Hot Shots 2022: Kiran Moodley

Amid the reverential blanket coverage of the Queen lying in state after her passing, Kiran Moodley found another way to capture the national mood. Rather than a detached view of proceedings or fleeting public soundbites, he joined the queue at 5am, filmed the whole experience on his iPhone and cut a TV piece for Channel 4 News, an extended YouTube video and a podcast, all within two days.

This exemplifies the approach Moodley has taken since joining the programme as an online producer. As host of daily podcast The Fourcast since its launch in 2020, he has doggedly sought out new angles on the biggest stories and uses the strengths of platforms to their fullest, from TikTok and Snapchat explainers to in-depth TV reports.

His keen eye for a story has led him to cover the Washington bureau three times this year, including coverage of the presidential response to the first week of the war in Ukraine.

Moodley has also demonstrated that with the right treatment, audiences will come looking for insight into unfamiliar stories. The Fourcast’s most-downloaded episode of the year was given over to explaining Finland’s foreign policy, with audiences subsequently offered multiple TV reports from Helsinki discussing the country’s application to join Nato.

“Kiran has the wit, depth and knowledge of a consummate veteran broadcaster together with the fresh eyes, the curiosity and the anger of the new generation of broadcasters,” says Channel 4 News head of foreign news Federico Escher. “He embodies the transition to a broadcasting world where the boundaries between television and digital dissolve.”