 Welcome everyone, it's a pleasure to have you with us today for the relaunch of our conversations with Strategy Series where we have an opportunity to hear some of the insights from our wonderful collection of visiting fellows to hear about their careers, to hear about their insights on big strategic matters, but also to give you the opportunity to ask them questions about their career trajectory, advice on the insights that they've gained from years experience in a whole range of different areas from journalism to politics to military matters and we're very fortunate to have such a wonderful collection at King's War Studies departments and we wanted to give you as much access to them as possible. Just before we get started I just wanted to say that we have now on, we're hopefully going to have one of these events at least once a month and next month are being conversation with Suzanne Rain who is a former British civil servant with great expertise on questions to do with terrorism and counterterrorism. Then in January we'll be speaking with John Tesh from another civil servant who's been involved in civil contingencies units of the cabinet office but also Michael Clark who's a great expert on military matters so we're really delighted to have a wonderful series and really excited to be kicking off with a really exciting and I think a really engaging conversation between Rachel and Karen so I'll hand over to Rachel to do the introductions. Okay thanks very much Charlie thank you for the introduction so I'm Rachel Kerr and I'm a professor in the War Studies department and it's a huge pleasure to introduce Karen Allen to you today and to have this conversation with her because I love asking people questions and Karen is always hugely interesting to talk to so I'm really looking forward to our conversation. So Karen is a visiting fellow in the department and she's also an alumni of one of our MA programs in international relations and contemporary war. She's currently based in South Africa where she leads the program on emerging threats in Africa at the Institute for Strategic Studies which is focused on new technologies and strategic communications and before joining ISS Karen worked for many years for the BBC as a foreign correspondent with tours in eastern and southern Africa and in Afghanistan. She's very kindly agreed to talk to us in this series where we explore different careers of our visiting fellows which hopefully will also help you gain some insights into the experience of doing these sorts of jobs and how you get into it and what different career pathways look like. So Karen and I are going to have a conversation for about 20 minutes we've got about 40 minutes with Karen today and then we'll open it up to questions so do feel free to put your questions in as we're talking and then we'll come to them and try and tackle as many as we can at the end of our conversation at the beginning that we start with. So I wanted to just ask Karen about your career pathways or key points of decision and change during your career and really to start with I suppose the first question which is when did you know you worked for 15 years in the BBC? Was that a desire of yours from when you were a child? When did you know that you wanted to be a journalist and when did you and did you always want to work for the BBC as a foreign correspondent or how did that come about? You're making me seem younger than I am because I actually ended up working for more than 25 years for the BBC it's about 15 years of it was over overseas so thank you first of all for the opportunity this is great Rachel and it's interesting the shoes on the other foot because you get to ask the questions this time around so I feel like I'm in the hot seat. So yeah I was always quite interested in journalism and I came from a family of medics and so my trajectory was going to be that I was a medical person until I failed my chemistry O level and my head teacher kindly took my my parents aside and said I think she'd be really good at economics I think she'd be really good at current affairs those kinds of things and say in a way my my path was sealed at that point. So I was interested in journalism as I was looking at either working as a journalist or working for somewhere in the sort of aid or post war reconstruction type field didn't know exactly when and there was a bit of a seminal moment which I'll tell you about in just a second but I was exposed sort of in the late 80s and I'm definitely showing my age now to a lot of people who worked at the world service the world service radio and it was when the iron curtain was still up my family come from central Europe and we had a lot of Czech and Slovak friends that were broadcasting at this momentous time so I I was very interested in that when I was at university I studied economics at university I had a chance in 1987 to go to to go to India I was supposed to be going to Canada to go into a holiday camp which is what lots of people doing at that stage and I didn't get my application form in in time so I turn around and say to my mom I'm going to India instead and she didn't seem to bat an eyelid which I thought was rather strange but I'm telling you that because that was really the seminal moment having had an interest in sort of the the mid 80s with what was going on and hearing all these broadcasts and having people coming in and out of our home who were having these exciting lives reporting on what's happened in the world I went to India and I landed right in the middle of a cholera epidemic in 1987 and the journalists there that indeed corresponded was a guy called Mark Tully who became something of an institution and eight hours prior to arriving in Delhi and this is Delhi 1987 where there's no phone communications there certainly wasn't the level of traffic that we have now um and there certainly wasn't