July
03
Tags
Peter Cardwell
News Reporter
Ulster Television, Belfast (UTV)
Peter is a reporter in Belfast with UTV Live Tonight. After working for Newsnight, BBC Washington, Question Time and Sky News, Peter moved to UTV. Peter participated in WIP in 2006 and interned with ABC7. He graduated from the University of Oxford with a degree in history and politics. He was also a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in New York.
I’ve been with UTV Live Tonight for a year exactly and I’m a reporter there. It’s my job to come up with ideas for stories with my producers, and often they will assign my stories which are their ideas too. With UTV Live Tonight we have a bit more time than with the 6 o’clock news where you may have 2 minutes to tell a story. With UTV Live Tonight I usually have 5 minutes. That might not sound like much time, but 5 minutes is a long time in television.
Last night for example, I did a report on interfaces and that was really interesting from a WIP point of view, because Northern Ireland is moving on so quickly, yet at the same time, there are still so many tensions. Every summer there are people living in these areas where petrol bombs, missiles, stones, bricks and bottles are coming in over the peace lines. For many people, Northern Ireland hasn’t moved on a huge amount – these low level tensions are still there. Issues like that are important to report on.
The good thing about my job is that once you have that initial conversation with your producer, you have a lot of freedom to report the story as you see fit. Obviously you have to be very fair and balanced and take impartiality very seriously. There also has to be a thread that runs through everything you do, but at the same time I can be creative with my reporting.
In terms of covering stories, I’m really interested in politics and the story of how Northern Ireland is moving on. I’m trying to cover more education and health stories as well. You do everything with this job – one day you can be interviewing the First Minister or the Secretary of State and on the same day you might be on a farm. One day I literally went from covering a very complex High Court story to covering a story about Christmas trees. It’s so varied and I really love it. It’s a privilege to meet so many people and also to meet them at very important times in their lives, when something significant has happened to them. You’ve got to remember that at all times.
The story I’m most proud of is actually quite complex. There’s a training college for the police, fire and prison service near Cookstown in Northern Ireland and I’m the only reporter in Northern Ireland who has properly covered it. Some people argue it’s something of a fiasco in terms of it being £30 million over budget at one stage, and there are still a lot of problems with it. I’ve spent a lot of time digging into this story, and I’ve interviewed the Deputy Chief Constable about it twice.
Within journalism, there’s covering and uncovering. Some days you get a story where you’re covering something and it’s very straightforward. There’s very little investigation involved and it’s very clear what you should be covering. And then other days, UTV gives you the time and encouragement to actually investigate your own stories. But there’s a role within our programmes for both kinds of stories – one is not necessarily better than the other. Working with a producer called Yvette Shapiro, we investigated this training college in terms of the public money that’s been spent and we keep revealing things about it that the public seems to respond to. It’s a story I’m very proud of.
I always wanted to report, I’ve done some very interesting jobs in London as a producer and Political News Editor with Sky News, the BBC and Question Time. But my burning desire the whole way through was to be a reporter. The opportunity came up in UTV and I grabbed it. I’m very grateful to the Managing Director Michael Wilson and the Head of News Darwin Templeton who gave me a contract. I was on a contract for a number of months and then became a permanent member of staff.
The thing with journalism is that it’s not like nursing or teaching, there isn’t a career path laid out in front of you. It’s very random and it’s very dependent upon what opportunities come up at a time. My dream is to go to London and to become a political correspondent. I’d certainly like to stay at UTV for a number of years, though. I’m learning every day, so I don’t see myself leaving for a quite a while, but we’ll just have to see what happens.
My internship with WIP was with ABC7 in Washington D.C and they were brilliant. The anchor there was Gordon Peterson and he was amazing. I’m still in touch with him. My internship was directly related to what I’m doing now. I was going out with reporters, I was seeing how producers work and it was really useful as it was my first taste of television. I’d done bits and pieces of newspaper work before then, but I hadn’t really been exposed to how television works and I absolutely loved it. I got the bug.
You also can’t overstate how important the host family experience is. Cathy and Mier Wolf were a very close family and I can honestly say I don’t think a two-week period has gone by since 2006 where we haven’t at least sent an email to one another. We’re very close and I consider them family. I’ve gone to Madrid, London and Dublin to meet up with them. They’re lovely people and I’m very privileged to have them in my life.
The real takeaway from WIP was the friendships that I still have with people like Frank Kennedy, Jo Black and Reachbha FitzGerald. WIP connections also helps me in my work. I speak with the DUP Press Officer every week and he’s a WIP Alum. I would say the friendships, the experience of Washington, the love for America, the internships themselves and the host family experience adds up to make WIP a fantastic and valuable experience. I recently gave a talk to some 16 and 17 year olds and one of the first things I said to them was you’ve got to apply for WIP.
WIP Alumni 