journalism

"Working on Grenfell was… oh gosh, how do I even articulate that?” asks Ashley John-Baptiste, the 28-year-old reporter who led the coverage of the tower block fire and its devastating aftermath for BBC Two’s Victoria Derbyshire programme last summer. “It was hard to switch off,” he admits.

Originally dispatched to west London to find residents who would speak to Victoria Derbyshire live on the programme, he revisited the area multiple times, meeting survivors and building a rapport with the community.

Ashley had his first experience in front of the camera as an X Factor finalist with boy band The Risk shortly after graduating from Cambridge University.

After leaving the music show during the live finals, he was asked to front a documentary on life in the care system and his own experiences in care. It was this experience working on the BBC Three documentary that sparked his ambition to become a journalist.

Victoria Derbyshire took home two awards for Network Presenter and Interview of the Year for her powerful interview with football abuse victims.

Sky News won the News Channel of the Year award in a closely contested category, and was also presented with the Breaking News award for its remarkable coverage of the Manchester Terror Attack. CNN International was rewarded with Scoop of the Year for its courageous and enterprising storytelling about the Libya Slave Market.

Nawal's impressive journalism career started when she travelled back home to Yemen after completing a degree in Economics with Politics at the University of Nottingham. Back in Yemen, she began to make her own videos about the Arab Spring.

If television news had a golden age, it was surely the three decades from around 1980. Driven by videotape newsgathering, growth in satellite capacity and buoyant budgets, news bulletins often drew audiences of 15 million. They were the main way that most people got their news. This was Jeremy Thompson’s time, and mine, too.

Thompson came up the old-fashioned way: straight from school into local newspapers and radio before BBC TV, ITN and Sky News. His father, an insurance man, was horrified at his son’s career choice, warning that only jazz musicians were a worse actuarial risk.

“I was not a conventional presence,” says the documentary maker, who is now entering his 24th year in television with over 50 films under his belt.

His opportunity came in 1994, when he joined Michael Moore’s series TV Nation. “I went into the interview with Michael saying ‘I’ll do anything’ and I genuinely meant it: writing researching or doing anything.”

That is his first tip for tomorrow’s Therouxs: focus on making good TV.

It was attended by 180 students and staff from Solent, Bournemouth, Winchester and Portsmouth universities, as well as Highbury College, Portsmouth.

On hand to offer advice were 15 journalism professionals at varying stages of their careers, from the just qualified to experienced programme editors and producers.

The professionals emphasised the importance of multi-tasking in the online world and of producing effective material for mobile media.

Darshna Soni, Home Affairs Correspondent at Channel 4 News, shares her experiences of working in broadcast journalism, and offers advice to those who want to follow in her footsteps.

The evidence is already clear that millennials largely ignore the news coverage of the traditional UK TV networks, said the Radio 4 Today presenter.

Unless broadcasters raise their game, Robinson said, there was a risk that quality news organisations like the BBC, ITN and Sky News would lose future generations of listeners and viewers.

Robinson, a former BBC and ITN political editor, said that erosion of trust in public institutions and the rise of alternative sources of news meant that traditional broadcasters needed to try harder.

Britain suffered a late spring and early summer of terrorist and other man-made tragedies: the attacks at Westminster Bridge, Manchester Arena, London Bridge and Finsbury Park, and the Grenfell Tower fire. There were moments of very raw emotion amid the days of live TV coverage and even during the later, more reflective, reporting.

An eye-witness told the BBC of a victim who had their throat cut by one of the London Bridge attackers. We watched live on ITV as an elderly man gazed helplessly out of his window in a blazing tower block wondering if he would be burned alive.