J-Lab

Jim Waterson is former media editor at The Guardian and now the publisher of London Centric, which covers politics, business and life in the UK capital via a fast-growing Substack newsletter as well as TikTok videos. After years reporting on national media, Jim made a striking decision: to step away from one of the most influential journalism jobs in Britain and try to build something new — a read...

This episode centres on The Salt Path, a publishing phenomenon that has sold millions of copies worldwide, inspired a major film starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs, and has become, for many readers, a story of endurance, love and hope in the face of loss. But over the past year, that story has also become the subject of a major investigation by The Observer. Our guest is Chloe Hadjimatheou...

In this episode, we talk with award-winning investigative journalist Dani Garavelli, whose reporting for the London Review of Books on the suicides of Katie Allan and William Lindsay at Polmont Young Offenders Institution has been nominated for a British Journalism Award. Dani has spent years uncovering the systemic failures that contributed to these deaths — and has also reported some of Scotland...

Our guest on this episode is The i Paper’s chief football writer, Daniel Storey, who has just completed an extraordinary project: visiting and reporting from all 92 Premier and EFL (English Football League) clubs in a single season. Seventeen-thousand miles, 80 interviews and nearly 200,000 words later, he has produced a portrait of English football that’s as much about people and place as it is a...

As the public’s fascination with crime stories grows, so too does the responsibility of those who bring these stories to light. Whether through traditional journalism or increasingly popular true crime content, the way these narratives are crafted can shape perceptions, impact communities and, significantly, affect the lives of victims and their families. Our first guest on this episode is Bethany...

Our guest on this episode is Jessica Hill, senior investigations and features reporter for Schools Week and FE Week. Jessica was the first journalist to reveal to the general public how reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) was ‘a ticking time bomb’ making school buildings ‘liable to collapse’. She brought the scale of the danger to an even wider audience when she persuaded The Guardian to...

Our guest on this episode is Paul Morgan-Bentley, head of investigations at The Times newspaper, who has just scooped Investigation of the Year at the Press Awards for undercover reporting that exposed the force-fitting of British Gas meters in the homes of vulnerable people. In our conversation, Paul explains how he reported this story, why he thinks undercover reporting is so important and offer...

Our guest on the latest episode of the J-Lab podcast is Martina Lees, a senior writer for the Sunday Times. Next month sees the sixth anniversary of the Grenfell Tower disaster, when fire destroyed a 23-storey tower block in West London, killing 72 people. Martina has spent much of the last few years seeking answers to why the disaster really happened, and who was to blame. She recently won a Brit...

Our J-Lab guest this episode is Hannah Barnes, investigations producer for the BBC’s Newsnight programme. Hannah’s reports with science correspondent Deborah Cohen and her subsequent book about the rise and fall of the Gender Identity Development Service (Gids) for children at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in north London are the result of intensive reporting, carried out across s...

Around 4,300 cases a week are heard in the family courts in England and Wales and the number of applications for children to be taken into council care has is around 13,000 each year. And yet remarkably little is known by most people about what goes on in family courts. In this latest episode, our guest is Louise Tickle, a multi-award winning freelance journalist who has reported extensively on do...

New laws banning independent coverage of the invasion of Ukraine have forced many news outlets to leave Russia. Meduza claims to be Russia’s biggest independent media outlet even though its editors have been based, in exile, in neighbouring Latvia for most of the last 10 years. In recent years Meduza’s reporting has ranged from exposing the presence of Russian mercenaries in Venezuela to uncoverin...

Our guest this time is Joshi Herrmann, who began the pandemic intending to write a book in the Czech Republic… but instead launched a venture in Manchester that shows there might after all be a viable future for good quality, local news reporting. In just 18 months, Joshi Herrmann has signed up 16,000 free subscribers (and more than 1,000 paid) to The Mill, his weekly email newsletter. And thanks...

In this episode, our guest is a journalist who has had three features shortlisted for this year’s British Journalism Awards – in one, she meets women who clear landmines in Lebanon, in another she talks to female footballers tackling France’s on-pitch hijab ban, while in the third she reports on the conditions endured by asylum seekers in the controversial Napier Barracks. With this kind of portfo...

