Richard Sambrook
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Richard Sambrook (born 24 April 1956) is the Director of the BBC World Service and Global News, and former Director of BBC News and BBC Sport.
Sambrook was educated at Maidstone Technical High School, at the University of Reading where he received a BA in English and at Birkbeck, University of London where he received an MSc in Politics. His first jobs were as a journalist for various local newspapers in south Wales. In 1980 he joined the BBC as a sub-editor. His career has been almost entirely in daily news, working in both radio and TV. He has been a programme editor, News Editor, and was Head of Newsgathering when the BBC won a number of awards for international news coverage. During this period he merged the radio and TV, and domestic and World Service newsgathering departments to form the world's largest broadcast news operation. He became Acting Director of Sport in 2000 before he was appointed Director of News in 2001.
In June and July 2003, he defended the BBC's story that the British Government had knowingly exaggerated claims over Iraq's weapons of mass destruction in the September Dossier. On July 20th he confirmed that Dr. David Kelly had been the BBC's source for the report and he later gave evidence to The Hutton Inquiry into David Kelly's suicide.
In July 2004, the BBC announced that Sambrook would become director of the World Service and Global News from that September. As Director of Global News he is responsible for the BBC's 32 radio language services, BBC World TV News, BBC Monitoring and BBCNews.com, the international internet news site. He has overseen a major restructuring of the World Service and its move into Arabic and Farsi TV as well as commercial interactive services. He is an advocate of citizen journalism and social media.
In 2006 he was elected Vice President of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) with a mandate to introduce major reforms to its governance and operations. He is a member of the leadership committee of the Global Media Aids Initiative, established by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in 2004. Sambrook is also a member of the board of trustees of the human rights charity ARTICLE 19 and a board member of the Fritz Institute. He led a global inquiry into the deaths of journalists around the world for the International News Safety Institute. He is a Fellow of the Royal Television Society and of the Royal Society of Arts.
He is married with two children.
