Gary O’Donoghue Q&A: excelling in broadcast journalism

Please note this transcript was automatically generated so may contain errors.

Sound Without Sight, connect, collaborate and create.

Hello and welcome to the Sound Without Sight podcast. In this episode, we welcome chief North America correspondent for BBC News, Gary O’Donoghue.

Gary shares valuable insights into his career and how he navigated a very competitive sector to reach his current position.

The techniques he uses in his role to deliver outstanding live content and analysis of the biggest stories in politics and society on TV, radio and online. And the tools and equipment he uses while reporting.

If you’re listening to the audio only podcast, there’s also a video version on YouTube. We also welcome guest host and BBC presenter, Emma Tracey.

I’m absolutely delighted to be hosting this session today with Chief North America correspondent for BBC, Gary O’Donoghue. He’s a good friend of mine, and we support each other a lot at work. And he’s just doing brilliantly at the moment.

He’s just won an RTS award, which is really big in the media circles, for his coverage of the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump. And he’s with us. Hi, Gary.

Hey, Emma, how are you doing?

I’m very well, thank you.

I could do a whole big long intro into all of your various work, but I think it’s probably better coming from you. And I think, you know, a lot of the people listening online are both audio geeks and journalism geeks.

So I think you’re right at home here. But I think, I think in order to, we’ll talk a lot more about your career as we go on.

But I think in order to kind of get to the heart of the level of geekery involved here, Gary, for both things, we need to go right back and talk a little bit about you as a kid, as a teenager and what your sort of start was like before all these

fancy awards and being on our televisions every week. Tell me a bit about, were you always interested in sort of words and language and journalism?

It would be wrong to claim that I always wanted to be a journalist ever since I could walk. That’s certainly not true.

When I lost my sight completely when I was about eight years old, and that, as you know, often certainly in those days put people on a completely different path educationally and socially in many ways as well.

You’re kind of plucked out of your media center way to school, certainly in those days and everything kind of, everything changed, absolutely everything changed.

I suppose, I didn’t really come from a home where people read a lot or books were a big thing and then suddenly, books were a big thing because of the nature of the education I got.

Because you went to Worcester, didn’t you? Well, you went somewhere else when you were eight obviously, but you went to a school that was quite academic, is that what you’re saying?

Yeah. I went to Doughton House first, which people will remember doesn’t exist anymore as a weekly border, and then at 11 went away to Worcester where you were away for three or four weeks at a time, at least sometimes.

The emphasis, as everyone will know here, in Worcester was on the academic side, a lot of literacy. They even had a first year in those days where the whole just the point of the first year was to get everyone up to speed reading Braille.

So it was a year before the real first year just to get people.

Well, that’s really interesting. I wish I’d had that. That might help me now reading scripts in my current life.

Yeah. So what did they make you speed read and speed Perkins Wright and stuff, the Braille, in your first year?

They did time your reading a lot to see if you were improving. That was a lot of pressure and a lot of rivalry about that. I was firmly in the middle.

I wasn’t the fastest and I wasn’t the slowest. I think that’s still true. I think there are lots of Braille readers who are faster than me.

But because I think I’ve used it ever since professionally, it’s fast enough. What is still true is that reading Braille is very linear.

You read what’s under your fingers most of the time, which means that it is a big challenge when you have to use it professionally nowadays, which I do every day.

Do you think knowing Braille and being very proficient in reading and writing Braille has had an impact on how you work and how you’ve gotten on in your career?

Yeah, I think so. I slightly hesitated on that one because there are people who can use speech output to read a script live on air, and I’m marvel at that because I can’t do that. I can’t list and talk normally in that way, but some people can do.

So I have always relied in structured programs or on presenting things, live programs, on being able to read a queue in Braille.

And I think it would have been difficult, particularly with news programs, which I’ve done a lot of, it would be very difficult to sort of busk your way through those introductions because there’s a lot of names and there’s a lot of facts you’ve got

to get in and you really need to read what’s in front of you. And that is, you know, it’s enormously stressful at times.

I mean, it’s stressful if you can see in it, there’s that added layer of braille being, you know, just not quite as efficient as being able to read print.

You can’t just glance and scan if you’ve lost your place. It’s a lot harder to find it again, I think.

When I do these, some of these world service programs, I do the live ones. I have people, a person who prints out the scripts for me, and I have a very sort of structured way of how I want to see things in order to make it as fluent as possible.

You know, blank lines, the ways of indicating that there’s an audio clip here, making sure that links aren’t cut, you know, spread across a page turn. You know, all this sort of structure to make it as fluent as possible.

And you need those symbols at the beginning of the line for a clip or whatever that you literally can just feel the shape of under your finger and then you know that.

So you spent your teenage years at Worcester and I think when people like catch you on TV and hear you on the radio, they don’t actually quite know, as I do, how sort of into the audio side of thing and into the sound and into the recording element

of things that you are. Did quite a lot of that come from your time with lots of other blind people in boarding school and was that one of the reasons why you went into the career you did?

We used to have a joke at Worcester, which was that hi-fi was the blind man’s car.

We could never have cars, so we all had these very elaborate hi-fi systems with what we used to call separate amplifiers, separate tape decks, graphic equalizers, fancy speakers and things like that.

I suppose when I had some of that, I wasn’t quite the biggest nerd in that sense. But that was a bit of an introduction to the world of audio. Then also, and I’m blushed to mention this, I was in a band at school.

I’m no musician. I know I’m among musicians.

What was it called?

It was called Shogun, believe it or not.

Okay.

I have no idea why. Someone obviously likes the television series or whatever. But that was a real introduction to, we had our own PA in terms of when we played gigs and amplifiers.

And that whole side of it was particularly fascinating to me as well. So that was a bit of an introduction at that time. And I think I lent on a lot of that stuff that I learned then later on in life.

Yeah.

And how early did you know you wanted to be a journalist and a broadcast journalist?

That’s an interesting question. I think when I went to university, I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do.

I had thought at one point in time that I wanted to be, what was called in those days, a systems analyst, which is I did a computing science A level and we had a fantastic teacher. And his approach really inspired me.

I wasn’t a particularly skilled programmer, certainly, but I enjoyed it and the work of the systems analyst is a slightly higher level from the developer and the programmer. They design systems.

I really liked the idea of that and I thought that was what I’d try and do. But there was a chance meeting between my father, who was a cab driver, a man called Kevin Mulhern, who some of you all know, who is a blind producer.

I mean, he’s all sorts of things, Kevin, he’s amazing. But he had a television company in those days, a production company used to make a program called Link in Central Television in Birmingham.

My father picked him up and he told him about me and he said, send him along to see if he come and have a look at the program going out. That’s really where it began.

That was at university and from there, I did started to do little bits of work experience.

I also started when I spent a year abroad in France, I did a couple of pieces for the In Touch program, where I was meant to be studying, I think, but I didn’t do that.