the level of development we we still you know I was out of my backpack um arrived in the middle of a cholera epidemic eight hours prior to that I had heard Mark Tully describe this cholera epidemic in incredible detail and it and it moved me that he was able to convey this to the world and I spent the next few weeks traveling around India seeing various aid projects and saw immense work that people was were doing and they were working for World Bank or other UN organizations but I was really then I realized we could have a real immediate impact if you like uh by communicating what was going on in one of these far-flung places so um so it was then that I realized halfway through my university career that that's what I definitely wanted to do and I then began to sort of shape my career choices to to end up in journalism great that's such a great story thank you um what so so how did you do that once you you know you're midway through university and you you sort of hit on um the desire to become a journalist so were the things were the opportunities that you could take while you were at university what experiences um did you sort of notch up before joining the bbc did you join straight out of university and or did you go somewhere else and what did you do at university I stopped and so I did a lot of a lot of students did I joined the student newspaper it was a very good news I was at Manchester University it's called the Mancunian a number of people who've led that newspaper have gone on to have quite um illustrious careers I worked with a guy called Ian King who is now Sky News business correspondent I think I think is a business editor um and I also edited the sort of the halls of residence newspapers that that's a good way to cut your teeth um and then when I left I actually applied for a researcher's job at the world service so I didn't go in the traditional journalist route um and it was a researcher's job that was based in a unit called Karris which was down in the bowels of the world service building which is now a building which is occupied by Kings College London so um Rachel and I we went back there a couple years ago I think and it was like going down memory lane um so I was a researcher there for about six months to a year in the Russian of affairs unit um which also had quite a lot of Eastern European um diminutive of very obvious reasons and I had a very very good boss who allowed me to write talks talks was sort of um a minute and a half pieces that then got translated in all to all the different languages and I thought this was great fun but for me it wasn't cutting edge enough it wasn't at the cold face and it was pretty clear that I didn't want to just sit there and write poppy I wanted to go and report on stories so I left and I went to um do a postgraduate diploma in broadcast journalism um at a place which was called Preston Poly it's now the University of Central Lancashire and it's it was one of about five um university programs were being offered um for broadcast journalists and um during that time it's a year's course I've studied what most journalists study at that point and this is really important it might sound boring but you study law you study t-line and you study government um and during that time um I would get up at four o'clock in the morning and I would go and work on a little radio station which was GMR Greater Manchester Radio and that was a way that you had to do it and I think in many ways that's still a path that I would advocate for a lot of people who want to go into journalism because you can have all the classroom experience that you possibly desire but actually there's nothing you know quite like the experience that you get on the ground the ink that you get on your fingers is how the print journalist would describe it um so yeah basically trying to get some experience in local radio and I then sort of moved through local radio into regional tv um I was doing this in mainly in the northwest of England and then from regional tv um I was went moved back to London I was approached by um someone who was the head of the bbc tv national news and I came to join what was called the family of correspondents in 1999 2000 um to do the ones it's telecom news and I sort of remained there um and had a career that basically spanned being a general news correspondent uh being a health correspondent then back to being a general news correspondent and then was posted overseas um so what what what would typically happen is that you would have some news stories that would require you to go into the field for a period of time maybe a few weeks maybe a few months um I was lucky enough to be embedded during the iraq war in 2002 so that required me being in iraq and to wait for about about months to six weeks um and other posting subsequently and it's at that point that I thought no I need to go and live overseas get posted overseas with the bbc and that's where my my career first in east africa southern africa and then afghanistan met yeah so um a question I think many of our students will have would would be what advice what advice would you offer a student who wanted to apply to bbc and if they're thinking about their career you're thinking about your trajectory of sort of going in to research and then coming out getting some training going getting training in other um in other sorts of broadcasting other sorts of journalism and then coming back and then once you were back in the bbc um I suppose how flexible do you need to be when you're applying um in thinking about options and and kind of career paths that you want to pursue because I'm struck by the sort of the there's the covering different areas of news and then going out to be a phone correspondent presumably you can't you just go in and say yes I want to cover east africa that's where I'm going you know how does that how does that negotiation