ABOUT

Describe your job in a sentence?

It really doesn’t feel like a job because every day is different and always exciting.

What has your career path been?

My career path has been pretty straightforward luckily! I did an English Lit and French degree, then a Masters in Broadcast Journalism at Sheffield Uni which was good because it meant I could live at home! Then I got onto the ‘Where it Begins’ scheme, which is a traineeship at Radio 1 / 1Xtra and the Asian Network at the BBC.

Straight after that I got onto the BBC’s Journalism trainee scheme as the Sport Trainee and worked at BBC Sport Online, Radio and TV News for 1 year.

After that, I got a job as an Assistant Producer at BBC Sport TV News for 1 year, and then I went freelance. Since then I’ve been reporting on sports news stories and worked on some really cool projects looking at racism in football. I really love my job and telling stories, especially ones about communities and people we don’t see enough of in the media. 

What is the best part of your job?

Chatting to really interesting people. 

Why do you do your job?

I actually kind of fell into my job - I was a sprinter for about 13 years and due to an illness I had in my childhood and some medication I was on, my training didn’t always go well and I was injured a lot.

When I was at uni (and injured) I started working for what was then a small website which mainly live-streamed track and field events, and within a few months I became co-editor and was interviewing athletes at competitions all over the UK, then Europe. Within 2 years I’d interviewed Usain Bolt, Mo Farah and Wayde van Niekerk! 

One piece of advice for someone starting in your role?

Be yourself - bring your own experiences and background to work and you’ll realise how unique you are in the industry, and how important your ability to offer unique perspectives can be when telling people’s stories.

Also don’t be intimidated by the industry and the people in it - focus on you! 

Check out Miriam’s Instagram below!

DAY IN THE LIFE

I don’t really have a normal day in the life, because as a freelancer every day is different and I work at different places. But my main chunks of work are sports news reporting - so I’ll talk about a big project I worked on for BBC Sport.

It was a racism in football project that was a documentary (on BBC News and BBC iPlayer), plus a long-form online piece, a TV news package that went on BBC Breakfast and the 1 o’clock news, and a week of interviews that went on Sportsday, which is the BBC News Channel’s daily sports programme. I also did a 30-minute programme for Radio 5 Live plus a live 2-way on Radio 5 Live.

Unfortunately due to the pandemic, we had to stop filming for a few months, but the project was basically a deeper look at racism in football and hearing people’s stories from all aspects of the game.

So I interviewed Emile Heskey, Anita Asante and Chris Houghton, plus the first Muslim woman to sit on the FA Council, a COO and a referee. They were really hard interviews to do, because they were so personal and everyone I spoke to had really heartbreaking stories of racism in the sport.

Once we had all the interviews, I put together the TV news package. The HARDEST bit was selecting which bits of the interviews to include. TV News packages are super hard because often they’re 2minutes max - luckily we had about 2 minutes 30, although I still went over… to put it into perspective, each interview was around an hour long, and we had 10! 

Eventually I wrote a script which linked to the transcripts of interviews I had, we edited it all together and then I recorded my voiceover. Sometimes you have something called a piece to camera where the reporter stands and talks at the camera, but I decided that would take away from the stories of our interviewees so I didn’t put one in this package.

The rest of the work was preparing for a live 2-way for radio, and writing ‘links’ that are basically little segments of talking around the interviews. These went in my 30 minute radio feature for Radio 5 Live, and then I recorded them with the help of a producer. I actually did it at home with my own little microphone! 

This was all in the space of a few days, and then my colleague worked on the documentary which went out on telly a few days later! Those days were pretty stressful and hectic, but definitely worth it when you see the finished product go out on TV and hear it on the radio!