And so I used to go and borrow the reel to reel, EWR as they were called in those days, the tape recorder from the BBC Bureau in Paris and go out and do little interviews and take them back to the In Touch program.

So it sort of started from there really.

Brilliant. Jay, we’ve got loads of community questions on how, we’ve learned how Gary sort of started working in the BBC. But we’ve got a lot of questions, haven’t we, about how he sort of developed his craft and how being blind sort of shaped that?

Exactly.

So yeah, I think I’ll just take a couple of these quickly if that’s okay. So are there skills that you had to hone or put extra effort into? In a lot of places, journalists are expected to be a jack of all trades, including lots of visual aspects.

So I guess, yeah, which aspects of journalism did you feel like you really had to put a lot of effort into?

It’s a good question because it’s changed over the years. In terms of the skill set, there’s been a whole bunch of revolutions in audio and in journalism and in the nature of digital news certainly since I started.

The first thing I’d say is I think blind people, it’s difficult to say this without sounding a bit vague, but I think we have a natural proclivity towards these professions because we spend so much of our time listening, understanding other people

because we’re forced to understand other people, particularly because sometimes their reactions to us, that makes us think a lot more about other people and putting ourselves in other people’s shoes. That’s a key skill for journalists in any case.

I think that helps, that’s an advantage if you like. When I started out, there were things that were huge barriers, and I don’t just mean attitudinal barriers, but real practical barriers.

For example, when I was on the Today program in my mid-20s, if you were trying to research a story, they had this department called News Information, and you would go down and you’d ask them to pull out some background research and it would come as a

massive photocopy of A3 articles, reams of this paper. And of course, I couldn’t read it and I had to beg, borrow time from researchers to read to me and take it home at night and ask girlfriends to read it to me, which didn’t go down particularly

well. And that meant you were behind by a day or two days, but just because you didn’t have that ability.

And certainly, when the digital revolution came along and newspapers went online and information became more available to us with screen readers and eventually with iPhones, I sort of, like all of us, I embraced it.

And I also decided, I think, at that point in time that we have to sort of, or I had to go further.

I had to understand the technology a bit more than perhaps I would naturally, if I could see, because I needed to exploit it as much as possible to my advantage.

And so, in the same way as we have to often be our own IT person, because IT departments see a screen reader and throw their hands up and say, you know, there’s a problem, there must be that.

In the same way that happens, people don’t really understand how we absorb and seek out information and sort of filter it, because we do it very differently.

So that’s been a real skill that I’ve gone further than I perhaps would have done to develop. Absolutely. And the amount of material nowadays, of course, is still a big challenge because there’s so much to try and get through.

And reading social media and stuff like that as well, like that kind of trying to keep up with all the stuff coming in as well, is quite tricky when it’s not hugely accessible.

James Rysdon had an interesting question, actually.

So James is asking, considering your blindness, how has that kind of influenced the type of journalist that you are, Gary, and your approach to pursuing stories and facts?

And Rhianna kind of has a similar question but asks, how does your blindness offer a unique perspective or offer an advantage in your journalistic work?

It’s a good question, really good questions. There is a sense in which you can, I suppose, play to your strengths. And certainly my interest in politics goes back a long way.

I was very interested as a teenager and not politically active in that sense, but very interested in current affairs and news. So that has, I think, influenced the direction I’ve gone in.

I find and have always found the kind of the news environment, an exciting environment. It’s very immediate. The deadlines are quite short.

I think I have a sort of personality that responds quite well at times, certainly at times to that sort of pressure. I think that works for me. Yeah.

Is it an advantage? I mean, as I mentioned before, I think our ability to listen is a huge advantage.

I think there are times perhaps where in difficult situations, where your blindness is not a threat in the way that sometimes journalists are perceived as a threat.

You’ve only started talking about that, I feel like, recently, in terms of your award-winning piece of work that you did around the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump. Talk a bit more.

I would think about how your blindness kind of was a bit of a thing in that situation.

Yeah. It’s interesting because you don’t really notice or you don’t really understand at the time what’s happening. I mean, there’s a couple of things.

There is that night, which was an extraordinary night and it’s been gone over a million times. But one of the key moments was an interview we got with an eyewitness who had seen the guy who shot Trump.

I had no idea because it was a stream of, I was on air for six hours straight and there was a stream of people I was interviewing. My producer was feeding them to me and I was doing it.

But the big guy who we got, who blew it all apart, turned out to be a very striking looking, the way he was dressed, he had this weird wig-type hat on, he had a can of beer in his hand, he was the sort of person that if you could see, there is a

Or to ask him different questions or treat him differently.

Yes.

Maybe treat him differently. I don’t know is the honest truth, but because I had no idea, I talked to him in a way that I think he was quite surprised, just going over it, letting him talk, asking basic questions, going back over things.

I think blindness was possibly an advantage. The other interesting moment that night was when someone did try to take us off air. There was a guy who was very angry.

Most people were actually fine, but there was a guy who was very angry that we were continuing to broadcast and he put himself physically between me and my cameraman, and was yelling and shouting and stuff. He was a couple of feet in front of me.

I went over and put my hands on his arm and started talking to him. This is all live on TV. And I think by that point in time, I think he knew I was blind.

And I think I wasn’t a threat. And perhaps that’s the thing that diffused the situation a bit in that case. I mean, it’s difficult to know, but I think it did.

And you do get instances like that. But also, there are times where you perhaps get treated like you’re not a serious person as well. I mean, there can be a downside to it too.

Yeah, I mean, I’ll take this one if it’s okay, Jay.

You know, Gary, you’ve proven yourself over and over again. You’ve got lots of confidence now in your ability and you’ve got to a quite high level really in journalism.

But Ollie Clay wants to know how, and I also want to know, and I’m in the middle of my career, how you deal with imposter syndrome and how you get that in the bin.

Because it’s hard when you feel, you know, when you’re blind and you don’t know, you know, you feel like you maybe you feel like you have to be better than everybody else or maybe you feel like some of the things you’re a bit slower at some things,

Yeah, I mean, it’s still there.

I wish I could say it goes away. It doesn’t go away or certainly hasn’t gone away for me. I think in some senses that kind of nervousness or that sort of pressure can be a good thing.

Because it can, you know, can stop you becoming complacent or lazy. It is still true that lots of stuff takes me longer than other people. And I’m in the lucky position nowadays where I can delegate some of that stuff that takes long time to do.

But yeah, the thing about journalism, I think it’s a pretty macho profession. Certainly seen by a lot of people.

It’s changed a bit now, but it’s been seen in the past as a macho profession and so there’s always been a very sort of, sort of, identicate view of what foreign correspondents are like or should be like and should look like.

And I think for some people, particularly older people in the profession, a disabled person coming along or someone from a different kind of background coming along and doing the job, can be a bit unnerving.

I mean, I do wonder whether sometimes it may sort of perhaps undermine their own view of themselves or what they’ve achieved, if you see what I mean. I’m speculating, of course I am.

