Fran Unsworth, Former Director, News and Current Affairs, BBC
BBC News reaches over three quarters of adults in the UK each week across television, radio and online. It also reaches a global audience of 438 million people per week in English and over 40 different Languages.
Fran became Director, News and Current Affairs in January 2018.
She was previously Director, BBC World Service Group, a post to which she was appointed to in December 2014. In this role she led the BBC’s global news services – BBC World Service, BBC World News and BBC.com – as well as BBC Monitoring, and she chaired the BBC’s international development charity, BBC Media Action. In this role, Fran was also deputy to the Director of News and Current Affairs.
Fran began her journalistic career in 1980 in BBC Local Radio, joining Radio 1’s Newsbeat. She spent some time as a network radio producer in Washington D.C. and later joined Radio 4’s The World at One and PM.
Fran was appointed the BBC’s Home News Editor and then, in 2001, Head of Political Programmes. In 2005 she became Head of Newsgathering, running one of the world’s largest newsgathering operations with bureaux across the world. Fran left the BBC in March 2022.
Fran is an alumna of Windsor Leadership having participated on the Strategic Leaders Consultation.
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