A Day In The Life… Rianna Croxford, BBC News Investigations Correspondent

To say Rianna Croxford is a rising star would be an understatement, Her work as investigations correspondent for BBC News — after becoming the broadcaster’s youngest-ever network correspondent at just 25 — has spawned a fully-fledged FBI investigation into sex trafficking at Abercrombie & Fitch, bagged her multiple prestigious journalism awards, and a place on Forbes’ coveted 30 Under 30.

A force to be reckoned with, we caught up with Rianna at the Student Publication Association‘s National Conference 2024 to talk about a day in the life of an investigations correspondent, and what she wished she had known before embarking on her career.

What does your typical day look like?

There is no typical day; the only thing that is typical is that I’m probably going to have several phone calls with different sources about different projects.

I tend to have both what I call short-term, medium-term, and long-term projects on the go. So, something that could have quite a quick turnaround, something that I know might take a bit longer, and something that I have no idea where it’s going to go — it’s going to be quite tricky, I can’t really put a timescale on it. At the moment, I’m still working on a podcast about Abercrombie & Fitch, so part of my day is speaking to sources about that, while also thinking about how to structure our next podcast episodes.

Sometimes, I have pitch meetings; for example, if I’ve been working on a project for long enough, I might be pitching it to Panorama, or a podcast partner, or to BBC News itself to get a commission. Sometimes I’m working from home, sometimes I’m in the office, sometimes I’m on the road, sometimes I’m in a recording studio.

I just got back from the States where I was doing a filmed TV interview, so sometimes it’s logistics — setting up interviews, preparing interview questions — and then typically interviews can be quite long because, doing investigations, you ask quite detailed questions. So yeah, no two days are the same.

Which story are you most proud of to date?

I probably am most proud of the story around Abercrombie & Fitch. It centred the voices of people we rarely hear about when it comes to abuse. During that time, while I was reporting, I heard a lot about how men can face a double stigma when it comes to speaking out: feelings of shame, feeling stigmatized, but also, at the same time, fighting gender stereotypes around not being tough enough to fight back.

People often said things like: “You’re a guy, how could you allow something like this to happen to you?” That was quite an experience and I thought those stories mattered and did matter.

Being able to work on something like that, I got a lot of emails and messages from people, members of the public, from other male survivors. I still do. I’ve also gotten them from people just saying that they are grateful that these experiences are being heard. Sometimes they share a part of themselves with me as well and tell me what happened to them, just because they feel like they can and they find that quite freeing. It’s probably what I am most proud of.

I think part of our job is to serve the public interest and to ask those tough questions and where possible hold people, hold power to account. I feel like I had served my purpose through that story. I think because the Abercrombie story took so long, I’m also trying to kind of think back to my life before it. That makes sense, because I had two birthdays while working on it.

Is there anything that you would have done differently throughout your journalism career?

It’s really difficult. Sometimes, I wonder what my career would have been like if I stayed in newspapers for longer. I worked in print for six months before I moved into broadcasting. I absolutely love broadcasting but I do find the culture of print very different. It can feel a lot more collegiate; I say that from the perspective that broadcasting sometimes can feel like a battle of egos, with people being on air and all of those sorts of things. In a paper, it felt a lot less like that.

I’m not a very egotistical person at all. I like just getting on with a good story and digging and investigating. I quite like the culture of that and I wonder how my career may have looked if I had stayed in that for longer.

There isn’t anything massively that I think I would have done differently because I’ve always stayed true to myself, true to my principles and also I’ve always been fair and accurate with what I’ve done. I’ve also stayed open-minded — so there isn’t anything more probably that I would have changed.

What’s one thing you would recommend to any student looking into going into reporting or news?

The one thing I probably would have changed (and the one thing I probably would recommend every student journalist to do, especially if you’re looking to go into reporting or news) is just to clean up your social media.

