Kirsty Styles

Kirsty worked for five years as a technology journalist in London covering mobile, startups and tech giants. Here, before many people knew these issues were coming, she focused on ethical questions of technology, such as its economic, environmental and social impact, which included creating a standup comedy show about her concerns. 

In 2015, alongside working as a journalist, she created an award-winning, jargon-busting podcast on economics for the New Economics Foundation think tank, the Weekly Economics Podcast. The podcast was listened to hundreds of thousands of times during her time at the front, was reviewed in the Guardian and, among many other things, we looked at tech giants and tax, and feminist economics.

Following this, in 2017, on International Women's Day, she launched a public speaker programme for women in tech in the North called Northern Voices, in order to change the image of tech jobs. This intervention was celebrated by the Minister for Digital and is about to become a published, academic study.

In 2018, as the UK’s first community organiser of a collaborative investigation network, Kirsty helped the Bureau of Investigative Journalism's Bureau Local open up its data journalism work to the public for the first time.

She's currently completing a Masters, where she's interrogating the idea of 'public journalism' - partially through comedy - where she's borrowing from a highly successful public engagement intervention done by University College London, in order to launch a new journalism training programme.