A Day In The Life Of… Ava Santina Evans, Political Correspondent at JOE.co.uk

Ava-Santina Evans is one of the most high-profile figures at PoliticsJOE, a digital-first newsgroup aimed at captivating younger audiences. Starting journalistic life at LBC, she first produced James O’Brien’s popular lunchtime radio show throughout the Covid-19 pandemic and has now been a member of the parliamentary lobby for the past few years, covering national and London politics.

Journo Resources met Ava-Santina at the 2024 Student Publication Association National Conference, where she was talking to young journalists about a day in the life of a political correspondent and navigating the Westminster bubble. We found out more about her path into reporting, her love for radio, and how she goes from source to scoop.

What is a typical day for you at PoliticsJOE?

Well, I kind of have three jobs because I’m mostly PoliticsJOE, but I’m also a political commentator and I do some news reporting as well. So most days I get up at about 5.30am and then I am somewhere by about 6.15am, sometimes earlier. I normally do a paper review and then I’ll do radio, normally I’ll do that on the way to the JOE office or to Westminster. So I might do Good Morning Britain and then I’ll do BBC local radio — that’s normally more storytelling, so it’ll be: “What’s the politics of the day?” and I’ll just explain it.

Do you enjoy doing a whole range of different content?

All of it was really by accident. I was a radio producer and I loved being a radio producer. Radio is my favourite media for telling stories and then I jumped into PoliticsJOE, because I thought it would be really fun to help build that brand with Oli Dugmore, the editor who had already built it. I wanted to join quite a small team and build it from the ground up — which we did because we got the Westminster pass for it, which it didn’t have before and we were really proud of.

But yeah, the other bits just genuinely happened by accident, like getting invited onto other stuff, and it kind of snowballed. I’m really bad at saying no to people. When producers call me and say: “Can you do this?”, by the time I’ve realised what I’ve actually got to do that week, it’s normally that I’m up at 5am in bed at 11pm.

What would you say is a good day’s work for you? Is it breaking a story, keeping on top of stuff, or making a new connection? What really matters to you?

I really like all of the pieces that we make. Not to sound arrogant, but I really like that we tell a very human side to a lot of the stories. When we’ve made a documentary that I’m particularly proud of, like I was particularly proud of the Port Talbot work that we did, and I was proud of when we went to Paris once and we were doing the riots. It was international news, so you only get the top line, and it was really covered here as if it was just French people setting fire to things. Actually, it was about teacher pay and I love that we told the proper story about why people were so angry.

How do you choose what to cover and how to cover it?

I am completely self-sufficient — I have to prove it with Oli my editor — but you go and pitch something to the desk. So I’ll see something that I want to do and then I go and pitch it. I curate quite a lot of lists on Reddit and Twitter (now known as X). I normally start with Reddit and there are certain people who I know are going to be talking about [interesting stuff]. I follow quite a lot of train people, because they’re quite a good indicator of when the next strike is going to happen. I normally find stories basically by going through those lists.

What are you proudest of in your career to date?

I think when I got my first job, that was the proudest that I’ve been, because it had been so hard. I was at Sussex [University] in my third year and I’d been getting up at 2.50am every morning to go and do this assistant producer role that I’d got at LBC off the back of work experience.

So I was getting the train from Brighton, I was going to do this breakfast show, and I’d come back and do my university lectures and then I’d go to BBC Sussex in the evening. Then on the weekends, I’d work at Waitrose so that I could pay for the train, because the train was £60 and so it wasn’t being covered by the shift. Actually, when I graduated, I was panicking like: “Oh my God, I haven’t got a job,” and I was going to stay at Waitrose but then I got hired by LBC and that was my proudest moment.

What did you do that you would advise others to replicate to break into the industry?

I just decided what outlet I wanted to work at and then, once I had decided that, I basically gave it everything. It was really, really hard — like I was paying my rent and my train and all of that — but I was like: “I’m being given this small window of opportunity, so if they want me to work here for 14 hours today, I’m going to do it.” I think that ended up paying off.

How do you turn your brain off from the news?

I have a lot of friends who aren’t in journalism and who have no interest in talking about the inner machinations of journalism. I also have a lot of friends in journalism — don’t get me wrong. In the week I’ll go to the bar with them and we’ll hash out: “Can you believe this happened?” and all that sort of stuff. But then, on the weekend, I don’t talk about it at all. I’m totally detached from it with that group of people.

I think you can get really big-headed and you can get all consumed by it. That’s actually a topic of conversation sometimes in the lobby. You’d be like: “Oh, so-and-so’s got a bit deep into the project.”

The only time that I really found it impossible to switch off, and I found it really draining on me as a person, was during the pandemic. We sort of turned into a bit of a public service broadcaster at the beginning where we had to give information that we didn’t understand, no one really understood. You’d even be calling people in the civil service asking: “Can you explain this?” and they would say to you “no”, because everything was so fast-paced. It was such a drain, I was really working 20 hours a day and I just did not switch off at all. Then we got to the end of the first lockdown and I was haggard.

Why is radio your favourite medium?

A lot of people are finding this in podcasts now, but nothing is the same as live radio being on in your house. You’ve got this singular voice talking to you, it’s as if you’re being spoken to directly in your home, in a way that I think you can get from great writing, but there’s something about [talking to] someone who might be washing the dishes or getting the kids ready for school. Something comes on the radio that interests them and they just stop what they’re doing to listen to it. I think being able to engage people in that way is something you can really only do with radio.

TV is so much harder because if you’re broadcasting on that, or you’re editing a presenter on that, they’re conscious a lot of time about how they look, the sort of facial expressions they’re giving. “Am I sitting up straight? Is my hair in place?” It sounds silly, but there are a lot of distractions. Whereas when it’s radio, you’re really in a room with a microphone. You’ve got to be ten times more interesting than if you were on television because it’s the only sense that you’re actually engaging.

What does PoliticsJOE bring to the kind of media landscape that’s different?

What it brings to the media landscape is the reach. Anyone will tell you that people under 35 don’t engage with news. They do, they just do it on a different medium to the traditional. Someone under 35 is not watching the ten o’clock news and they’re probably not buying a newspaper, but they are constantly on their social media feed and they’re scrolling and they’re picking up a lot of news from that.

Oli has been able to captivate that audience and we’ve been building off of it, especially with things that you wouldn’t typically associate with being interesting to young people. I mean the things that we’ve done with select committees, a lot of those videos on YouTube alone have two million views on them and then if you look across social, we’re getting near to six million. That is not a light that would usually be shone.

When we can deliver something that we think is important and 100,000 people watch it, that’s great. It’s not great because it’s gratifying. I mean, it is partly gratifying, but it’s great because otherwise a lot of people wouldn’t know about this.