Ambassadors

Roula Khalaf

Editor, The Financial Times

Roula Khalaf is the first woman to edit the Financial Times – join us online interview with WIJ chair Eleanor Mills. Their discussion will be followed by an audience Q&A. Roula was previously FT deputy editor from 2016 to 2020, overseeing a range of newsroom initiatives and award winning editorial projects and leading a global network of over 100 foreign correspondents.

Before taking up the deputy editor role, Khalaf was the FT’s foreign editor and oversaw the FT’s operations in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Before that, as Middle East editor, she launched a Middle East edition and led coverage of the Arab Spring. Khalaf was named foreign commentator of the year at the Editorial Intelligence Comment Awards in 2016 and her series on Qatar won the Foreign Press Association’s Feature story of the year in 2013. She joined the FT in 1995 as North Africa correspondent and before that was a staff writer for Forbes magazine in New York.

Sian Williams

Broadcast journalist & counselling psychologist

Dr Sian Williams has been a broadcast journalist for nearly forty years, working as a reporter, producer and presenter across the BBC and ITN, including over a decade anchoring ‘BBC Breakfast’ as well as presenting all the main BBC News bulletins. She is now as the host of ‘Life Changing’ on BBC Radio 4. Sian is also a Counselling Psychologist, practising in the NHS with the emergency services, and privately with journalists and media production companies, to help them identify, treat and recover from vicarious trauma and secondary traumatic stress. Sian has published academic research into journalism and post-traumatic growth, as well as a book called ‘Rise. Surviving and Thriving after Trauma’.

Justin Webb

Presenter, Today programme Radio4

Justin Webb has worked for the BBC since 1984. He is a former BBC North America Editor and the main co-presenter of BBC One‘s Breakfast News programme. Since August 2009, he has co-presented the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, and also regularly writes for the Radio Times.

Alison Phillips

Former editor, The Mirror. MHP Group Consultant

Editor of the Daily Mirror and Chair of Women in Journalism. She is a regular media commentator, often appearing on programmes such as the BBC‘s Politics Live and ITV‘s This Morning. 

Rianna Croxford

Correspondent UK Newsgathering, BBC News

Rianna Croxford is an award-winning correspondent at BBC News. She currently specialises in investigations and reports on domestic and international TV, radio, and digital platforms. Previously, she worked as the BBC’s Community Affairs correspondent, and has also reported for BBC Panorama. Rianna won “New Journalist of the Year” at the British Journalism Awards 2020, and was awarded Gold in the News category at the MHP “30 to Watch” awards for her coverage of the coronavirus pandemic. Prior to this, she worked at the Financial Times while training to become a journalist with the support of the Journalism Diversity Fund after graduating from Cambridge University in 2017.

Anna Botting

SKY NEWS Presenter

Anna Botting has been in broadcasting for 30 years. Starting at the BBC, for the last 25 years she’s been a presenter at Sky News, currently hosting Sky News at Ten and the evening’s popular Press Preview.

Her journalism has taken her around the world: most recently to Ukraine, but Anna also covered the collapse of Islamic State from Mosul, in Northern Iraq; the fall of Gaddafi in Libya; the Japanese tsunami and Fukushima nuclear disaster; the disappearance of Madeleine McCann; and recently for a TV first in ‘Deep Ocean Live’ from the Aldabra Atoll in the Indian Ocean, the first live programme broadcast from a submersible, hundreds of feet down.

Anna never intended to be a presenter, But her first ‘try-out’ in the studio saw an IRA bomb go off in London, a train derailment in Derbyshire and a hijacked plane come into land at Stansted Airport, all in the first 20 minutes. There was no going back.

Anna has sailed the Fastnet race, climbed the highest mountain in the Andes, in Africa and in the Alps. And now enjoys hill walking with her children in the Lakes, as well as music, art, food and growing her own veg.

Robert Peston

Political editor, ITV

Robert Peston is presenter and founder of the education charity Speakers for Schools.