Well, yeah. What can Ollie do? Maybe a mindset or a way of thinking about it that will help with kind of thinking that maybe you are not good enough or you’re not as good as other people.

Well, you can only control what you can control, right?

So you cannot persuade doubters other than by just doing it. That means focusing all your strength and your sort of time and effort on the skill set, on the ideas, on the stories, on delivering it on time and properly.

Easier said than done, but not worrying too much about how you’re perceived. Because the evidence is the thing that counts at the end of the day. It’s sort of doing it day in, day out, isn’t it?

It’s the thing that counts. And there will, after years and years, still be some people who are sceptics. And there’ll be some people who don’t like you for different reasons.

Not because you’re blind and you don’t like you or you’re only good. But control what you can control.

Well, part of that is the equipment that you use and the tools that you use for your job, getting to know them really well and controlling maybe that little pocket of things.

Let’s talk a bit about that and let’s talk about the microphones and the recorders. It’s changed a lot. Oh, here we go.

I don’t even have to talk now. I can just sit back for 10 minutes. That’s changed a lot over the years, right?

Yeah.

So when I started, it was quarter-inch tape for radio, so reel-to-reel tape. And I learned to edit quarter-inch tape. In fact, it became, I think it was, I was pretty quick at it, actually.

We used to, I mean, I know some of you on here will know this and many of you won’t, but what you did in those days when you recorded an interview on a reel-to-reel tape recorder and the tapes lasted 15 minutes.

So you’re always very focused about your interviews because, otherwise you had to change the tape. Then you took it back and you cut it up. You literally cut the tape with a razor blade.

I had this little device that someone found from the film industry, that it was a little lever thing that you bring down and cut the tape.

But I would mark the tape in the same way as everyone else with what was called a China graph pencil, and you could feel these marks on the back of the tape.

So accessible.

It was very analog in a literal sense and very physical, and it was fun. You hang bits of tape around your neck, in case you wanted to put that sentence back in. Then I suppose that was the first five or six years of my career, we would do that.

Then the first digital editors came along in terms of, I think the first one I used was something called FastEdit, which kind of worked, and that was in the early days of Jaws as well.

And I spent hours trying to finish a three-minute piece, hours and hours and hours.

You were like, bring back the tape.

Well, the thing about the tape was that the final mix was done by a studio manager. So suddenly you had a whole new area of work you had to take on, you had to deliver a final mixed piece.

At four o’clock in the morning, that felt like quite hard work. So yeah, so that was one of the big revolutions was the change to digital.

And then the portable recorders that we’ve used over the years have moved from that quarter-inch tape through, I think mini-disc was the next generation.

Oh yes, the end search button where you had to hold the mini-disc to your ear to make sure that you weren’t going to record.

When you finished recording to make sure it didn’t corrupt, it wrote the index or whatever.

I used to hold mine to my ear to make sure to hear the little, when it was finished, got to sort itself out, oh, it was so stressful.

It was stressful.

And what do you use now? Brittany Wolf wants to know what you use now.

Oh wow. Okay. So I have a bit of a weakness for gear and the microphone.

So I buy too much and I fiddle around with too much. So I have a bunch of these new Zoom recorders, the accessible ones. In fact, I’m using one of them tonight as an audio interface.

And for those who care, I am talking to you on an SE Electronics dynamic microphone, hypercardioid microphone, which I carry around with me everywhere because I’m often in hotel rooms like this and it’s fantastic for getting rid of quite a lot of

room reverb and things like that. So it sounds reasonably good. So that’s going into the Zoom, which is then going into my Mac. So I have a couple of the Zooms.

I tend to carry this microphone around with me. I carry an omni-directional handheld microphone around with me for doing interviews.

And I carry a gun mic around with me for when you’re in a scrum and you want to get something that’s a bit further away, a bit more focused. And that’s probably it. I mean, I do.

Oh, that’s all, is it?

Well, I do have some of these new radio, these wireless mics, which I do some.

We used those, didn’t we? At Seesum. We did.

They come in like a little head, like your little buds come in, your little wireless buds, these little microphones.

There’s two of them in this little teeny tiny box.

Yeah. There’s a whole bunch of them out there now and they’re much more affordable. And they’re kind of, they’re getting used a lot by vloggers and TikTok people and YouTubers and things like that.

But they’re starting to creep in to the professional or the journalism world a little bit as well.

Because they are so cheap and some of them you can just plug straight into an iPhone and you can do a video and have at least a reasonable sound, rather than something that sounds six feet away.

I don’t know if you have to edit packages anymore, but what do you use for your, because we all have our likes and dislikes and we’ve all gone through various levels of accessibility in different editors. What do you use just now?

I use Reaper. I don’t do as much editing as I used to. Again, because I work with a producer the whole time who’s faster than I am.

Sometimes I do occasionally cut short news pieces, with a couple of clips in them. Occasionally I do a package, but very rarely nowadays. But I find Reaper really good.

It works on the Mac and on the PC. BBC is moving to Reaper very shortly, moving away from something called Sady, which I never used.

And Reaper is in many ways designed for musicians, but it works fine as an audio editor for radio or for recording TV tracks.

Better than me still on my Soundforge 9.

If it works, if it works. There’s one other piece of editor I use, which is Studio Recorder, which is the one from APH, which is not a multitrack door in any sense.

But sometimes for something just literally topping and tailing a clip, doing something quick and down and dirty, it’s a lot quicker because you don’t have to render the file out like you have to do in Reaper.

Okay, cool. Jay, is there anything you want to pop in with before I go on to the next?

Just one thing about Reaper. I’m just wondering if you use it, Gary, with the Osara add-on and stuff like that, or whether you’re using it just out of the box with a screen reader.

I do use it with Osara. And eternally grateful to all the people who put all that time and effort into Osara and into the development of that. I mean, those of us who do rely on it, owe them a huge debt of gratitude.

And as you know, there’s a huge community around Reaper, Scotch, Hesworth, all those people and putting in a lot of their own time and sharing their knowledge, which, you know, I’m full of admiration for that, the sort of community that surrounds

that. I also use the Jaws scripts that Jim Snowbarger makes because they add some added sort of benefits.

So you still do making scripts?

Yes, he is. That’s amazing. Yeah, he is still doing a radio show and still making scripts, you know, they’re free.

So all those in combination, that works really well.

But I’m doing quite basic stuff, you know, when it comes to editing, topping and tailing clips, mixing some actuality underneath, you know, a few, you know, plot a few fades, and I think I’m, you know, a master editor.

But, you know, so, but, you know, it does work really well.

And it takes a certain amount of learning because it has this whole sort of concept of items and things like that, which you have to sort of get your head around and, and that, but it’s worth it in the end.

And I certainly think if, you know, big organizations like the BBC are moving towards it, then it’s become, it will become a bit more of a standard.

You know, the BBC for years, certainly in its, in sort of on laptops, so, you know, for mobile editing, they used to use call edit pro, which is now audition.

