According to Broadcast, Fiona Campbell, currently Controller BBC3, has been elevated to Controller Youth Audiences. Fiona has been ploughing the yoof furrow for some time, and is now in her early fifties - being kept on her toes by a ten year-old son.
Fiona didn't leave her native Belfast til she was nineteen, and got off to an odd start at Cambridge. "I found myself caught up in the push for girls to become engineers. I applied for Electronic Engineering degrees all over the UK – winding up at Jesus College Cambridge in the winter of 1988. I was surrounded by a lot of guys who had already spent a year in engineering firms and frankly I was lost immediately. There were maths lectures where equations spanned across four blackboards (yes chalk!) and by Christmas of first term I realised I had no idea why I was there or where it was taking me. Never one to waste time; I left the course."
Fiona (Dominican College, Belfast and BA Economics, Jesus College, Cambridge) was brought into News by James Harding in 2014, from documentaries on BBC3, to run the whole of current affairs. It was a torrid time: "There was lots of ranting, swearing and tears — with my coach, with my team leaders, with James Harding. I’ve learnt to stay on top of emails by replying the same day with a “yes, we’ll make that” or “no, we can’t”. Nobody should write a long email or send emails on the weekend. I also started to walk out of meetings early — an hour is too long"
One of her innovations was an online section called BBC Stories. It survives today. Top stories: The seven-day-a-week life of a maid for Qatar's royal and rich, My dream holiday was a $30,000 scam, Deepfaked: 'They put my face on a porn video', 'Claims I had sexsomnia destroyed my rape case'.
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