Catrin Nye

What makes a good piece of investigative journalism?

I think as an investigative journalist – especially one that broadcasts on television more than in written form – it’s crucial that you know how to tell a story in an engaging and also entertaining way.  Television is an impatient and competitive medium and you know you have just minutes to grab someone.  You can do the most thorough and important investigation ever but you have to be able to communicate it well in order to get people to truly feel like they care. One of the things that made Jobfished such a great story to investigate is that we were able to show our workings to our audience rather just present the conclusion. I think especially now – in a world where people can and do conduct their own investigations online – people want to how you did it not just what you found.

How does your approach to storytelling shift across mediums – between radio and television for example?

This is something we have just dealt with in great detail for the launch of Jobfished. It was released as a TV documentary for BBC Three and iPlayer, as a radio documentary for BBC Radio 4 and BBC World Service and as a long read. The final products are all completely different. The same pieces of the investigation are in there but everything else changes. You have to change the story to suit the medium and not the other way round. If you compare the way we open our story in written form and on television they could not be more different and that is vital.

Given that you're an accomplished presenter, could we ask you for three tips for better presentation skills?

1. Be yourself. I spent a lot of time when I was younger pretending to be someone I wasn’t because that’s what I thought a presenter should be like – someone more serious than I am especially. Since I’ve realised I should just be me the whole job has got a lot easier.

2. Listen intently. This sounds so obvious but i’m not sure it’s always done. When I’m interviewing someone it’s almost like I enter a trance, no-one else exists and nothing else exists. If you concentrate on what someone is telling you like this you can feel their every word; in that moment you will feel like you are going through what they have been through and you can really truly empathise. I often feel very emotional in interviews and that is fine – it means you are actually experiencing what you are being told and so you’ll help your audience do that too. Do not worry about the next question you need to ask; that will distract you from this proper listening.

3. Don’t worry if you’re nervous. I still get terrified doing live presenting – it’s scary and that’s okay, it should be.

The Idea is your BBC Radio Wales radio programme featuring talks from politicians, entrepreneurs, academics. What kind of stories get your attention?

Everything! One of the most wonderful things about this job is that you realise everyone has a story to tell and sometimes it’s the everyday struggles we all go through that make for the most important things we can read, listen to or watch. The most important thing is allowing people to be honest and comfortably share with you the stuff that may be harder to talk about – those are the stories that we can often relate to the most.

What made you want to make Jobfished and what do you hope the story achieves?

The story of Jobfished was fascinating from the moment my producer Leo Sands told me about it. He had heard about it on a WhatsApp group because a friend of a friend was working at Madbird, the fake digital design agency at the centre of the story. We knew immediately we had to tell it. It felt so relatable and yet totally bonkers. We all know what it’s like to work from home, we all know the struggles that people went through in the pandemic. And then to find out the people that you have been remotely working with were not even real? Unbelievable. I hope it brings some sense of justice to those that suffered and also starts a conversation about exploitation of our current home-working environments.

What can real-life agencies learn [about company culture] from the ““human-centred” Madbird?

Honesty – about what you do, about what you can offer your clients and staff. Madbird looked just like any other design agency when you clicked on its website with lines on there like….

“Madbird is a human-centred digital design form born in London”

“We thrive to bring inspiration and innovation to everything we do”

It feels like it used the sometimes vague and flowery language sometimes used in the industry to its advantage.