And I know people have tried over the years to get hold of it, but I don’t, I’m not sure I’ve ever met someone, a blind person who’s ever, you know, really, really mastered it. I could be wrong, but it was always pretty tricky as far as I could tell.

Cool, well, thank you so much. I’ll make sure to include links to all of these things. And then just for anyone that’s listening.

So OSARA is the kind of add-on that’s been made by the community, open source community that really exposes a lot of the functions within Reaper to screen reader access. So thank you very much.

Emma, if I hand back to you and we’ll go to the next section.

Yeah, absolutely. It’s quite a lot of really interesting questions that I would have asked anyway. And this one’s all could be coming back to you pretty soon, Jay.

But let’s talk a bit, Gary, about the techniques you use for delivering kind of live content and analysis. So kind of tell us how that works anyway, because most of us won’t work in TV very often.

And then tell us maybe what you might do differently as a blind person in terms of preparing and delivering. You do so much and have done so much now on TV as a blind person.

Yeah. I mean, so I suppose we can divide it into sort of live stuff, live contributions and what we would call packaging. So, cut pieces or VT, or all sorts of different names for these things.

In terms of the live stuff, it’s often going somewhere, an event or a sort of breaking news story.

I’ve done a whole bunch of like mass shootings in the States where you hear reports of people being shot and a gunman in a school or college or whatever, shopping mall, and you’re sent on the next plane, and you go and set up nearby and you’re doing

sort of endless live injections into the very sort of rolling news channels. In terms of the techniques for me, what do I care about?

What I try and do is not hide my blindness, but I also try and make sure that it doesn’t get in the way of communicating. I’ve always thought that it’s a tricky line to tread.

If for example, one of the basic things is you really, when you’re doing a live like that as a reporter, you really do need to look down the barrel of the camera. If you’re looking for- How do you do that?

Asking for a friend.

Your team.

You have to ask your team. You have to trust the professionals you work with, the cameramen, the producers.

And so, I often work with cameramen I’ve known for years, and they’ll just say, you need to look right a bit, look left a bit, you’re off there, or you’re too high, too low.

So they’ll say, but you can be working with someone you haven’t worked before, and you can sense that they’re too embarrassed or too unsure about saying it.

And so, you know, my producer, for example, will insist on having a look in the viewfinder to see if it looks all right. And I will go out of my way to say to people, these cameramen who I don’t know, you have to tell me.

You have permission to tell me if I’m not doing, if this doesn’t look right, because I want to know. Because if I’m looking off too much, you know, it’s a complete distraction.

Everyone’s going to hear what you’re saying, because they think, what’s he looking at? Well, you know, what’s going on? Why isn’t he looking at me?

As it were. So that’s a basic, one of the sort of basic things I make sure of. Obviously, you want to trust the people you work with too.

I mean, you know, I wear suits a lot of the time. And, you know, if you’ve got your breakfast down your tie, you want someone to tell you. So again, that’s building trust with the people you work with, making sure that you want to know that stuff.

Yeah, and that it’s okay to see it.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

Some of the harder stuff is like, how do you deal with visual information that you’re conveying?

So, you know, if you’re standing outside a school where there’s been a shooting, and, you know, just before you go in the air, your producer says, oh, there’s a whole bunch of, you know, ambulance people coming out with stretches, body bags, or

whatever. How do you phrase that without suggesting that you’ve seen it? You know, so, you know, I will say things like, you know, we’ve just seen the medics coming out of the school with some stretches and things like that.

Because I think, you know, I can’t pretend I saw it, but, you know, I indeed do need to phrase it in a way that the audience will understand.

So even just putting that we in it.

I think it’s an honest thing, you know, it’s not claiming it’s me, and it’s not distracting, you know, and I think it’s still conveying meaning.

But, you know, these are all, these are all sort of things I sort of wrestle with and have done over the years.

There was one, there’s one interesting thing, which I mentioned to you at one point, Emma, about sometimes you have to read something out on air, like a statement, you know, a statement from the police or whatever it is.

You know, and so I remember going to sort of some of the people in news and saying, you know, when I first started doing television, say, you know, how, what would, you know, what do we want to see?

You know, cause I’m, if I’m reading this on Braille, do you want to see it on screen? Do you want people to, you know, see the workings as it were? And no one would really sort of engage with the issue.

So I had to sort of develop my own kind of, you know, thoughts about it and you know, and how to, cause you know, if you’re reading Braille, standing up, you know, as you-

You put it against your tummy.

Exactly, really upside down. And that’s kind of gonna look weird, right?

Yeah.

So I sort of, you know, developed this technique of holding it like a normal piece of paper in one hand and sort of bending the paper so I could then use my other hand with one finger to read across.

So at least it could be in shot, even though people-

That sounds so stressful.

Well, a little bit, but you know-

Do you do that now? Is that what you do?

I do, but only for short quotes and things like that. So I just think people to see it, and the more they see it, the more they get used to it and eventually they don’t care.

Yeah, and as you’re so well known now that actually it’s most people know you can’t see, and therefore reading Braille is not a step too far for them. It’s just a gentle acknowledgement of that.

Jay, we’ve got some great community questions on this topic, haven’t we?

We do. I’m just going to rewind slightly actually, just because we’re talking about Braille. Dave Williams had a few in-depth questions really, just on the Braille for a second.

Dave’s asking how you use Braille specifically, and I think I’m going to tweak that slightly and ask, you’re just talking about hard copy Braille there. Do you ever use a Braille display?

Yes, all the time. The main Braille display I use is a Mantis, the APH Mantis, which obviously can connect to a phone and a computer as well.

Particularly when I’m in the field, at a rally or an event, where you obviously can’t print like an embosser around, I can read a script of that reasonably well.

It’s only 40 cells, so it helps that you’ve usually written the thing you’re reading in terms of a script. But yeah, I use a Braille display multiple times a day, as well as my embosser in the office and when I’m doing set piece programs.

I use it for taking notes. So if I’m watching a press conference, I jot things down in the Braille editor on there, in my own shorthand kind of thing.

Which of course, you know, contracted Braille in combination with your own shorthand kind of mnemonics and things. Means you can get pretty close to verbatim. Yeah.

You just don’t want anyone else to see it.

Because they’re like, what is that?

Well, it’s weird though, because a lot of journalists now don’t learn shorthand and so they’re kind of slightly behind the curve. You have the quotes written down and they have to go back and listen back for stuff.

So, yeah, it’s absolutely essential to what I do day in, day out.

Amazing. That’s super, super interesting. Just to dig in a little bit more on the practicalities of working in TV.

So, Onya is asking, what sort of prep do you do for a live report in the field? What support do you receive from other colleagues on site, I guess, when you’re preparing to do a live report?

Yeah. Television is a team effort, no question. No one part can do it on its own.

So, we operate often in teams of three. So, what we call a shoot edit, which is a person who does the camera and edits when we’re cutting packages. We have a producer and then you have a correspondent.

That team tends to be nowadays the unit that travels together. What preparation do you do? It depends how much time you’ve got.

