News Broadcasting
Alan Johnston to host BBC’s ‘From Our Own Correspondent’
MUMBAI: Alan Johnston, the BBC reporter who was kidnapped in Gaza last year, is the new presenter of From Our Own Correspondent (FOOC) for BBC World Service.
During his career, Alan has written a series of dispatches for the long-running BBC Radio programme from the Middle East as well as Central Asia and Afghanistan.
In one of the pieces that he wrote in Gaza before he was kidnapped, he admitted that the possibility of being taken hostage terrified him.
During the 114 days he was kept prisoner by the Army of Islam, he spent hours working out how, once free, he would tell his story on FOOC. In October last year, an entire edition of the programme, some 27 minutes, was given over to Alan’s story.
Commenting on his new job, he said, “I hope that the show might benefit from having a regular presenter, and one who has both contributed to it and been a fan for many years. The structure of the programme will stay the same however – the extraordinarily successful FOOC formula would be very hard to improve.”
In a world where the correspondents’ stories must often be condensed into a minute or less, or perhaps confined to a single answer to a programme presenter’s question, FOOC gives them an opportunity to say a little more – to provide some of the context to the stories they are covering, to describe some of the characters involved and some of the sights they see as they watch events unfold.
The show’s producer Tony Grant said, “I am delighted to be working more closely with Alan. In the past, most of our conversations were down crackly phone lines. He may have done loads of pieces for our programme, but I never got to meet him until after his kidnap ordeal. It will be great now to work side by side with him; he’ll make a really terrific presenter.”
News Broadcasting
Senior media executive Madhu Soman exits Zee Media
Former Reuters and Bloomberg leader says he leaves with “no regrets” after brief stint at WION and Zee Business
NOIDA: Madhu Soman, a veteran of global newsrooms and media sales floors, has stepped away from Zee Media Corporation after a short stint steering business strategy for WION and Zee Business.
In a reflective LinkedIn note marking his departure, Soman said his time within the network’s corridors was always likely to be brief. “Some chapters close faster than expected,” he wrote, signalling the end of a nearly two-year spell in which he oversaw both editorial partnerships and commercial strategy.
Soman joined Zee Media in 2022 after more than a decade abroad with Reuters and Bloomberg, returning to India to take on the role of chief business officer for WION and Zee Business. His mandate was ambitious: bridge the newsroom and the revenue desk while expanding digital and broadcast reach.
During the stint, Zee Business reached break-even for the first time since its launch in 2005, while WION refreshed programming and strengthened its digital footprint across platforms such as YouTube and Facebook.
But Soman suggested the cultural fit proved uneasy. Describing himself as a “cultural misfit”, he hinted at deeper tensions between editorial instincts shaped in global newsrooms and the realities of India’s television news ecosystem.
Before joining Zee, Soman spent more than seven years at Bloomberg in Hong Kong as head of broadcast sales for Asia-Pacific, expanding the company’s news syndication business across several markets. Earlier, he held senior editorial roles at Reuters, overseeing online strategy in India and managing Reuters Video Services from London.
His career began in television and wire reporting, including a stint with ANI during the 1999 Kargil conflict, before moving into digital publishing as India’s internet media landscape took shape.
Now, after nearly three decades in broadcast and digital media, Soman is leaving Delhi NCR and returning to his hometown, Trivandrum.
Exhausted, he admits. But unbowed. And with one quiet line that sums up the journey: he didn’t sell his soul — because some things, after all, are not for sale.