work out yeah that's a good question I mean first of all the the the news environment's changed dramatically uh from the time when I first entered obviously I entered in the analog at the analog time we're now this digital revolution and you know a large part of the journalism outputs that you see um or here or read um there's a lot of processing that goes into that and so the skills base is very very different so there are people who are journalists who may be video journalists they may be the people who go out and film and they may also report and edit and put together pieces you need to you need to decide whether you are a technical person or you want to do kind of the news writing if you like and those news writing skills as I say they percolate all the way down but if you think of it like a pyramid and this is not hierarchical in terms of who's got a better job or who's clever but there is a very very small number of correspondence and foreign correspondence and a very large number of producers and other technical skills that are processing the material because what's happened during my experience at the BBC is that there was a big drive partly driven by funding to be able to get much more value out of the material that we got so if you imagine you know foreign correspondent goes out and gets a story in place X that then has to be salami sliced for a variety of different BBC outlets obviously the BBC is an international news organization and so it would then get translated and be used through the different language services some of it might be used for audio purposes some for video there'd be a digital content so as I say the job has changed beyond recognition so what I would say what I would say to students is be be be clear in your mind what's the kind of job do you think you want to do are you interested in being the person out there in the field gathering the information or you interest in being part of the process to get the stories out perhaps you want to be a program editor perhaps you want to edit the 10 o'clock news perhaps you want to edit the today program which doesn't necessarily require you to be out in the field all the time um for those who do want to do sort of more field work I mean one of the options that you can consider and I think it's there is definitely merit in it um you're not going to earn very much money this way but you will certainly demonstrate your experience is to become a stringer and a stringer is basically a freelance operator who may decide to go and set themselves up in in Lagos or in Kabul or a variety of different places and and then basically sell their stories to a variety of different news outlets sometimes there'll be a retainer arrangement sometimes you'll be completely freelance so you know that is definitely how you cut your teeth in getting experience quickly in the field um the alternative is to kind of work your way through the news system and I worked at Sky News for a short time before coming back to the BBC which is slightly less hierarchical but the same principle applies is that before an editor sends you out to do a story he or she wants to make sure that you're you're safe and you're safe in terms of legally safe you're not going to lie to someone um you're not going to um put yourself in intentionally in harm's way and you're not going to do anything that brings the channel into disrepute now sometimes those are unavoidable harms that that happen uh and consequences but that's the reason why quite a lot of journalists still opt to go to journalism school and to learn the tricks of the trade because certainly editors when they're selecting journalists um to come work in their newsrooms they will be looking for that and given the fact it still um is a very appealing career to follow you know in a way that is it's not a passport to a job but it's a passport for your application form to be considered among a pile of millions so that shows some level of commitment and going and spending some time working and maybe volunteering for a small news organization perhaps offering to write some stories for a number of publications building up a portfolio all those are really good um tangible um examples of your commitment to doing this job so I mean I would certainly do that um don't do a master's at King's College in international relations and contemporary war I'd strongly recommend it I couldn't afford it at the time again some of my colleagues have come in through the academic route fewer of them I have to say and that generally will be a choice slightly later on in your in your career um it's a very very practical job still and so editors will want to see examples of practical expertise if you can teach yourself to edit and you can teach yourself to shoot um shoot a camera not shoot a gun um then you know you you will be ahead of many many other people now if you told that to me sort of 20 30 years ago I did learn to edit but it was a very very different world then now many many young people coming out of university or college um they already have some of those editing skills because you know we've got garage bands we've we've got all these different programs so it's becoming much more natural um so in a way a younger generation of would be journalists have got huge advantages against us all crusties in terms of not being daunted by the technology that's interesting so there's a different maybe a different set of requirements that editors are looking for when you're applying for a job and it's it so is it do you think it's more important now to have the journalism qualification in addition to the skills the tools of the trade um than it was say 20 years ago well I mean you know in in in so 20 30 years ago there was a sort of snobbery in journalism that if you hadn't worked in newspapers and you hadn't done the courts and the local police cases you know you