Sometimes, there’s a breaking news story and the news channels of various kind are screaming to have you on air immediately before you know anything. Sometimes, you have to resist because you don’t know anything.

It’s okay going on air and not knowing anything or not being certain about things as long as you say so. So sometimes, you have almost no preparation.

And that’s where your kind of background knowledge comes in and your sort of experience of being able to talk. You know, I often do 15 or 20 minutes is what we call a presenter’s friend.

So, you know, the presenter is there on location, you’re there with them talking about maybe not much very happening, waiting for something to happen in the Oval Office or whatever.

And because you’ve spent so much time in the environment and thinking about these stories, you know, the stuff that just comes to the surface to say and to talk about, you know, not dry up.

So that sort of preparation over the long period of time, I think, does help. But also if I’m going to, so for example, I think it’s Monday week, I’ve got to go to Canada because King Charles is opening the Canadian Parliament.

And so that’s a sort of set piece thing.

So I’ll do a bunch of reading before that about, you know, make sure I’m up to speed with the latest in Canada, US problems, what people have said, you know, what, you know, what, I don’t know, just a lot of background stuff just so I can have some

stuff to say as well as what’s actually happening on the day. The difficult stuff is commentating on live events. I mean, I think that’s really problematic for us as blind people.

But what I have noticed over time is that the presenters on news channels that I work with, the experienced ones, often take over in those circumstances, because they’re seeing the pictures, the feed of the pictures in the studio.

So they will often say, and yeah, Gary, we can now see this happening, you know.

Oh, that’s good.

And it just, the really good ones do it in such a way as you don’t even notice. Yeah. As opposed to the correspondent like me trying to turn around and point and say, oh, you can see him over there, can’t you come over the door?

Which I think, you know, is a bit, you know, can be a bit awkward anyway. But yeah, that’s a way in which I think I’ve noticed colleagues, you know, who I’ve known for a long time, adapt. I didn’t talk about cutting pieces for television.

Oh, and you had a great question about that as well.

So you can just go on into that, yeah.

Because this is, I mean, it’s really interesting because this is where you have to, you know, understand the pictures you’re working with and write to those pictures without kind of saying what you see, because that’s not what writing for television

is. You’re not saying what you see, you’re sort of reflecting what’s on the screen at the time.

And I, you know, I mean, depending on deadlines, some of this goes out the window when you’ve got an hour and you want to hack some a minute and a half together for the 6 o’clock news.

But, you know, I make sure that the people I work with tell me what the best shots are.

And the best shots is a subjective thing, but everyone knows what you mean, you know, what, you know, what to start on, what, what, what there is, the clips, if you like, what, what we call shots, which are sound on film, sound on tape.

You know, the actual words people say, that’s the easy bit, you know, because you can just say that’s the clip we want. It’s what comes in between that’s the hard thing.

And I am, I’m very sort of forceful about understanding the visuals that there are, and making sure that my words fit and work with them. And, you know, because I say you, it’s much easier to change your words than it is to change the pictures.

So I think, I think I ask more questions. I think visually about these, you know, when I’m cutting these pieces, I do think because there’s a certain kind of, a certain grammar of television that you can understand through over time and experience.

Even if you can’t see the pictures themselves, you know that a sequence, let me give you a silly, tiny example.

If you’ve got a prime minister or a president, who’s about to make a speech, often you’ll see a shot of them walking onto stage or, or sort of getting out of their car, and outside a building, something boring like that.

You have to have ways of getting them physically into a position where they can start talking in the clip. Because if you sort of cut from them to them, it looks really awkward. And you can understand that grammar without being able to see it.

So you can know, I know to ask, do we have a cutaway camera? What cutaways do we have? So that allows me to write in a way that I can go from this to this, and know that the pictures will work.

But I obviously do rely on people to say, this looks fantastic. This bit here is really kind of saying something, and then you try and reflect that in the word.

So I make an absolute effort to think visually, which I know sounds weird, but it is true. I think I asked more questions about pictures than some of my sighted colleagues do.

Yeah, it’s really interesting. You actually are expected to do that, to play your part. You have to write for it, so you need to know exactly what’s happening.

We’ve got a question, building on that really.

Have you ever hired a specific assistant or support worker, or do you handle everything within the team that you’ve got around you? If you have, what are the pros and cons of having an assistant?

Yeah, so I suppose for the first 15 years of my career, I tended to work on my own. Certainly in radio, all the reporters would go out on their own to do packages on the Today program.

Certainly in the early part of those years, there was no mobile phone, so you had to find phone boxes to ring the office and things. So yeah, I have worked alone and I’ve traveled abroad alone before to do a lot of gathering and radio material.

In the last 15 or 20 years, I’ve had a dedicated producer, which is a huge privilege and it’s someone I get to interview and pick and that works very well.

It’s not as unusual as it sounds because most correspondents are given a producer to work with, not necessarily the same one the whole time. Yeah.

What’s the difference between yours and someone else’s?

The only difference is that I have someone who’s dedicated. So you don’t want to have to explain everything all over again to someone new, just because there’s a rotation going on or something like that. So it’s a very important thing.

Over time, they understand accessibility issues, they understand how to get information to you quickly, they understand how you digest information in a different way to other people. There’s a lot of trust involved.

Of course, there’s lots of practical things they have to do guiding you around and things like that. I think it’s a pretty stressful job actually, because they’re not just a producer, they’re what we call a facilitator as well.

I mean, I’ve got a fantastic producer at the moment who juggles all those things incredibly well. That’s a huge help.

But I am in a slightly privileged position, I suppose, but not as unique as you might think, given the way other people’s work is organized, cited correspondence who do have a producer with them most of the time.

Well, what are the practical things that your producer does for you that maybe Sarah Smith’s producer doesn’t have to do for her? Or doesn’t have to do, but doesn’t do?

Well, some of its tiny things, like we turn up in a hotel, I will get her to find CNN on the telly for me. Because hotel tellies, as you know, completely useless.

Yeah, touchpads mostly now, I find.

Just awful. I mean, these sounds so micro, but they’re important. Work out how the air conditioning works, so you can get a proper night’s sleep.

Things that other people just don’t have to worry about. She will also, if there’s some breaking news, she will trawl for stuff for me to read, send it to me in the way I can consume it the quickest, which is in the body of an email, not a link.

But the text, as quickly as possible, she will describe things to me. She will, if we’re in a place, she will take a bit of time out to what’s happening, what does it look like, what’s the crowd like, what are people doing, what are they wearing?

That sort of description.

So there’s a whole sort of range of things, as well as the sort of standard stuff producers do, liaising with London, working out a list of demands, what we can do, what we can’t do, making sure the technical stuff is there, that we’ve got the right

accreditation. I mean, the list is never ending.

There’s loads of producer-y stuff that producers do.

But I do think it’s useful for people earlier in their career and a different part of their career to know that you do have support with those things and that they don’t necessarily have to struggle on and pretend to be able to, or try and find

I think the one thing it’s always difficult to explain to, I suppose for want of a better word, bosses or people who manage.

