Barbara Serra
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Barbara Serra (born 1975 in Milan) is an Italian-born British-based journalist, television producer and TV newsreader, who presents at weekends on Al Jazeera.
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[edit] Career
Born in Milan to a Sardinian father and Sicilian mother, she was raised in Copenhagen from the age of nine. As a result, Serra is multi-lingual, with a native language of Italian, secondary languages of Danish and English, and is fluent in French.
In 1993, she moved to the UK to read International Relations at the London School of Economics, and then trained as a journalist via a Postgraduate Diploma in Broadcast Journalism at City University, London.[1]
Serra's journalistic career started at the BBC, where she worked her way up from runner, spending two years working as a presenter/reporter for BBC London News, produced on Radio 4's Today programme and regularly presented EuroNews on BBC Radio Five Live. Her worst on-air moment was having to improvise a 5 minute radio bulletin without any scripts.
She then joined CNN for short period, and in 2003, joined Sky News as a reporter, working on both domestic and international assignments. Serra covered a wide range of stories, from the death of Pope John Paul II in Rome, to the Michael Jackson trial in California. She is quoted as saying that her best TV moment was her live report from the French Presidential elections when Jean Marie Le Pen made it to the final round [2]
In July 2005, as part of a Sky News deal to deliver Five News, she became presenter of the evening News on four nights on Five. She left Five News in early 2006, and in April 2006, it was announced that Serra had joined Al Jazeera English as its London-based weekend news anchor. During weekdays she'll be reporting on news events from across Europe [3]
[edit] Trivia
- The literal English translation of the Italian word Serra is Greenhouse, and Barbara as Barbarian
- She is good friends with the "Money Saving Expert", Martin Lewis - they were both at LSE [4]