weren't a proper journalist you didn't have ink on your fingers now I think that I think really think that is gone um and I think increasingly particularly in the broadcast world uh people who can pick up a camera and can turn a minute 20 around it doesn't have to be you know wonderful for a surprise winning uh content but they can turn a reasonable step around that will be attractive to a you know that'll be attractive to a news editor so effectively you need to have both a lot of the colleges that are now training journalists will incorporate those um those technical skills into the training so you will learn to edit digitally I'll go back to um talk occasionally at uh university of central Hampshire and I'm always impressed at how technically adept you know the young students are but you still need to have you know the solid understanding of what makes a good story a solid understanding no no your history um you don't have to have an English degree I keep saying this to people you do not have to have an English degree you do not have to have a media studies degree there are plenty of journalists who are accountants history of art students I've worked with a couple of engineers and mathematicians you know it's the interest in in in journalism and as in my background is news journalism there's plenty of other different types of journalism that people might venture into okay brilliant thank you I'm gonna I'm gonna move over to the Q&A now because I can see question um question starting to come in so and I'm a bit conscious of time I don't want to monopolize um all of the time so I've got a question from Hassan um Fouaz who says with the decline of foreign news correspondence do you think that the quality or the veracity of news and information has diminished that sounds a great question um I think the available sources of information uh that get depended uh depended upon um has obviously increased there's a big pressure that comes from social media I have a real mixed relationship with social media it's a fantastic platform for on which to share information we've seen the democratization of news the democratization of information but I think one of the one of the challenges that has come with that is that news organizations have often felt that they've had to compete with speed they've had to compete with speed with with twitter with facebook because people a lot of people may want to consume their the news very very quickly and this idea of wrong but not for long which we're used to use against one of our competitor news organizations I can't possibly comment on but this idea that you know it may not be quite accurate but you know what everyone else is talking about it so you know so there must be a there is a there is a real challenge of truth at the moment and I think Hassan this you know you make a really really important point um one of the things one of the disciplines that um traditional journalists get taught is sourcing being able to understand the importance of not relying on a single source for a story double sourcing your story protecting your sources in certain instances well protecting your sources as a professional um non-negotiable but understanding why that is so important so you know me putting a story up um saying you know we are coming close to um understanding that a big event is about to happen which is a bit boring let's face it and someone's saying this big event is happened you know you can see as a news editor you want to go with the user-generated content the non-journalist who says this this event's happened it may not be true it may not be accurate it may not have been checked but it's fast and that's the kind of competition that we're facing I think in foreign news and I think Hassan you did talk about foreign news in particular I think it's a huge challenge it's it's extremely expensive to do foreign news well um I was lucky enough to to have been at a time when I was traveling a lot um and I ended up working in Afghanistan which was still very much on the news agenda increasingly people are having to do a lot of desktop journalism um but I think it's I think it's incredibly important to still keep boots on the ground still keep your journalists in the field precisely because you want to be able to if you see journalists uh role is to bear witness and to um to report uh as impartially as possible on the on the truth on what they see before them you have to have boots on the ground and I don't think there's any other way of doing it and I think you can have very very valuable contributions through social media and through user generated content which can contribute to a story but I don't think it's a replacement and and having said that you know there are certain instances when user generated content that comes onto social media from a place that's hard to access is really important and you'll see that many news organizations will will use it and say we can't verify the um the authenticity of some of this material but actually if there are various other reports from other news agencies that are coming out to say you know a bomb's gone off into Haier square for example you know you will start to see uh with certain riders and certain warnings and labeling that this material you know has come from unverified sources and increasingly that's being incorporated into mainstream news reports as well I just think you have to be really careful and I don't I don't see social media at all being a replacement. A lot of people say you say that Karen because you're protecting your turf I'm not protecting my turf but I'm also seeing how how dangerous myths and disinformation campaigns can be. So it's really interesting when you think about it actually how news organizations like the BBC or newspapers um sort of broadsheet newspapers will present social media reporting to in the visual presentation of it