The difficult thing to explain is that accessibility, particularly for information or whatever, is not a on or off switch. Often there are things that we can do with time, but they take too long in the context. That’s where help is really useful.

It can look like you’re just passing stuff off to other people, because you can’t be bothered. But it’s because you need to maximize the thing that you’re useful for, which is writing and telling a story and broadcasting, not navigating a website.

That’s not what we’re paid to do.

I think it will be interesting going forward in the next few years around AI and that kind of thing, whether we’re expected that people will go, well, you can do that with AI now, can’t you?

You can get a video description of that, you can just get all of that information and suck it down into a little pot.

My mom would kill me for saying this, but she now sends me screenshots of everything, like she sends the rest of the family because she knows that I can, and I’m like, mom, it takes me five minutes to go through all the steps to put it through.

How many taps does it take?

Whereas actually you could just write it out for me, but she treats me the same. Now she thinks I can do it. She’s like, right, we’ll do it then.

It’s going to be an interesting in the future, isn’t it, for us?

It makes one a bit reluctant to say that these things are useful, because people immediately say, that problem is solved then, as you say. It’s like I’ve been trying to learn teams recently, because we’ve switched over to teams.

I did a really useful three hours with someone who understood Jaws.

I need to get their name, actually. Let’s talk about this after the session.

But people think, okay, so now you can use it, right? I can use the little bits I looked at, but it’s very difficult to explain to sighted people how we use technology and how you can’t just absorb a screen and understand.

They don’t understand, obviously, that this stuff is designed for them, not for us.

So what do you think the future is? Is it bright for blind journalists, visually impaired journalists going forward? Is it going to be easier?

Is it going to be, is the road, you’ve paved the road a bit, maybe?

Well, I have to say that, you know, I’m a mentor a couple of young journalists who are still at college who are blind. It’s so competitive, much more. I mean, it was competitive when I was there, but it’s really competitive now.

I mean, there are crazy numbers of people applying for jobs, applying for even apprenticeships. You know, thousands of people were applying for, you know, a handful of apprenticeships at the BBC. So, you know, it would be wrong to pretend.

So what advice are you giving them?

Yeah.

Well, I think, you know, if you want to do it, you have to, you know, you have to keep going. You have to have some stamina and, you know, you have to sort of carve out, you know, a bit of a niche.

I mean, the one thing we have is that we are, we do stand out a bit. You know, we are, we are different in, and that is something that means we do stand out from the crowd a little bit. And that can be, you know, can be an advantage.

And, you know, building that, well, having built all that resilience, which blind, I think blind youngsters have to do at a much earlier age, perhaps in some of their sighted contemporaries, is really useful when it comes to that sort of battle, that

Jay, I’ll go over to you to go through some of the questions that are left.

Absolutely.

Yes. Just to wrap up this section on kind of the techniques that you use in your role, Gary. Rihanna is asking, so you’ve worked across radio, television and online platforms.

How does your approach to reporting differ across these mediums?

That’s a good question. I mean, in many ways, the online medium is much more sort of, I suppose, pure, is that a word?

I mean, when I was writing after the Trump assassination thing, I had to write quite a lot of pieces very quickly for online because it’s a huge priority for us now.

I discovered a sort of real pleasure in just you and the keyboard, and none of the sort of technical distractions that certainly television can bring and the limitations, and the fact that it takes time to do stuff.

That’s something that I’ve really enjoyed when I get down to write, because I enjoy the writing and I enjoy thinking about the words that are used, and making sure that there’s some of your personality in it as well.

People can take it or leave it, but it seems to me a quite important thing in terms of connecting with the people who are reading.

I suppose television is again about what’s possible in the time, because gathering takes a long time, editing takes a long time, feeding material takes a long time.

I mean, we did a big documentary for BBC One back in October last year when Trump went back to the place where he was shot. We were filming in 4K, and sending those rushes back to London took a long, long time.

These huge hours you have to factor into the process and things. So that becomes influences the way you approach what you’re doing.

Radio is lovely, because you and a tape recorder or a Zoom recorder nowadays, I did a documentary for the World Service, and it was me and a producer in a car in the middle of nowhere in Kansas for a few days. And it was a joy.

It was a real joy to have that freedom just to wander around, talk to people, do interviews, see what was happening. So again, that makes for a different kind of experience, I suppose.

Amazing. Yes, super, super interesting. So Rhianna actually had another question, which is, what are some of the biggest challenges and rewards of covering US politics, but for a UK audience?

Like it or not, the US is the most powerful country in the world.

What happens in Washington matters everywhere, has an impact and effect everywhere.

And so trying to explain and contextualize that for UK audience and indeed audiences around the world, which we do, that’s what makes it worthwhile, actually, because the number of times I’ve been wrong over the last 10 years, I hate to think because

it’s been an extraordinary change in what’s possible politically. And a lot of the old assumptions have gone out of the window, as you know, and trying to sort of grapple with that in real time, literally in real time, is a huge challenge.

And we’ve often failed to do it properly, and we’ve often done it in a half-baked way because, you know, first draft of history and all that kind of thing. But I get stopped in the street here. I mean, I’m in the UK at the moment.

And I get stopped in the street here, you know, several times a day by people saying, you know, really enjoy it. Thank you very much for what you do. That’s what makes it worth it.

That’s awesome.

I mean, it’s great to hear that you have such recognition. You totally, totally deserve it. And I think, you know, just hearing your speech from your award, just showing that it really can be done.

Yeah, it’s super, super inspiring. And yeah, just thank you so much.

A real pleasure.

So kind of on that theme a little bit, Peter Bowsher offers firstly, some warm congratulations on on that award and your amazing career. So he says you’ve achieved so much thanks to a combination of talent, confidence, and sheer determination.

So you’ve shown it can be done for roles in front of the mic and the camera. But what about behind the mic technical roles?

He’s only aware of two blind sound engineers that have worked at the BBC and both, unfortunately, weren’t retained due to accessibility issues. So what do you feel like can be done to improve that situation?

Yeah, I think it’s a really surprising situation to me because there are lots of things that should lend themselves to that being possible.

I know certainly in some stages, not just the BBC, but the BBC trains most of the industry when it comes to sound engineers, even now, I think. But there was lots of sort of fixation on whether you could see the level meters and things like that.

That always struck me as something that was kind of, if there was a solution, that would work. But it seemed to me there were always ways around that because you can use your ears for a start, you can get used to a certain desk.

I never understood why there was sort of resistance to blind people doing those sorts of roles. So I don’t have a straightforward answer to that, I’m afraid.

I think one issue has, whilst the digital revolution has certainly helped me as a journalist, it’s opened up the access to information.

Some of the digital revolution in terms of sound engineering has gone a bit the other way because desks are so, got lots of screens on them now and stuff like that.

Not all those manual pots that were there are all done by other kinds of configuration which must make things a bit harder.

