Beyond the Headlines

Imagine what it would feel like if you opened the homepage of a mainstream media outlet and what you saw truly represented the concerns and realities of people around you? Be it systemic racism, climate collapse, crime reporting or health injustice, attention is apportioned and funneled to suit vested interests. Those interests also inevitably shape the way stories are told. Outside of this, however, there are countless journalists and collectives working to draw vital connections.

Join our panel of fierce, insightful writers as they take a closer look at the media landscape, the stories it intentionally sidelines and how media narratives can be rooted in our own communities.

Our speakers:

Dr. Marianne Colbran is Visiting Fellow at the Mannheim Centre for Criminology, LSE. Previously I was a Research Associate at the Centre for Criminology, Oxford. I am the author of two books, Media Representations of Police and Crime, which was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2014 and Crime and Investigative Reporting in the UK, which will be published by Bristol University Press in June 2022. I am currently working on my third book, Policing and The Media, to be published by Routledge in 2024. Before becoming an academic, I was a television scriptwriter for thirteen years. I was a staff writer on the long-running British police show, The Bill, for seven years and on the British soap opera, Brookside, for two years. One of my Brookside episodes was nominated for a BAFTA in 2001.

Rachel Hamada works as a journalist and community organiser for the Bureau Local at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, where she has recently published several investigations on health inequalities, ranging from access to housing for disabled people to migrant healthcare. She also led on the Change the Story project, which looked at reimagining local news journalism. She is also a founder and Journalist Director of The Ferret, and is studying for a Masters in Playwriting at Edinburgh University. She contributed to Routledge’s recent Investigative Journalism Handbook, created the New Models of Journalism course with the NUJ and Centre for Investigative Journalism, and was a member of the Scottish Government Working Group on Public Interest Journalism.

Diyora Shadijanova is a multi-media journalist and writer, as well as the current climate editor at gal-dem magazine. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Vice, Novara Media and many more exciting publications.

Katie Goh is the First Person editor at gal-dem, a media publication committed to telling the stories of people of colour from marginalised genders, and the nonfiction editor at Extra Teeth, a Scottish literary magazine. Katie also writes about culture for publications like the Guardian, i-D, Huck, VICE and the Independent. Katie's first book of non-fiction, The End: Surviving the World Through Fictional Disasters was published by 404 Ink in 2021 and shortlisted for the inaugural Kavya Award in 2022.