so that you can see that it's Twitter that it's a Twitter feed that they're looking at to make it very clear where is it getting informed and sort of make that distinction between what's coming from the correspondent and what might be coming from social media. And it's striking a balance between being um elitist and paternalistic which the BBC used to be accused of by some critics in selecting what material viewers listeners would receive and presenting everything as an alternative and letting viewers or listeners make a judgment for themselves as to what they think is common that's believable. And I think I think that's I think that's a very very fair compromise actually you know I don't think people want to be taught told you know what they should be thinking or but I also I also talk into my generation and slightly younger generation of news consumers people say we don't want to have to sift through loads of of news feeds and decide through a Twitter conversation you know what is the what is the the factual truth and by the way I'm one of these old school people who believe there is truth there are facts that you know they're not alternate facts they're all facts and they want someone to curate the news now I hate this word curate the news but actually what it effectively means is select select you know what is what are our stories that are of importance people that can then choose they can customize their news feeds so you know perhaps offer a suite of 10 stories which are the 10 critical stories that are affecting people's lives globally and then if you're particularly interested in science if you're particularly interested in sport then offer you know a range of other stories that speak to that and that's exactly what the BBC is doing and I think that's a model that makes really good sense. Yeah and it sort of to me emphasizes the importance of professionalism too in general because when you're talking about sources you know we think about you know this is this is useful for students as well thinking about how we deal with one of the skills that you develop at university is working out how to deal with sources and how to corroborate and how to judge the veracity of them they're bringing that in and there's sort of the I suppose the difference between the different kinds of sources of information perhaps curation perhaps creation but you know where it's coming from and who's making their professional judgments it's really interesting I've got a couple of questions if you don't mind I'm just gonna go to the next one and it's a great question from Patrick Lee what skills does a freelance journalist need do you have any tips for negotiating in incomes who's selling stories so it's the stringer question and he also says thank you for the great insight that's Patrick so Karen do you want to tackle that one? Yeah by Patrick I think one of the great skills of a stringer is first of all being able to identify a story to be able to find you know to be able to sense what's going to make a good story second skill be able to repackage it for a number of different outlets so a number of different clients know what angle you can take for your different your different clients perhaps if you're working in international news think about other agencies that might be interested in your story other foreign language outlets because so much gets translated and certainly you know start thinking about patience what are the pictures that go with your story can you offer pictorial content as well as text can you perhaps offer some audio as well as text so you have to be a little bit of a delboy a bit of a jack-of-all-trades and be able to get the most value out of your story the number one thing is being able to sense what a story is what a good story is and why is it going to get people's interest going but also having a good accountant who can make sure that they keep keep tasks on your on your stories look it's difficult it's really tough being a freelancer and it's got it's got a heck of a lot tough but it really has but I think having enormous amounts of energy and enthusiasm alongside the other things I've mentioned you know you can't go wrong if you really you know if you're committed to it you'll be able to do it great great advice thank you question from Marilyn Sim so a thoughtful and really interesting but quite difficult question to answer so I will pitch it at you and see see what you think thank you for the sharing cow and given your rich experience in journalism and reporting in countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya do you think your role as a journalist helped push towards the strategic objectives of foreign intervention to achieve peace within those countries perhaps by combating disinformation or shaping perceptions and from your experience on the ground do you think these interventions are in the interests of local citizens so yeah absolutely well um no it's a really good question um and I guess you can ask the ultimately what what a what a journalist doing there what a journalist doing there reporting in these various settings that you've described and for me you know that that phrase bare witness is still a number one the number one thing it's number one reason and you know don't forget you know in the UK we have a very advanced media history and legacy and we almost take it for granted that we have access to free access to information in many of these places and many of the countries that I've worked at um you know that that is not a given and therefore to have journalists that who are able to ask the questions that perhaps you know in other settings a loyal opposition might be able to ask um is really important um being able to have people to bear witness to things that are happening on the ground challenge narratives that are official narratives you know are incredibly important um I think