But I don’t, Peter, honestly, have an answer for you and I think it’s something where the industry does need to do a lot better.

I think there’s sometimes an over focus on proving in a very obvious way that progress is being made, and that can be done by people in front of the camera or the microphone, whereas actually this is something that should go through the whole kind of

culture right across the kinds of job that people do. So I mean, I don’t honestly have an answer and I don’t understand why it’s been so difficult and why there’s been, and there clearly has been resistance in all sorts of areas to something that

Harry, thanks so much.

It’s been a fascinating, hi there. It’s been a fascinating session. What you just said is kind of at the core of what Sound Without Sight is trying to do.

And the two people that I know of, the first one was in the days of analog, the cutting tape with razor blades that you were talking about earlier on. And she had to leave because of the change over to digital systems.

She then went on to have a very successful academic career. The second one is me.

And the problems that I had when I was working as a studio manager with radio drama, there was a machine that played in sound effects that didn’t have a, it wasn’t possible to put a screen reader on it.

That there was a desk which was entirely visually driven, that kind of thing. And while I was there, I had countless meetings of people talking about improving accessibility.

And lots of people made helpful, helpful noises, but nothing actually came of it. And I’m just wondering how Sound Without Sight might be able to get some kind of traction in there.

If there’s anything you can think of, that’s kind of what’s behind my question.

I mean, I think there’s a genuine wish at the top of organizations, and not just the BBC, but others too, other organizations too, to make their workforces more inclusive, more representative, because they know that that’s the way…

If you reflect the country, you operate in more, better, then you get better products and better engagement with audiences and all that sort of thing.

So I think the strategy has to be, I think, to go to the top and to ask the questions about what can we do to change this? But I don’t pretend to know how to move things. I mean, there are still barriers.

I still come across barriers now, and sometimes you have no idea why they’re there. So I think, obviously, showing work that people do can be a huge way of persuading people.

So what you do, you’re showcasing people who are running studios, mixing music, all those sorts of things, is a way to show people that this is possible. Then when it comes to particular things, I wonder, there’s usually another way.

I’ll give you a small example. When I’m presenting a live radio program, they have a big sheet of glass, as you know, Peter, between what we call the studio and the cubicle, which is all the control room.

And one of the reasons there’s a great big sheet of glass is because for decades, people have believed there has to be a sort of visual contact between the presenter and the studio manager or the producer or the studio director, whatever they call

them nowadays. But if I want to add lib into a tape, I can do that in all sorts of ways. I don’t have to have eye contact with the studio manager. Often on television, when I’m talking into a clip, they’ll say to me, what are your run words?

What are your in words? I’ll say, I’ll make it obvious.

Oh yes, I say that all the time.

It works. It seems to me there are different ways to get around what practices people have done for years. But I think you have to go to the top because I think that’s where, once there’s buy-in and it’s genuine, that’s the thing that filters down.

But it is very, very difficult to know how to shift that sort of thing even when, I think there is a lot of goodwill, but people are slightly daunted perhaps by or imagine problems that don’t exist. Perhaps that’s what I mean.

Yeah, there are always solutions, but it’s getting that message across. Thanks so much.

That’s beautiful. Lovely to hear you.

Thanks so much for that, Peter and Gary, for your response. Emma, I know we’ve only got you for a few more minutes. Was there anything else that you were hoping to ask?

No, I asked about the road ahead for blind journalists, and I think that’s the, you know, and then Peter asked about accessibility, because, you know, if we’re very honest, we are wading through that sort of stuff all the time in and out of work.

It’s all hard work. So I think you answered that as well. So, Noah, I think I’ve asked all my questions.

Thank you so much, Gary, for answering them. And thanks to everybody in this fabulous community for all your excellent questions. You’ve basically let me off the hook mostly.

So I really appreciate it. And thanks for having me.

Emma, well, thank you so much for leading the main part of the Q&A. Yeah, masterfully led. Yeah, thank you so much for your time and your expertise.

And yeah, you made it a very, very smooth session.

I’m doing my, I’m doing, I’m waving. Bye.

We had a question from David Brookmeyer. So we’re moving into slightly kind of political waters now. So maybe just answer as much as you feel like you can.

So David is asking, how has the climate in the US changed politically in the past six months since the election?

Well, it’s no secret that these are extraordinary times, and the media is often an object of this administration’s anger and ir. And so it is a challenging time.

The big challenge is the, if you’re talking about the current administration, is the sheer sort of speed and quantity of what is coming at us every day, trying to process, contextualize, check, fact check, all that kind of thing, with so much

avalanche of stuff. They described it as flooding the zone.

And that is a huge journalistic challenge for everyone, and particularly because the news cycle gets ever shorter because of the amount of different outlets and digital and live streams and things like that, that you get less and less time.

I was reading something the other day about people who were count covering the famine back in the 1980s in Ethiopia and Tigray, and how they were talking about on their flight back to London, where they were sort of crafting their scripts.

And I thought, chance would be a fine thing, if you had a few days on the way home to write your script, when actually what people want it now, what they want is something in five minutes time.

I really appreciate that. I just want to reiterate the thanks again for just joining us. You guys have been very informative.

Thank you.

I feel like a white belt is beginning a lot of these aspects in my respect, so it’s just been very informative.

Just a bit more of a fun one really to lighten the mood a little bit. What instrument did you play when you were in the band at school? Because I just have some musical interests myself, so I just thought I’d throw that one in there.

I played the guitar very badly.

I was one of those people who’s like rhythm guitar, which means you can’t really play. That’s not fair, but I could hack a few chords, and we had an awful lot of fun. We were 16, 17, I mean, I don’t think you’d be able to do this now.

We would play the pubs around Worcester and Birmingham, and get paid in beer, basically. It was a huge fun. It was really huge fun.

We used to do the TSB Rock School competition, which we never got very far in, but we used to do that. I did a couple of grades of classical guitar, but as I say, I am a terrible musician.

I have no talent in that realm, or much to my shagging, but it was a lot of fun while it lasted. And I sold my guitar when I left school, and basically haven’t picked one up since.

Well, hopefully, you might be able to pick one up again soon.

But as a fellow guitar player, I can relate to that. So thanks, Gary, again, for everything.

Thank you.

And there was a related question actually from Adele, who was asking, have you ever been tempted to try and make the music for the shows that you present on?

No, I think that would be a bad idea. Yeah, I think I’ll leave that to the professionals.

Brilliant. Thank you very much for that one. And I guess vaguely similar, what’s your relationship with podcasting?

Have you ever been tempted to make your own podcast?

I mean, I do appear on quite a lot of podcasts nowadays. We obviously, the BBC Newscast, the main newscast, I do that quite often nowadays. I’ve done a couple of other sort of external ones.

I don’t have a particular yen to do one of my own. I mean, the space is quite crowded, so to do something that’s distinct, I’m not sure. In many ways, on-demand radio is quite close to podcasts.

