geoff Hill is the editor of ITV News. He is responsible for a range of its output such as its national news programmes, ITV News London and ITN-produced Tonight programmes.
The channel recently won an RTS Television Journalism Award for home news coverage.
Here he explains that there is no written formula when planning a news programme.
The event, which was held at Highbury College, Portsmouth, discussed changing practices in journalism and also provided informal access to 15 working journalists.
Among those attending were Managing Editor of ITV News Robin Elias, London Live reporter Reya El-Salahi and the Director of News Services at Olympic Broadcasting Services, Grant Coleman.
Did the broadcasters’ coverage of the last general election actually determine its outcome? This was one of the key questions asked during what session chair Martha Kearney called an “inquest” into how television handled the run-up to polling day on 7 May.
Former Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg certainly thought so. He argued that there was too much of a focus on the possibility of a Labour/SNP tie-up and this “had two very big consequences. One, it had a determining factor on the outcome.
Alastair Stewart may have hosted British television’s first political leaders’ debate in April 2010 but, more often than not, it was Jeremy Paxman who had the last word at a rumbustious RTS Legends lunch in May.
Steve Hewlett was the ringmaster at this highly entertaining event, which sought to bring an insider’s perspective to the recent general election.
For much of the time, the two TV anchor men agreed to disagree. Paxman was as cynical as Stewart was enthusiastic. Maybe he’d recently attended a positive-thinking course.
If you were to believe the headlines, you might think that local television – dismissed by some as "Jeremy Hunt’s pipe dream" – was dead in the water. The former Culture Secretary’s vision, scorned by most broadcasters, was bulldozed on to the statute book four years ago and the first channels are now 18 months old.
Hunt thought it wrong that Birmingham, Alabama, had eight local-TV stations while Birmingham, UK, had none, and secured some funding and the Channel 8 slot on Freeview (in England, at least) to help the new stations get established.