in terms of changing the strategic trajectory I mean our job is not to determine the trajectory but certainly to report on the decision makers that effectively control that um and to certainly question inconsistencies and certainly question um and remind uh leaders about the consequences of some of their decisions so let me give you an example without being so abstract so in Afghanistan when I was working there the narrative that was coming out and this was 2013 2014 through 2015 is that all the airstrikes were being called in by Afghan soldiers um the afghan military were the ones that were taking the lead um when we all knew on the ground and that was a political decision because um there was pressure to try and withdraw coalition forces US coalition forces we knew on the ground that the afghan forces were taking huge huge losses they had very high attrition rates simply because the brave men and women that decided that they did want to join the afghan security forces were were dying in their droves or they were getting injured and it was a story that obviously the americans and the other coalition forces didn't really want to come out they wanted this success story to come out so our job was not to be you know not to have this sense of shadow voided but to actually be quite realistic about the expectations that were being placed on um a young fledgling afghan police service for example to be able to do the job at hand so you know we weren't shaping the trajectory but i think we were certainly questioning it and i think you know i don't think we i don't want to overstate the importance of of journalists in being able to shape things we do march around thinking we're the most important people in the world um and having now that's the bbc i realize i'm just a tiny tiny little and i'm very content to be that way but i do think you know i do think there is enormous power in communication as we're almost you know holding power to account we've seen that sort of just in the past year and with some of the things that have happened in in the united states with the sort of Black Lives Matter campaign um you know i think certainly we can hold feet to the fire i think that's the most we can expect to do yeah thank you i mean there's there's lots of questions there you know you can think about ethics you know ethics of responsibility and and how you draw the line and how you sort of chart that course between impartiality there's a question from Hassan again thank you for your previous answer you mentioned being in Iraq during the invasion could you describe your experience and if you were able to report freely which is similar so in 2002 there was a system that was trying out for the first time it's a system of embedding journalists with the military and at that point in Iraq this is 2002 march 2002 a number of us were sent out and embedded with various different units i was with the royal air force and i was based somewhere called Ali Al-Salim which is on the Kuwaiti Iraqi border the benefit of that i was one of four journalists the benefit of that is you had exceptional access exceptional access to military operations the downside of it was that it was you were seeing it through one particular lens so just to give you an example you know on the night of the first airstrikes happened i was standing on the on the tarmac on the runway where rf tornadoes were taking off and then going and dropping their smart bombs their precision guided missiles in Baghdad and my colleague Raggi Omar who was in Baghdad was reporting on what was actually happening on the ground and these missiles were far from being precision guided and so there was much debate and there were many phd's that were written about the value of embedding i think at the time it was done on the basis of access control and security one of the things i say to people who knock the whole embed system is that i flew out to afghanistan to iraq in 2002 with journalist from itn skynes from the bbc and my colleague terry loyde did not come back he was a unilateral reporter and he died very early on in the in the iraq war caught up in an ambush and that's the very real reality that we face when you're in these situations and you know i was bloody terrified to be honest at certain points um when when i was in in on the on the border when missiles were were coming in and everyone thought there were still chemical biological weapons were being used um and so i had a degree of protection by virtue of being with the military i mean you could question that because it was it was a target because it was a military airbase but you know the alternative to that was people going unilateral and the exposure that comes with that yeah thank you um i think we've got time for just sorry i said i'm a journalist so i have it i'm swearing on that um i think we've got time for one more question uh this question from lenard um i should put my glasses on lenard quick queries uh what's your opinion about the narrative control in particular at the fake news of the press i guess you know the question is about what what can news organizations like the bbc do about fake news you know how do you how do you navigate that difficulty when all of this all of this information and so-called facts are sort of flying out um from different news organizations some of which um looks at face value to be more liable than others how does the bbc do it no it's really and this is obviously not a bbc view because i don't i don't work there anymore i mean there's a department that was set up which was called a fact-checking department um to check facts which i always thought was quite strange because i thought we always had to check facts anyway as a journalist but it you know it was important it was made as a decision um to try and push back against the whole kind of fake news agenda to try and fact-check individual pieces of