As students, for some reason, we love hot takes and I know we’re at university to develop opinions, find ourselves, and figure out our identities. All of that stuff is great, but if I had known once upon a time that somebody would unearth tweets that I had put out that, if I’m being honest, couldn’t even remember at the time, and found those to be weaponised, I’d definitely say clean up your social media — be professional about what you put out.

Obviously, it depends on what kind of reporting you want to go into; there are some beats where it’s great to have an opinion and that’s what your brand and your work is defined by. But, I think if you’re looking to go into news and investigations, you don’t really want to have an opinion. You never want to do a story where you face the risk that somebody says your bias is because of X. That risks undermining everything that you’ve done — and you don’t want to become the story yourself.

What would you say to students who are making that jump from print journalism into broadcasting and reporting?

I guess staying multi-skilled. The most exciting thing about broadcast is that you get to work in so many different mediums. I love writing for radio, I love print and online, I love TV,… but they’re all very different modes of storytelling.

So, I’d say, always staying ahead of the trend, getting to work with a lot of different social media platforms, what works and then what doesn’t. I think wherever you are continually learning and pushing yourself and self-development is key.

Is there anything that you change about the British publication industry?

There isn’t anything that I would drastically change. The one thing that I would like to see more of, and I think most newsrooms would, is diversity. And that’s not just from the ethical standpoint of: “Oh it’s good.” I think there are values, there are monetary benefits, for an organisation to be able to appeal to different audiences, to bring in subscribers.

If you’re not catering to everyone, what’s the point? There’s no point speaking to an echo chamber. You want to bring in new voices, you want to bring in new talent, you want to connect with different groups, whether that’s younger audiences, ethnically diverse audiences, people from different backgrounds.

I shouldn’t be able to count on my hands the number of journalists of colour in certain spheres or covering certain spheres.

What are your thoughts on the dichotomy of the power on social media? It’s a very powerful tool for investigations — but it massively contributes to the spread of misinformation.

I feel like a few years ago, it was a lot easier to use social media as a news-gathering tool, particularly on platforms like X (formerly known as Twitter), where you could use software like TweetDeck and be able to find people in certain locations, get some geodata to help locate where something is.

A lot of those tools don’t exist anymore, so that’s a lot harder. I think it’s good to be on those platforms, even if you aren’t actively engaging with them, because I think it’s always interesting to hear different viewpoints from people on all sides of the political spectrum, and, as a journalist, it’s our job to listen and reflect different perspectives.

At the same time, I think people can be too hasty to tweet sometimes. Being on those platforms shouldn’t mean that we forget our principles when it comes to journalism: to be accurate, primarily, to be fair, to be balanced.

I do think it’s good that we have seen some social media platforms move towards adding things like community notes, where they flag information that you might want to reassess or review, or that may be potentially inaccurate, but I think with most things, we need to be inquisitive about everything that we read or that we see.

As a woman of colour in journalism, have you faced any specific sort of backlash due to your identity?

It’s tough. I think when I first joined the industry, I naturally felt a lot of imposter syndrome. You don’t see a lot of people from backgrounds like yours. Actually, I felt like at times, I quietly took on a persona. I don’t want to say [that] in a performative way, but, I definitely had to give myself little mantras.

You just have to be in this space; your voice matters and how you think. If we work better as newsrooms, if you can bring yourself to work, and we can all challenge each other’s viewpoints, it makes it better when you’re interrogating a story, when you’re interrogating analysis, and even just trying to figure out what is the story as well.

I definitely feel like I’m less active on social media in some ways than I once was — because of some of the experiences I’ve had in terms of racial abuse. I find it frustrating acknowledging that, but, for me, that is a protective measure to be able to get on and do my job.

Would you consider yourself to be a feminist, and is that something you take into account when you work, or is that something that you leave at the door?

Most of my work focuses on voices that we rarely hear, communities that can feel marginalised or underrepresented, and I think, if anything, I’ve always remained open-minded to that. I guess I look and try to see the perspectives that we rarely hear from. I think that is actually what shapes my reporting and makes it different.