Ben Hammersley

Incidentally, the RSS data standard I wrote two books on provides the underlying technology that enables podcasting. And the word “Podcast” is generally considered to have been invented by me in an article for The Guardian in February 2004. A year later and it was declared Word of the Year by the New Oxford American Dictionary . The journalism never went away: from writing then for the Guardian, and other newspapers and magazines, through to being the Associate Editor, and later Editor-at-Large, at the launch of the UK edition of WIRED magazine. In 2015 I presented the six-part BBC World News tv series “Cybercrime with Ben Hammersley” , and I have many years of making radio programmes for BBC Radio 4: including the 5-part series Futureproof Yourself, and investigations into online privacy , personal genetic testing , and the canon of fictional universes . But back in 2007, I was the reporter who pioneered multi-platform reporting for the BBC. It was an experiment that saw me file for TV, radio, and the web as I covered the election in Turkey. No had previously done all of this, and far from being the enthusiasm of the young, this multiplatform journalism was based on missions I had undertaken to Afghanistan for The Guardian. There I used cutting edge video cameras and satellite phones to deliver words and video from the Forward Operating Bases and combat areas of war-torn country. Beginning in Kabul , and then reporting from Naray in the East, and Helmand in the West, I was able to use the systems that I had built in the years before, when I acted as the secret skunkworks developer for the Guardian’s online department, building their pioneering range of blogs, including the award winning Comment is Free. My foreign news reporting, which lead from Afghanistan to Beirut, Mindanao to Tokyo, was mainly conflict based, and lead to observations that brought me to the third arena: national security and strategic foresight. Drawing connections between the innovation cultures and practices of Silicon Valley with those of non-state actors and terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, I was able to show government and military audiences new ways of considering the world and the threats within it. This lead to work for the UK Foreign Office, the European Commission, parts of the US government, and then more than 10 years of advising corporations, and individuals, on the nature of the changing world. This background, and my ability to work as a translation layer between different fields, different generations, and different cultures - and to highlight the interconnections of technological change with political, economic, strategic, social, and cultural change - is what drives my work today.