Working in live broadcasting is an exhilarating experience – it is about the day’s news and much more. Planning, producing, presenting, coordinating and leading are part of the everyday routine for an editor. Meet Marysia Nowak who spent over three decades in broadcast news. She had a ringside view to some of history’s most interesting events – from the fall of the Berlin wall to election of Donald Trump – she’s been in the BBC newsroom – telling the story. She spoke to Hot Off the Press about her exciting career, challenges the news media faces today and what are some of her top tips for a doing a good media interview.
I know you wore many hats at the BBC – as editor, producer and trainer. But could you tell me what got you to pursue a broadcasting career in the first place?
My maternal grandmother always wanted to be a journalist. During the Second World War in the eastern part of the Netherlands, she used to listen to the BBC on an illegal radio, then go round the village to tell everyone the latest news from the front line. But at that time, women in rural areas did not work once they were married, and so her calling remained unofficial. I love that story, and I would like to see it as my inspiration for becoming a journalist. But that was not actually why I chose journalism.
(BBC radio announcing Hitler’s death in 1945)
When I was at school in the Netherlands, I enjoyed languages. So, I studied English and Russian at university to become a translator or interpreter. Then two things happened. I did a master’s degree in English at the University of Leicester which pushed me into the direction of video, and the sometimes-blurred line between fact and fiction in documentaries. The second thing was a visit to Bush House in London, then home of the BBC World Service. It was the most amazing, inspiring place back then, an iconic building with some state-of-the art multitrack recording studios, but also 1950s B-type desks, a buzzing newsroom, and a wonderfully international community of journalists, with a different language for every corridor. I loved it and decided that’s where I wanted to work.
In many ways, being a journalist or broadcaster is a bit like being an interpreter: you listen, you understand, and you vocalise the thing you’ve understood. I’ve always wanted to understand things, and I loved explaining them. I eventually got into the BBC by applying as a studio manager – a technician – which was fun because it allowed me to work with all the language sections, and across music recording, drama, and news. Once in the BBC, I moved to news production within two years. It’s the sort of place that is very hard to leave, which is why I was still there 34 years later.
Q: What skills do you think someone needs to be a broadcast journalist?
To be a journalist, you have to be curious, and you need an urge to explain what you find out. To be a broadcaster you need the same journalistic curiosity, but you also need to have a visual, or an aural sense of telling the story. Good research, communication, and story-telling skills are essential. You’ll need a good grounding in news, and excellent writing skills to translate a complicated story into short narratives. Today, you need to be well-versed in social media and video production too, as much of your news gathering and storytelling will go on different platforms. With so many deadlines in a large operation, you’ll do well if you thrive under pressure and if you love working in a team. Plus (and this is not essential, but it helps) – a sense of humour!
Q: Could you talk a bit about how the news is produced for television? So, who does what – reporter in the field, editor back at the HQ, producers who put it all together etc. What makes for a good TV news bulletin?
This is where teamwork comes in: to make a great programme, you need every single person, no matter what their role is, to do an excellent job. Every link in the chain matters. At the start of the day, you meet as a team to go through possible stories and set the agenda for each hour. All producers, reporters, presenters, editors add their ideas – the more views and diverse ideas, the better the spread of stories. We agree on the stories to be covered, angles to take, reports to be commissioned, interviewees to be chased, and on the division of labour. Then story producers get on the phone to find a guest or talk to a correspondent through a report they are commissioning; presenters read in, get their face done by the make-up artists, and chat to story producers about content and guests; the chief sub starts to check and rewrite scripts; reporters go through picture feeds, and start writing a script; the output producers build their running orders and liaise with their presenters; directors go back to the gallery to brief the rest of the gallery team what is happening in each hour; the editor is the point of contact for everyone, guiding the work being done by the team.
