Breaking the News - OE Alice Udale-Smith Reflects on Her Route to Journalism

The latest in our OE profiles, drawn from this year's OElink, journalist and TV producer Alice Udale-Smith (2000-2010) reflects on her route into journalism and what it’s like to work for a 24-hour news channel.

When I joined Sky News in September 2015 the world seemed relatively straightforward. David Cameron had finally won a majority for the Conservative Party. Barack Obama was coming to the end of his term in office, with Hilary Clinton looking a strong favourite to succeed him. The Scottish independence referendum had failed and Europe seemed no more unstable than usual. There was a sense that we knew what the next few years would bring.

Perhaps that was why I didn’t take my manager seriously when, a year later, he gloomily predicted we could soon see the UK vote to leave the EU, Donald Trump in the White House and Boris Johnson in Downing Street. But fast-forward three years and two have already happened, and as I write, you’d get pretty good odds on the third. If I’ve learned one thing in my career so far, it's that you can never know for sure what will happen next and anybody who says otherwise is lying.

Working for a 24-hour news channel over the last few years has been fascinating. I’ll never forget standing in the newsroom after a long overnight shift to watch David Cameron resign the morning after the EU referendum. Nor the moment around 2am when the newsroom collectively realised that Donald Trump was probably going to win the US Presidency. The buzz you get from getting something on air before anybody else knows about it never goes away.

It’s perhaps unsurprising, given my general nosiness, that I became a journalist. But when I left KES in 2010 it wasn’t an obvious career path. I initially went to Cambridge to study Physical Natural Sciences, before specialising in the History and Philosophy of Science in my third and fourth years (turns out Physics is hard).

It was while I was at university that I first became involved in journalism, volunteering to be the science editor of the student newspaper Varsity during my second year. Over the next two years I did most jobs at the paper, including a term as Editor in my final year. After that it was off to London for a Masters in Broadcast Journalism at City University and, several internships later, I joined Sky News as an output producer. 
I’ve since had many different roles at Sky. I have written articles for our website and apps, edited videos for social media, produced our daily Snapchat discovery edition and worked as a TV producer on our breakfast and daytime shows.

I’ve also been sent to cover the news on location around the UK. My first experience of this came in March 2018 when I was being deployed to York with an hour’s notice, to stand in the freezing wind and snow for seven hours. Luckily since then I’ve managed to avoid any more snow stories. Instead I’ve travelled to glamorous locations such as Margate for World Oceans Day, Gatwick in search of a rogue drone and a gloomy makeshift studio in Westminster.

Most recently, I was fortunate enough to be sent to Portsmouth to cover the celebrations to mark the 75th anniversary of D-Day, a highly impressive and genuinely moving occasion with more world leaders and royalty in one place than I am likely to ever see again. 
While my Masters provided my formal journalism training, many of the skills I use every day were unconsciously being developed during my time at KES. My hours spent in the Drama and Music departments taught me how to write and perform, both vital for the time I now spend crafting scripts for presenters to read on air. Helping stage manage school plays and music concerts also provided me with a technical awareness of sound, lighting and gallery operations, all of which I now use when producing live TV from the Sky News gallery.

My background in Science and Maths has also been a huge asset. The last few years have not been short of elections, and newsrooms sometimes have a lack of staff used to coping with large amount of data. As a result, I have been fortunate enough to work on most of Sky’s recent special election programmes, whether that’s a by-election in Peterborough or the US midterms   ̶   as well as, of course, on the EU referendum. It never ceases to amaze me how useful even a basic ability to calculate statistics and program an Excel spreadsheet can be, to say nothing of the analytical skills that studying Physics taught me.

Perhaps most importantly my time at KES taught me to be curious about the world around me and how to stand up for myself and my opinions whether in the classroom or out of it. After all, if you can write a History essay on the American War of Independence without remembering a single date and persuade your Head of Year that skipping Games to work on your Drama project was a good idea you can probably cope with working in a newsroom.