So I do some programs for the World Service, there’s one particular one called The Enquiry, which is 25-minute deep dive into a particular subject, and I do a few of those each year. They go up effectively as podcasts, and I really enjoy those.

But twice a week or something, and having to come up with the material all the time, doesn’t attract me particularly at the moment anyway.

Yeah, fair enough. You probably got your hands full with everything that’s going on at the BBC. Sounds like such a great and rewarding role, but yeah, a lot to it for sure.

So we’ve got a question in the chat from Katie.

Hi Gary, very nice to hear from you, and just wanted to find out a bit about how you manage with speaking to senior political figures in terms of whether being blind has an impact on whether you get picked for questions when you’re having to say who

you are, and I guess being from the BBC makes a big difference to that is helpful anyway. Also, on a one-to-one basis, do you find that there’s any discomfort or more openness, and do you actually feel conscious about it anymore, or do you just get

The question about press conferences and getting picked is an interesting one, because I think that’s really hard, because it’s often about trying to catch the eye of whoever it is giving the press conference, or getting in their line of sight, and

that’s quite hard to do. I mean, when I worked at Westminster, which I did for 10 years, that wasn’t so hard there. But in America, where you’re not as well known to the politicians, that is difficult.

I do tell you a story, it just really occurred to me. I remember one Welsh Labour MP, when I was a very young political reporter, tapping me on the shoulder and saying, I’m terribly sorry for your affliction.

It made me laugh because that’s such an old-fashioned word. Sometimes you get there. But what I don’t do is, if I’m going to turn up to interview someone for a radio piece and I’m on my own, I don’t turn up cold having not told them that I can’t see.

So I give them some time to adjust to the idea. I’ll say something like, you’ll let me because I’ll have a white cane because I can’t see.

If I’m in a team with my colleagues doing television, then I wouldn’t bother because I don’t think there’s any need. But I want to give people some time to absorb it if I’m going to be the only person going to their house or something like that.

That’s really, really interesting. Thank you so much. Yeah, great, great insight.

So we’ve got a hand up from Marsha, which I think is the final question actually.

Hi, Gary. It’s a great honour. I’ve heard you on TV countless times without actually knowing that you were visually impaired.

So it’s a great honour. But yeah, I’m always fascinated about, because I’m a football fan and I’m always fascinated about how all sports stuff works on BBC Radio, specifically BBC Radio Derby.

From what I’ve heard from you, it’s probably possible for someone like me to get into those rooms and at least experience what’s going on. I’ve always wanted to do radio and or sound engineering in studios. What would be the best advice to get going?

One thing I would suggest is, and just because you mentioned Radio Derby, often it’s a sad indictment really.

Radio, local radio is so understaffed that they’re often very grateful for any help they can get. So it’s definitely worth approaching local radio stations and seeing if there’s anyone who can let you in to do some stuff.

I mean, I think that’s one thing.

The other suggestion I would make to Jay is that you should manage I think I’m going to start with the one that I’m going to ask me on, who is a sports producer, reporter, presenter, who’s also totally blind, works for the BBC, unknown many for

years. And if people are particularly interested in sports broadcasting and what’s doable, I mean, he ran a podcast for years called World Football.

He covered a bunch of World Cups and Paralympics and things like that. Travels quite a lot. He might be a super guest to talk about.

Yeah, the area of journalism.

Oh, I would love to get his contact details some type.

of details.

That would be interesting because I often get, as a studio engineer and particularly an analog engineer, I always get fascinated about if I go to a Derby game and I sit in the ground with my earpiece in or my IEMs in, the referee will blow his

Well, I know a lot of them use the commentators.

I have one of these. It’s like a headset mic, so it’s a very close mic and it’s amazing how much it excludes the noise around. But people don’t, even though they can’t hear themselves talk, they’re actually really clear.

But there’s a real proper technique in using them without popping a lot.

Yeah, without clicking them.

Below the mouth line and things like that. You can tell with some other less experienced sports broadcasters, other networks, where they’re just constantly, right on top of this or that.

You don’t realize how annoying and hard it is to listen to when people don’t have a good mic technique, you know?

Yeah, definitely one for a green or good mic technique.

Yeah, even 20 or 30 dollar mics can be fine if you use them properly. You don’t have to spend a fortune.

Yeah, I mean, we were doing a single mic recording today. We were doing a single mic recording experiment where we tried to do everything in bits, but it was just a single 57.

So we did 57 on the piano, 57 on the guitar, 57 on the drums, and it was the same 57. It just got moved.

I think that’s the mic that they’re using in the White House for presidential press conferences. And I think they’ve used it for years. I think so.

I think they’ve used it for years.

Yeah. And you’d think, wouldn’t you, just because it’s the American White House, it’s the superpower of the world. You’d think it was a bleeding Shure SM7B or a U47 or something like that.

You wouldn’t think, you wouldn’t think it was a 57.

It doesn’t feed back. It’s an absolute course.

Well, thank you so much, Gary. I think we are at time now. I don’t want to take any more of your time than we said we would.

Yeah, it’s been fun. Yeah, it has been super, super fun and super interesting. So many really important insights that I’m hoping will, as you said in your speech, it really can be done and you’ve shown that.

And it’s been good to expand on that tonight. Just wondering if you had any closing thoughts before we wrap up?

I don’t have anything particularly profound to say. I mean, I think the thing with, you’ve got to really enjoy, and I’ve been very lucky to do a job that I enjoy, and not everyone gets that chance.

And so I think you should follow your heart a bit, and the knockbacks, I’m afraid, do come and will come, and they are hard to take. And I think you have to sort of get up and do it again.

I would stress just building skills and building workflows that mean some of the frustrations and the time-consuming stuff is eliminated.

I mean, one can get too obsessed with sort of software and bits of kit and things like that, and lose track of what you’re actually doing. There is a danger of that.

But we do need to be as efficient as we can if we then want to have the time to be creative, be it musically or journalistically.

So it’s worth putting some of that time in to learn how this or that software works, master it, and call on other people who have done it before. Because we are a community and we should.

Absolutely.

It’s totally an investment of time really, on any kind of specialism that you want to do, whether it’s journalism, whether it’s the audio side, there are people who have explored that particular path before and there will be solutions for sure.

So it’s just about finding those solutions. So that’s what we’re all about here. So Gary, again, thank you so much for your time.

Thank you. We’ve had so many comments in the chat thanking you and saying it’s been really interesting and people really appreciate it.

Thank you for the invitation. It’s lovely to be here.

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Sound Without Sight podcast.

Sound Without Sight is a community-driven online hub, collating resources and opportunities to enable blind and partially sighted musicians and audio engineers to break down access barriers.

Why not share some accessibility solutions you’ve found on our Knowledge Hub? You can learn more and get involved at soundwithoutsight.org. If you’ve enjoyed listening to this podcast, please consider making a donation to support the project.

You can do so at soundwithoutsight.org/donate. The music you’re listening to was composed by Andre Louis and members of the Sound Without Sight community.