Usually, everyone is working towards multiple hours of broadcasting, so some producers and outputters disappear off into the gallery to produce a live bulletin or programme. The reporter may head out with a cameraman to record some material or a “piece to camera” for their report; correspondents in the field will be gathering material for their pieces and filing them to our newsgathering colleagues. Media managers will come up to the editor with great new pictures that have just come in. And if you listen carefully in the newsroom, where other teams, programmes, channels, and platforms are working, you can hear the murmuring of other teamwork in action – on different stories, but in the same way.
Q: Linear television is becoming less popular these days – why is that and what do you think will replace it?
When my children were younger, we would switch on the Ten O’clock news and watch it with them. But that’s a long time ago – these days, very few people watch programmes when they are scheduled. About 20 years ago, I worked for a while for what was then called “On Demand” – a pioneering place on the BBC website where you could watch back items that had gone out on the news. It turned out to be very popular. With people’s lives getting busier, the economy having become 24/7, and technology allowing people to watch or read the news on the train/bus/any time, there was a growing demand for news that could be accessed when it suited the viewer.
Fast forward to 2025, and everyone has Netflix, Amazon Video, Disney+, Hulu, or watches things on YouTube, iPlayer, ITVX. You switch on when you are ready, streaming services are always ready for you. It’s clear that the future of news also lies in streaming. How newsrooms across the world are going to deal with this will be interesting to watch. The BBC has certainly dived into streaming, cutting up its linear output into story-related chunks and putting them on iPlayer as separate news streams. It’s a little clunky, but I guess it succeeds in allowing the viewer to choose which stream or topic to watch breaking, rolling or developing news on.
But there are downsides to a future in which all news is streamed. In a world where our interests have already been defined and narrowed down by social media algorithms, streaming in news will allow the viewer to watch the stories they want, when they want them. But what will be lost is a built news bulletin with a wide variety of stories, which would take the viewer to places they didn’t know, and report on important issues that are new to them. Like with algorithm-driven social media, you are given what you appear to want, but you might miss a whole different world out there.
Q: What pressures does the news industry face today?
Journalists are no longer the only providers of news. Research from the Reuters Institute suggests that younger audiences are more likely to get their news from influencers than from the news media. In fact, anyone can now be the purveyor of news via social media, and User Generated Content has become a staple source for many of the broadcasters. In that kind of environment, where news proliferates without the usual checks, misinformation and its ugly cousin disinformation proliferates too. Exponentially so. Disinformation is now a chosen weapon of war for countries such as Russia. The riots in Southport last summer were triggered by disinformation. All these things have brought the term “fake news” centre stage. This makes it even more important for journalists to search for the truth by separating fact from fiction.
But that is not the only problem with “fake news”. When a term like that is available, those who do not like unfavourable media coverage will seize it. Donald Trump has successfully used it to dismiss any publisher whose coverage he doesn’t like. Successfully, because his base will believe him, not the “fake news media” as he calls it.
That is how authoritarian figures distort the truth and disseminate “alternative facts” instead. “The fake news media” is perhaps his most consistently used phrase – and he applies it to anyone who criticises him, from CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC to the Washington Post and the New York Times. Donald Trump’s media bashing has led to a dramatic drop in the audience’s trust in the media, with percentages of those trusting the news dropping most among Republican voters. This picture is repeated wherever populist leaders turn into authoritarian politicians. Think of Russia, Hungary, Turkey, and countless others. But in liberal democracies too, trust in news has fallen to all-time lows, as the omni-presence of fake news, plus the tactical use of the term, has made it hard for the audience to decide what to believe.
I think the biggest pressure is a slower, more deadly one. We are witnessing a growing audience news avoidance. Not only have audiences become less trusting of the news, they have become less interested. This has happened over decades, but in the last two there has in particular been an onslaught of bad news: the War Against Terror with its associated atrocities, the 2008 financial crisis, the war in Syria, Europe’s refugee problem, Brexit, the 2016 Trump presidency, the Ukraine War, the war in Gaza, the Cost of Living Crisis, and now the second Trump Presidency. The Reuters Institute have monitored the decline of interest in the news and are reporting a continuing downward line. What do we news journalists do to recapture the attention of an audience that is becoming less interested in news, and more interested in entertainment, celebrity gossip, sport, arts? An audience which is often actively avoiding the news?