information as and when they they come through i mean the simple answer is that i think traditional broadcast organizations need to be better they need to be absolutely squeaky clean in their sourcing and their presentation of news possibly not get involved in the the speed argument you know get the get the story out as quick as possible and for people to realize that if you want accurate and um properly sourced news you may have to wait a few more minutes longer it doesn't have to be hours but a few more lot few longer than than a story that think it simply gets um plunked out there but i also think news organizations need to be um really aware how they can inadvertently amplify fake news stories i have to declare a bit of an interest in this but i'm just doing a study about this moment in south africa the iris says and you know if you think about how disinformation or fake news can get spread very very quickly on something like twitter because of the way algorithms are designed you know even if i don't engage in a story and but just click on it like it and pass it on you are giving it oxygen you are giving it the most extraordinary platform in a way that you may not in the real world so it's it's virtual traction is much much greater than its real world traction the problem is that some of those fake news stories have got real world consequences as we know you know whether it's uh yeah in this part of the world it's about race it's about xenophobia you know so i do think that news organizations need to be quite aware that you know they mainly have to report on what are the big stories that are being faker otherwise that are being talked about on social media i understand that if it's part of the narrative it's what people are talking about in the street you have an obligation to report it but there are ways of being able to do it where you don't inadvertently amplify that message and give oxygen to a fake news story and i think perhaps more i'm not going to use the word digital literacy because that sounds really patronizing but more awareness of of just the mechanics of how we can inadvertently sort of propagate a fake news story would be would be really helpful to have yeah thank you um i'm going to just paraphrase we've got a question from claire that's come in about um the kinds of you know what pathways would you take my internships and i'm going to truncate it a little bit because we are out of time now but just to ask you to close what would be your sort of single top tip if you were coming out of an MA program in war studies now so you were coming out of the MA in international relations and temporary war but hadn't done it in the middle of your career but rather at the beginning what would be your what would be the one thing that you would advise students to do if they wanted to get into a career in journalism and particularly to become a foreign correspondent or war correspondent well first voraciously i mean read and know what's going on voraciously because a news editor isn't going to take you seriously until you demonstrate that and i would say um use it i mean if you're coming from kings you have an advantage that you can leverage the reputation that goes with it to see if it is possible to go and spend some time whether it's a formal internship whether it's some work experience for the newspaper i mean i'm the guardian i think is still quite open to this to go and spend some time with them to offer to write some stories you might have to offer one or two stories for free you know what it's worth it it's worth it in the long term and i would say you know you need to be tenacious that is the number one thing you need to be tenacious and you need to be able to identify you know who the news editors are you don't want to be the pain in you know the pain in the neck person who rings them every single day and and tells them that they've got to hire you because you're the best thing since fly spread because i can tell you that they get those calls ten to the dozen you need to be able to offer some value to to to the papers or to the broadcast organization so do offer to go and spend a bit of time there offer to be able to help and learn and listen and if you do want to go down the string of route brave choose a place where obviously no one else is reporting from and do your research do your research and know your market great thank you thank you so much cat and thanks for taking the time to have this conversation today it's been absolutely fascinating and really useful and interesting so so thank you once again to our students i would say we do have a couple of times a year opportunities for students to go in and spend a day with bbc monitoring which is a great a great opportunity great thing to do so do look out for those opportunities and will there's an application process for it so apply for those if you're interested in pursuing this sort of career um as charlie said the next one of these i think is on the third of december is that right charlie um so do join us for that and then as the series develops into january yes 10th of december it'll be um sorry yes uh but thank you so much that was really fantastic and uh some really great questions and i know that everyone would have benefited hugely from this so thank you and a really great way to to kick off the program again for this year well thanks the opportunity and really to all the students that i know it's been a really difficult year and you're doing stuff online and you're not having the kind of social interaction but just don't don't you know don't lose your mojo just keep going with it because you're also studying at a really good place and they didn't pay me to say that by the way i love my time at kings which is why i'm still clinging on but um yeah just just just carry on with the studies and you know it's worth it in the end thank you kevin