Helena Wadia chose "People's Faces" by Kae Tempest as her song of hope. It's a song about what actually saves us - not stuff, not safety nets of money, but the faces of the people in our lives. It's also a song that keeps evolving: every time Kae performs it, new lines appear, new distinctions are drawn. When Helena first heard it in 2017, the lyric was "oppressor and oppressed." Now it's "oppressor, complicit, and oppressed." That shift, she says, is everything. This episode moves from the personal to the political and back again. Who decides which stories matter and what happens when we change the lens? Helena has spent her career trying to answer that question, first in legacy newsrooms where her pitches about women, trans people, and communities of colour were repeatedly told they weren't "relevant," and now through Media Storm, the podcast she co-created with Mathilda Mallinson to do journalism the way it should be done: from lived experience, with the people at the centre rather than as an afterthought. Helena Wadia is a multimedia journalist and award-winning presenter working across print, video and audio. She co-hosts and co-created Media Storm with Mathilda Mallinson, a podcast that puts people with lived experience at the centre of news stories, teaches media literacy through "news watches," and has built a devoted audience of listeners who wanted the news to feel like it was actually for them. Helena spent years as a news anchor on London Live's News at Six and presented NME's In Conversation series. Her work has appeared across the Evening Standard, Channel 5 News, BBC Asian Network, The Independent, The Line of Best Fit and more. She specialises in feminism, race issues, and social justice and as of this year, she is also the new co-host of the Drowned in Sound podcast. Helena talks about what it took to leave a stable journalism career behind: the moment she and Matilda looked at forty articles about refugees, not one of which quoted an actual refugee, and decided to do something different. She talks about how the left/right divide is less a political reality than a system designed to keep people from realising they share most of the same values. She reflects on her own route into music - Top 40 until 17, when an ex-boyfriend played her the Pixies and sent her on "a huge journey," eventually to Bristol, to the student music press, and to journalism. She speaks honestly about the difficulty of resting while reporting on Gaza, and why she's come to understand that community - a gig, a choir, a friend you call - is the only kind of rest that actually works. And she ends with a message for the future, tattooed on her body: "it takes an ocean not to break." This podcast is part of the Drowned in Sound network, and was produced by Sean Adams and edited by: tell.studio (Phil, Louisa, Owen, Matt) Helena Wadia https://www.linkedin.com/in/helena-wadia-4a653889 Media Storm podcast https://mediastormpodcast.com/about-us/ Recorded remotely. Find out more and follow the show: https://linktr.ee/soundslikechange
