Glen Oglaza, "When I Stories" (Pegasus, 2024)

Mar 9, 2026

Glen Oglaza, an award-winning TV reporter and political correspondent with 25+ years at ITN and Sky News and a prolific poet and author. He recalls frontline reporting on the Berlin Wall, Dunblane, miners' strike and other seismic moments. He reflects on newsroom culture, local journalism's lessons, the power of images to change policy, and how reporting shaped his turn to poetry.

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ANECDOTE

Dubček Interview Took Two Weeks And Tape Changes

Securing an interview with Alexander Dubček took two weeks and a skilled interpreter; Dubček then spoke long-windedly about shoe production.
The team had to change camera tapes mid-interview, making editing a challenge for the News at Ten lead.

ADVICE

Credit Producers And Cameramen For TV Stories

Credit producers and cameramen because television reporting is largely logistics and visual framing, not just reporter presence.
Oglaza stresses good producers get you the right place and cameramen see moments the reporter cannot.

ANECDOTE

Reporting With Kurdish Refugees Changed Policy

Oglaza spent weeks with Kurdish refugees after the First Gulf War, sleeping on floors and tents with no toothbrush while refugees froze and starved.
Persistent nightly reporting pressured governments to establish a no-fly zone and provide help.

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As news reporters, we are in the story-telling business, the eye witnesses to history, writing, it's ‎said, ‘the first draft of history'.‎

The fall of the Berlin Wall. Lockerbie. Hillsborough. Dunblane. Mad Cow disease. 9/11. ‎
These are all events that have entered our national, and international, consciousness. Events so ‎momentous that we can all say where we were, what we were doing, when the Berlin Wall fell, or ‎when the planes hit the Twin Towers. Award-winning television news reporter and political ‎correspondent, Glen Oglaza, can say exactly where he was when these events happened. He was ‎there, he had a front-row seat as history unfolded. And in this informative and fascinating account of ‎those years, he allows the reader to be there too. From Thatcher and the miners' strike, to the Gulf ‎War, the Good Friday Agreement and Tony Blair at Number Ten, captivating national and global ‎events are all given an intriguing new inside angle. ‎

Glen Oglaza is an award-winning television news reporter and political correspondent with more than twenty-five years' experience with ITN and Sky News. At ITN, he covered many of the biggest stories of the 1980s and 1990s, and was part of the award-winning ITN teams covering the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the plight of the Kurds in the wake of the First Gulf War, and the massacre in Dunblane. He was BAFTA-nominated for his coverage of the London Poll Tax riot. As a political correspondent, he covered the governments of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron.

Glen is also an accomplished poet with several volumes of poetry published these Religion Fake News and Misdemeanors, No Words, always and his latest collection Spam and other poems.

In this podcast we discuss Glen's books When I Stories and More When I Stories (Pegasus, 2024), starting in local journalism in Television news with ITN and Sky News, and the great events he covered during his career.

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