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How tech has helped journalists tell stories

  • Written by Fiona Campbell, Controller of BBC Three

    BBC Three’s Fiona Campbell discusses how starting out in electronic engineering led to a career in the media and telling the stories of thousands through tech.

    Digital, tech, analytics, and engagement - these were all concepts that just weren’t relevant when you were trying to think of a career in the 1980s as a teenager in Belfast.

    Instead I found myself caught up in the push for girls to become engineers. I applied for Electronic Engineering degrees all over the UK – winding up at Jesus College Cambridge in the winter of 1988. I was surrounded by a lot of guys who had already spent a year in engineering firms and frankly I was lost immediately. There were maths lectures where equations spanned across four blackboards (yes chalk!) and by Christmas of first term I realised I had no idea why I was there or where it was taking me.

    Never one to waste time; I left the course.

    Fast forward over thirty years and I have spent time at Infinite Loop; the Apple HQ in California, met Evan Spiegel - the founder of Snapchat, and worked with Jio, the largest digital content platform in India (331 million customers and counting). It turned out the world of digital was exactly where I wanted to be, as a free flowing place to tell stories in a dynamic, unfettered way. It just took 30 years for this opportunity to become clearer.

    In 2017 I became the Digital Director of BBC News at a time when the BBC was investing in bespoke content for mobile and online audiences. I have always been passionate about telling hidden stories. I had embraced the early technologies and learned to shoot my own video and record my own sound for documentaries. Now I had this opportunity to tell stories to people all over the world across BBC platforms that reach 30 million in the UK and 80 million globally. I set up BBC Stories as a pioneer BBC brand focussed on the perspective and experience of women, the young and the less well off. These videos drove that new thing called Engagement! We found an audience who loved the unfiltered nature of storytelling and it worked.

    So my journalism started to meld into the world of tech as we explained our editorial approach to partners like Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram and Apple. The way we told stories changed in vertical video and the data analytics showed new insights like - at what point do people stop watching? How many women are watching? How many under-35s are watching? The data all helped change the type of stories we told and how we told them. None of this people-focussed insight was imaginable when I dropped out of engineering in 1988, but it is what excites me about how tech enables real people. That’s why I became passionate about digital content.

    I now am the Controller of BBC Three’s content stream in factual, entertainment and drama, focussed on under-35s. This is the channel that brought us Fleabag; People Just do Nothing and Ru Paul’s Drag Race UK. I can safely say all the learnings from the emergence of vertical video, data platform analytics, video production and global tech partnerships are coming together for me at BBC Three. Tech and digital enables your ideas that people may not even think possible, but in which you believe passionately – it is important to support the next generations to believe their ideas. Their concepts can be made a reality using the tech sector. In the 2020s Digital, Tech, Analytics and Engagement are core attractions to any job that the next generation will invest in. We just have to invite them in and wonder; what comes next?!

    This article first appeared in the Women in Tech special edition of the Sync NI magazine. You can download a FREE copy here.

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