Eliot Higgins is founder of online investigative collective Bellingcat which, over the last 10 years, has used open source investigation techniques to prove that Syria’s regime used chemical weapons against its citizens, find evidence of Russian involvement in the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17, and unmask the “kill teams” who poisoned Russian defector Sergei Skripal and opposition lead...

If you've seen Oscar-winning documentary Icarus, you’ll no doubt have been astounded by the scale of the state-sponsored doping of Russian athletes. And in this episode of J-Lab – a podcast brought to you by the Civic Journalism Lab at Newcastle University – our guest is Nick Harris, one of the two Mail on Sunday investigative journalists who exposed Grigory Radchenkov, head of the Moscow lab who...

Annabel Deas, an investigative journalist who works for BBC Radio 5 Live and Radio 4, has just won the Orwell Prize for Hope High, a seven-part podcast documenting the year she spent with a community in Huddersfield where a number of children were being exploited by county lines drug dealers. Judges described Hope High as “British public service journalism, impartial and hard hitting, at its best....

The appetite for showbiz and celebrity news has only increased during the last 12 months and our guest for this episode is Katie Hind, showbiz editor at the Mail on Sunday newspaper. In the last year alone, Katie has broken stories that forced Victoria Beckham to withdraw her application for government furlough money; that blew the whistle on James Norton and other celebrities for posting photos o...

George Arbuthnott and Jonathan Calvert of the Sunday Times Insight team have published the first major book telling the inside story of Britain's battle with coronavirus and exposing failures at the top of government which may have cost thousands of lives. In this episode, George explains the reporting behind the story and discusses the methods used by Insight – perhaps the most successful and cer...

Our guest for this episode of the J-Lab podcast is Christina Lamb, award-winning chief foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times. Christina has spent more than 30 years covering wars and conflicts around the world. She has written nine books, including one with Malala Yousafzai, who was shot by the Taliban in northern Pakistan because of her campaign for girls to go to school. Most recently, Chri...

Our guest for this episode is Zing Tsjeng, the executive editor of VICE UK. Most recently, Zing ruffled a few establishment feathers with her Empires of Dirt short-form video series about British colonialism. Zing is a podcaster too, host of United Zingdom on BBC Sounds. She launched the UK edition of women’s website Broadly, while her four-book series, Forgotten Women, explored the untold stories...

Reporting by journalists like the BBC's John Sudworth has revealed the scale and severity of the Chinese government's large network of detention camps, in which more than a million Uighurs and other minorities are thought to have been detained, mistreated and abused. And in the last couple of weeks, in addition to the heavy restrictions already placed on foreign journalists, China's government has...

Stephanie Kirchgaessner’s exclusive investigative report of January 2020 about a multi-billionaire, a royal prince, phone hacking and murder was jaw-dropping. And it won the Guardian’s investigations correspondent in Washington DC a British Journalism Award in recent months. In this latest episode of J-Lab – a podcast brought to you by the Civic Journalism Lab at Newcastle University – Stephanie e...

In a year that has seen very little live sport, the Telegraph’s chief football writer, Sam Wallace, unearthed a story that rocked the world of football: plans to reduce the size of the top division in England, scrap or modify some of the cup competitions and introduce B teams. In this episode, Sam gives some insight into how he got hold of these controversial proposals, explains the skills needed...

Alexandra Heal is an investigative reporter whose work for the Bureau of Investigative Journalism on domestic abuse by police officers won her the Private Eye Paul Foot Award 2020. Alexandra’s reporting has also led to lawyers submitting a nationwide "super-complaint" with police regulators. In this episode, Alexandra explains how her research and reporting discovered close to 90 women with terrib...

Vox pops are much maligned, seen by some as the lowest form of journalism. Just filler at the end of a news package on TV or radio bulletins. A tick box exercise to include different voices. But over the last 10 years, the Guardian’s John Harris and John Domokos have discovered that vox pops, done thoughtfully, given time and conducted with an open mind can unearth significant perspectives that es...