Biographies

Director, BBC News

Helen Boaden took up her role as Director, BBC News, in September 2004.

She oversees the News division which was combined with the BBC English Regions in April 2009 to produce local, regional and network news on TV, radio and online.

It is responsible for flagship programmes like Today, Newsnight, Question Time and Panorama as well as the 6.30pm regional TV news programmes, the BBC News website, the BBC News channel, BBC Parliament, BBC Radio 5 Live and news on local and national radio.

It also produces the news for the BBC World Service and BBC World News.

Helen started her journalistic career on campus radio at the University of Sussex.

She volunteered on a listener-sponsored station in New York and, on returning to England, she graduated in Radio Journalism from the London College of Printing and then worked at Radio Tees and Radio Aire before joining the BBC in 1983 as a news producer with Radio Leeds.

She later became a reporter and then Editor of BBC Radio 4's flagship weekly current affairs programme, File On 4.

She regularly presented Woman's Hour from Manchester and produced and presented a range of features and documentaries for Radio 4. She reported on the BBC Two documentary programme Brass Tacks and presented a series for Channel 4.

In 1997 Helen became Head of Business Programmes and a year later she was also made Head of Current Affairs, the first woman to do the job.

Her distinguished BBC career has been recognised with some of the top industry awards.

As a reporter, she won the coveted Sony award for Best Current Affairs Programme for her report on AIDS in Africa and was named Radio Industrial Journalist and Campaigning Industrial Journalist of the Year by the Industrial Society in 1990 for her investigation into safety standards in the oil industry.

As Editor of File On 4, she won a second Sony and a wide range of awards for specialist journalism.

Helen was appointed Controller of Radio 4 in March 2000 and also Controller of BBC 7 in 2002. Radio 4 won the Sony Gold Award for UK Station of the Year in 2003 and again in 2004.

Helen has been awarded honorary doctorates by the University of East Anglia (Suffolk College), the University of Sussex and the University of York.

She is a Fellow of the Radio Academy.