He is the Political Editor of ITV News and host of the weekly political discussion show Peston (previously Peston on Sunday). From February 2006 until March 2014, he was the Business Editor for BBC News and Economics Editor from March 2014 to November 2015. He became known to a wider public with his reporting of the late-2000s financial crisis, especially with his scoop on the Northern Rock crisis.

James Mitchinson

Editor, The Yorkshire Post

James Mitchinson is editor of the Yorkshire Post, “Yorkshire’s National Paper”, as well as Editorial Director of JPI Media Yorkshire where he manages 30 news brands and 100 journalists. James is a fearless champion of local journalism with an intuitive understanding of his readers. His previous roles include Editor of the Sheffield Star, Derbyshire Times and Grantham Local.

Caroline Wyatt

BBC Presenter

Caroline Wyatt is a presenter on BBC Radio 4’s PM programme. Wyatt is bi-lingual in German and was the BBC’s correspondent in Berlin, Moscow and Paris. As a war reporter in the nineties she was in Baghdad during the first Iraq war and covered the Kosovo conflict in the Balkans and later the invasion of Iraq following 9/11.

Being a foreign correspondent was an “all-consuming way of life” packed with extraordinary, often dangerous assignments. In her foreign reporting she tried to give a voice to both sides of the story – as well as pleasing the BBC desk back in London.

Her reporting covered the “crucibles of human experience”.  There was one moment Wyatt never forgot and which affected her more than she realised at the time. “We were in a very heavily armoured vehicle, driving down the road in Afghanistan and a little Afghan minibus full of parents and children on their way to a wedding, got impatient. We were moving very slowly, so they drove off the road to overtake us because they were in a hurry to get to the wedding. But they drove over an IED (improvised explosive device) and all four of them were killed, including all the tiny children.”

These experiences required physical energy and mental toughness . Wyatt was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2015.  In 2007, she became the BBC’s defence correspondent. “For me, the time had come to put family and friends higher up the agenda.” She later became the BBC’s religion correspondent.

Persistence, persistence and persistence, particularly for women, is the key to a successful career. Don’t take no for an answer – and if you can’t get the job of your dreams, go for something you can get that is similar.

David Livingstone

Sports Correspondent

David Livingstone started working in Scottish newspapers in 1972, training on the Outram Group’s local papers and on their Glasgow Herald and Evening Times titles. Continued as a news and crime reporter at the Scottish Daily Express and, in the 1980’s, at the Scottish Daily Record.

In 1987, joined Scottish Television as a production journalist and during that time also wrote about sport in Scotland for The Independent. Moved to England to be part of BSkyB’s football coverage in 1990 and worked as a trackside reporter on the first season of the Premier League two years later.

Switched to golf in 1993 to front Sky’s coverage of the US Tour and stayed in that role for 25 years, hosting countless major championships and 12 Ryder Cups. Retired at the Ryder Cup in Paris in 2018 but continued occasional writing about Golf.

“I am honoured to be an ambassador for the Journalists Charity because I’ve seen first-hand during my own career how many colleagues can find themselves in need of help and support. In my early days in newspapers I attended many memorable Press Fund lunches in Glasgow, featuring renowned speakers from politics and beyond, but in the years that followed I saw how the funds raised at those great occasions were used to make a huge difference in the lives of journalists who’d found themselves in challenging situations. It is a privilege to play a small part in the continuing work of the Journalists Charity.”

Dominic Ponsford

Editor-in-chief, Press Gazette

Dominic Ponsford  is Media editor at New Statesman Media Group and Editor in chief  @pressgazette.

Ponsford has been editor of Press Gazette since December 2006. He completed his NCTJ training at Lambeth College and began his career on the Battle Observer. He then worked as a senior reporter on the Evening Advertiser, Swindon, from 2001 before joining Press Gazette as a reporter in 2003. In 2006, he was highly commended in the writer of the year section of the PPA Awards.