All of this is happening at a time when the money flow has slowed down, there is less funding available and willingness to invest in news has decreased. We are seeing the slow demise of big newsroom-centred news organisations, fewer jobs, more automated roles, and much more journalism done by freelancers.
It’s not an easy field to send our students of Journalism into. I noticed at Oxford Brookes university where I lecture in Journalism how many students are hoping to go into sports journalism or fashion or lifestyle journalism. These are areas of expansion, that’s where audiences go when they’re fed up with the news. But what will happen to news reporting – and to holding power to account? And yet a reliable provision of news is now more important than ever. Looking back at the start of my career in journalism, I realise we were lucky. The coming generation of journalists is going to find negotiating a way through this minefield of problems a whole lot harder.
Q: You have now left the BBC and work as a trainer in Oxford – could you talk to us about what you do? Could you also share 2-3 top tips for academics who appear in the media please?
Alongside lecturing, I offer media training to academics who need to brush up their skills for a media interview. Throughout my BBC life, I’ve always advised inexperienced presenters, correspondents, new reporters, and first-time guests how to do well on air. So, it was easy to carry on with this advice in a different capacity. Oxford is full of brilliant scholars who publish books and research or are working on new medical inventions. Sometimes their knowledge doesn’t make it out to the public but stays in lecture rooms or on paper. I train them in how to prepare for a media interview, how to focus on the most important things to get across, how to appear on air, how to remain in control of the interview. The most important thing here is practice: only by doing interviews can you get better at them, so I interview them at least twice per session, focussing on the topic they want covered. The improvement in the second interview is always lovely to see. But it’s not just academics – I have trained people in the charity sector, a company CEO, a rap musician – anyone who needs some coaching on appearing on air. The variety is great, and I get to learn about a lot of different subjects!
My three top tips
Prepare: Make sure who you know who you are talking to, which medium/channel, what programme, and, crucially, for how long. In a 3-minute interview, you will only be able to make about three main points. Decide which ones, find a simple way to explain them, and think of great examples and stories to illustrate them.
Practice: Imagine telling your points to a friend over a pint or a cup of tea and practice aloud. This is easier if someone asks the questions – for example, a media trainer!
Perform: relax on air! Maintain eye-contact and build a rapport with the host. Keep your language simple and conversational and avoid jargon and acronyms.
Sorry, that’s more than three points – and there is so much more I could say! As you can see, it’s all in the preparation and practice – I love helping people with this.
Q: Anything else you’d like to add/ any additional remarks for younger people making a career in journalism/ PR?
Journalism is one of the best jobs in the world, and I consider myself extremely lucky to have been in the middle of it for most of my life. It’s given me a ringside seat in history. I was at the BBC when the Berlin Wall fell, Nelson Mandela walked out of Robben Island prison, Princess Diana died, Yitzak Rabin was assassinated, as planes flew into the World Trade Centre and Afghanistan was invaded, as the Paris attacks unfolded, the Nice truck bomber ploughed into pedestrians, followed hard on the heels by a coup in Turkey, the moment David Dimbleby announced the Brexit result, when Donald Trump was elected president for the first time, covering the evening when Queen Elisabeth died, and the day Russia invaded Ukraine. In some ways, it feels like being a contemporary historian, analysing and documenting the most important events happening each day.
If you like to ask questions, find out what’s going on, want to understand the world around you, and if you like to write/film/speak about it – journalism is for you. Almost the same goes for PR – if you like looking at a situation, a product, a problem, and reflect on how best to portray this, how to tell this story best – Comms and PR could be what you will shine at.
It’s a tough world out there – so you’ll need to knock on lots of doors, live on social media, be a self-starter, and just keep researching/writing/filming/talking…Good luck – go for it!