Speakers 2026

Ros Atkins is BBC News’ Analysis Editor. He also co-presents The Media Show on BBC Radio 4. 

John is an employed barrister and advises editors and journalists for ITN’s news services – ITV News, Channel 4 News and Channel Five News.   He has a particular interest in open justice. He led the broadcast industry lobbying the judiciary and government to allow cameras in court, resulting  in legal reform allowing filming in the Court of Appeal and sentencing in the Crown Court. He also helped establish the CPS Police Media Protocol (which allows images shown in court to be provided to the media) and authored the Reporters’ Charter which details the rights of reporters to report the courts. He is a past Chair of the Media Lawyers Association and has previously worked for Associated Newspapers and News UK.

Rebecca is the Chair of the Crime Reporters Association (CRA), a group of specialist journalists covering crime and policing across print, broadcast and new media. She first joined the CRA 15 years ago and was elected Chair in 2019, becoming the first woman to lead the organisation since its inception in 1945. The award-winning journalist joined the Daily Mail 20 years ago as a general news reporter and moved onto the crime desk in 2010. In 2020 she became Crime and Security Editor, the first woman in the paper’s history to hold that role.

Natalie is Editor in Chief for London and the East of England at Reach Plc, and is Editor of Nottinghamshire Live. She has been a journalist for 20 years, working across regional and national titles.

Ben Fishwick is editor of the Southern Daily Echo in Southampton and regional editor for Southampton and the Isle of Wight at Newsquest. He became editor in January 2022 after a career at The News, Portsmouth, moving from being a patch reporter, to court reporter and then chief reporter. An award-winning newsroom leader, he has an interest in the courts, policing and justice. He currently co-chairs the Newsquest Investigations Network.

Sam Greenhill is the Daily Mail’s chief reporter and has worked at the newspaper since 2003 when he joined from the Press Association where he was also chief reporter following a career on magazines, local newspapers and the BBC.

Steve Hendrix is the Post’s bureau chief in London, coming to the U.K. in 2025 after five years as Jerusalem bureau chief. At the Post since 2000, he has reported from the Middle East, Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas and most corners of the United States, covering conflict in Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon and Libya, profiling militants, presidential candidates, party princesses and parrot smugglers along the way. He was part of the Pulitzer-winning team that covered the 2024 Trump shooting and the Pulitzer-finalist team for the 2013 Navy Yard shootings.

Secunder Kermani is an award-winning journalist and a Foreign Affairs Correspondent for Channel 4 News.

He is one of the few foreign journalists to have reported inside rebel-held territory in Myanmar, where a brutal civil war is raging, and also recently interviewed former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan after his release from jail.

Since joining Channel 4 News last year, he has covered major stories in Brazil, Israel and the Palestinian Territories and Japan. Secunder was previously the BBC’s Pakistan and Afghanistan Correspondent where he played a leading role in covering the rise to power of the Taliban.

Anthony Loyd has been writing for the Times for over thirty years. He began his career reporting from the Bosnian war in 1993 and has since worked in multiple conflicts, including those in Ukraine, Chechnya, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Kosovo, Libya, Sierra Leone and the Central African Republic. His special reports have included eye-witness dispatches from the siege of Sarajevo, the genocide in Srebrenica, the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001, the defeat of Islamic State in Mosul, Muammar Gaddafi’s downfall in Libya, and the withdrawal of the US-led coalition from Afghanistan in 2021. Anthony exposed the use of Sarin gas by the Assad regime in Syria in 2013, and later discovered and interviewed Shamima Begum in 2019. His Times multimedia projects have included the short film ‘Another Man’s War’ from Ukraine, and the highly acclaimed podcast series ‘Last Man Standing’.  Among his many awards for The Times the reporter has won foreign correspondent of the year five times in the British Press Awards , and twice won the prestigious Prix Bayeux-Calvados for war correspondents.

Sharon Marshall spent a decade as a tabloid reporter and columnist. She’s penned over 75 scripts as part of the BAFTA-winning Emmerdale and EastEnders writing teams and wrote the bestselling memoir Tabloid Girl. Known as the nation’s Soap Queen – she has presented a weekly segment on ITV’s This Morning for over 23 years.

Chris Mason is the Political Editor of BBC News, a position he has held since 2022.

The job takes in broadcasting from the Today Programme to the BBC News at Ten, and plenty in between, including the BBC’s daily news podcast Newscast. Chris joined the BBC in 2002 as a reporter at BBC Radio Newcastle, after completing a traineeship at ITN. He went on to be a Europe Correspondent and has done around one hundred overseas trips as a reporter.

He became a national BBC Political Correspondent in 2012 after stints as a political reporter at Radio 5 Live and covering Westminster politics for BBC Local Radio.

He has presented programmes and documentaries on BBC Radio 4, presented on 5 Live and the World Service and presented BBC Breakfast.

Gabriel Pogrund is Whitehall editor at The Sunday Times. He was named Political Journalist of the Year and News Journalist of the Year at the 2025 Press Awards. For his investigative reporting on the government, the BBC, MI5 and MI6, he won Journalist of the Year at the 2023 British Journalism Awards. He is the co-author of two books, including Get In, a Sunday Times bestselling account of Sir Keir Starmer’s rise to power. In 2018, he was Stern Fellow at The Washington Post.

Liam Thorp is the multi award-winning political editor of the Liverpool Echo newspaper, one of Britain’s biggest regional news organisations. Having started his career as a trainee reporter in Greater Manchester, Liam moved to the ECHO in 2017 to become a political reporter. He then advanced to become political editor and is now one of the most recognised members of the regional press in the country.

He has won numerous awards in his career, including being named the Regional Press Awards specialist journalist of the year three times. He is also the current Society of Editors regional journalist of the year. Liam has been nominated for the prestigious Orwell Prize for Reporting Homelessness and Private Eye Paul Foot awards for his investigative and campaigning journalism.
Liam is passionate about reporting on issues of social justice such as homelessness and the effects of government policies on the most vulnerable.

Liam lives in south Liverpool with his wife, his toddler, his new baby and his Romanian rescue dog.

Sarah is the President of the Society of Editors and the Director of Newsgathering and Operations at Sky News with responsibility for UK and international journalism as well as Sky’s operations teams.

Sarah has been at Sky News for 13 years as Head of International News, Head of Home News and Deputy Head of Newsgathering before her most recent promotion. In her role as Deputy Head of Newsgathering she ran major events and special projects including Sky’s coverage of the death of the Queen, the Coronation and award-winning projects around climate in the run up to COP26 in Glasgow.

Before Sky News, Sarah was at the BBC. She has over 20 years’ experience working across TV, digital and audio and has worked in many genres including news, documentary and drama. She is a member of the DSMA Notice Committee and is on the board of the British Journalism Review.