Featured Post

What a Journalist Isn't

I'm sick and tired of the abuse journalists are getting at the moment. They don't deserve it, at least real journalists don't - ...

About

More than you need to know about Richard ...

Richard Horsman is a Leeds lad who's never strayed far from home. Born in 1959, he was educated at Aireborough Grammar School and holds a collegiate degree in Communication from Leeds University.

As a student environmental activist, a negative encounter with a wireless reporter sparked his professional interest in radio.

Turned down by the BBC straight from college he spent two decades getting his own back by working in the commercial sector, joining Pennine Radio in Bradford as a copywriter and progressing to Features Editor, Senior Producer and latterly News Editor from 1993-98, by which time the station had been renamed The Pulse of West Yorkshire.

He was part of the management team which bought The Pulse in 1995.

Since 1998 he’s been a consultant in the radio industry – initially for The Wireless Group, and more recently for the Guardian Media Group, for whom he devised a wide range of educational and outreach activities through the Real Radio (Yorkshire) Media School.

The police and the CRE commended his coverage of riots in Bradford in 1995 .
This led to Richard training journalists in Bulgaria, Estonia and Croatia in techniques for reporting inter-ethnic conflict.

Richard married his teenage sweetheart, and they have two sons. 

Family life requiring more sociable hours, he began training postgraduates at Leeds Trinity University alongside industry commitments.

He joined the faculty full time in 2007, and rose to the position of Course Leader (Associate Principal Lecturer) in Broadcast Journalism. He was awarded a Teaching Fellowship in 2012 for his innovative work involving undergraduate students in real broadcasting projects for East Leeds FM and Bradford Community Broadcasting.

His postgraduate trainees won the BBC Developing Talent Journalism Award in 2009 and 2011. Richard was himself awarded the same scheme's Achievement Award for his contribution to journalism training in 2012.
 
Richard's previous trainees have also twice won the “Student Radio Journalist of the Year” title from Press Gazette, and numerous awards from the Broadcast Journalism Training Council.

Richard was elected to the BJTC's council in 2005, where he served a five year term.
He also continues to deliver media training sessions for West Yorkshire Police, the army, local authorities, several charities and development organisations including Common Purpose. He’s also written chapters on radio for textbooks used by students of GCSE and GNVQ media studies.

Richard's radio experience isn't limited to news - in his early days at Pennine Radio, as a pioneer enthusiast for computer technology, he broadcast downloadable programs for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum for users to tape on cassettes at 2am, and he was once asked to stand in as relief presenter on the station's Yorkshire dialect and brass band music show. They didn't ask him to do it again.

He did enjoy a degree of power without responsibility as a regular relief presenter on The Pulse's late-night phone-ins, and he's the voice you may well associate with being stuck in a snowdrift on the M62.