August 2021: TRUTH
Rebel Book: #76
Book: Catch + Kill by Ronan Farrow
Meetup: Huckletree West, Benk + Bo, Framework, Hop In
Fuel: Toast Ale + Dash Water
Special Guests: BBC Investigative journalists, Gail Champion + Chloe Hadjimatheou
Action: £100 raised for Together Rising
Q+A with BBC’s Gail Champion + Chloe Hadjimatheou | Catch + Kill
Who better to speak to about a huge piece of investigative journalism, than two of the BBC’s finest journalists, Gail Champion + Chloe Hadjimatheou.
Gail Champion is a Senior News Editor at the BBC, where she produces investigative documentaries and podcasts. She is the editor of Radio 4’s ‘File on 4’ programme, and the new BBC Sounds / 5 live podcast: ‘Brixton: Flames on the Frontline‘.
Chloe Hadjimatheou is an investigative journalist at the BBC where, among other things, she has uncovered disabled kids kept in cages, tracked deaths caused by jihadist violence across the globe and told the story of a group of young Syrian boys who took on the Islamic State.
Ben Keene spoke to Gail + Chloe during our virtual event, which for the first time we also streamed live into our Huckletree West meetup in White City, London. It’s fair to say this interview prompted audible gasps and jaw-on-the-floor moments amongst our live meetup crew…!
Thank you so much to Gail + Chloe from everyone at Rebel Book Club. It was such a thrill to hear your stories.
To everyone on RBCTV catch up – here are the best bits, we hope you enjoy them!
Clip 1: Introducing Gail Champion + Chloe Hadjimatheou and their fave nonfiction reads.
Clip 2: Gail + Chloe tell us how they ended up in Investigative Journalism.
“Not having a clue what I was doing, I bought a camera. It was top of the range and it wasn’t even digital, it had a little tape in it… And I hooked it up to a surveillance camera, which had a tiny lens and then I got a job at the hostess club. So I bought a bag, made a hole in it and stuck the camera through the hole…”
CHLOE HADJIMATHEOU ON HER FIRST TASTE OF INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM
Clip 3: Next up, Ben talks to Gail + Chloe about their thoughts on the stories told in Catch + Kill from the point of view of journalists who work in the industry.
Clip 4: Ben digs into how investigations have changed in a post ‘Catch + Kill’ and #metoo world, and the influence of social media and True Crime as popular entertainment.
Find out more about Gail + Chloe’s work
In the following clip, Chloe + Gail put forward two important investigations they worked on and explain why we should check them out…
Here is episode zero of Chloe Hadjimatheou’s ‘Mayday’ from the BBC Radio 4’s Intrigue series:
Here is Gail Champion’s File on 4 episode ‘Transforming Care’, plus its 2020 followup episode:
Introducing Together Rising
Each month we give our members the opportunity to donate the cost of a kindle book to a selected charity, usually associated with our theme. This month we supported Together Rising and donated £100.
“Together Rising transforms collective heartbreak into effective action.
In a world where crises abound and heartbreak is in every community, people who want to help often don’t know where to turn. Together Rising is where to turn.
Whether it’s pulling children out of the sea outside the refugee camps in Greece, helping abandoned kids on the streets in Indianapolis, establishing the first opioid recovery home for pregnant teens in New Hampshire, building a maternal health wing in Port-au-Prince, providing a single mother access to breast cancer treatment, or keeping a foster family’s heat on in Texas — Together Rising identifies what is breaking the hearts of our givers as they look around their world and their community, and then we connect our givers’ generosity with the people and organizations who are effectively addressing that critical need.”
Thank you so much to all of our venue partners who keep our club connecting in curiosity:
If you’re new here, welcome!
We are Rebel Book Club, a global nonfiction book club.
We’ve been reading together for 5+ years and we exist to accelerate your reading habits, connect you with like-minded thinkers + doers and take positive action in a changing world…
We have an event at the end of each month, where we hear from experts in a relevant field to the books we’re reading – which is how this blog post came about.
If you’d like to find out more, check out our website, follow us on Instagram or email our Membership Manager at hello@rebelbookclub.co.uk.
We can’t wait to welcome you aboard!
