Ben Hammersley
Technologist, Journalist and Broadcaster

Ben Hammersley is a British journalist, broadcaster, photographer, and technologist, currently based between London, England, and Florence, Italy. Ben is also Head of Digital for SIX Creative, a full-service creative and design agency, with clients including Armani and Marks & Spencer

He is founder of Dangerous Precedent Ltd, a digital-media design practice, and Editor at Large of WIRED magazine. He is also a freelance reporter for the BBC: he previously worked as the first Internet reporter for The Times, where he was shortlisted for one of the British Press Awards, and as a reporter for The Guardian and the UK arm of MSN.

During his early career, he specialised in technology journalism. Hammersley often reported from dangerous countries. He worked in Iran and Afghanistan. After travelling undercover to interview the Burmese opposition leader and Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, Hammersley moved toward war correspondence and foreign reporting.

In April 2008, Hammersley announced the founding of a company named Dangerous Precedent, with the strapline "Telling Truth With Beauty", promising a launch in Summer 2008 - though no other information has been forthcoming. Around the same time, at his geekyoto conference, it was announced that he was acting as a consultant at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, although the exact nature of his work there is shrouded in secrecy. Hammersley is a Fellow of the RSA, and a member of the Savage Club and Frontline Club.

Multimedia reporting and broadcasting

In 2003, Hammersley blogged from Afghanistan. In 2006, Hammersley was embedded with both British and American troops in Afghanistan, shooting video for The Guardian as a multimedia reporter for Guardian Unlimited. In June 2007, Hammersley was the reporter in an experiment in multimedia journalism for the BBC. Reporting from Turkey in the run-up to the general elections there, he reported for BBC World, and the BBC World Service, while also placing behind the scenes video online. A 30 minute documentary entitled "Turkish Journey" was later shown on BBC World and BBC News 24. In August 2007, he was reporting for the BBC World Service from Mindanao in the Philippines, notably staying with the Philippine marines on the island of Basilan as they searched for members of Abu Sayyaf.

Hammersley writes and presents documentaries on BBC Radio 4's documentary strand Analysis, covering Facebook in November 2007, and personal genetic testing in December 2008. Hammersley also contributed the multimedia reporting chapter to the book "International News Reporting", published by Blackwell Publishing. After returning to London in late 2007, Hammersley started working as the Foreign Correspondent for the UK arm of MSN, starting with coverage of the 2008 Pakistan General Elections.

Photography

Ben Hammersley works in two very differing photography fields: conflict coverage, and fashion and portraiture. Apart from the photography taken during multimedia reporting trips, in 2007 he travelled to Beirut to photograph Hezbollah, and to the Philippines to cover the Basilan conflict. Hammersley's portrait and fashion photography is mostly studio based. He held two exhibitions in Florence, Italy during 2007, and is currently working on long-form story based fashion imagery in London.

Writing, Speaking, and Technology

Hammersley was the author of six technical books and programmers' guides, notably with O'Reilly Media. He has been influential in the Social media and RSS communities, writing the first book on the latter subject. Other books have covered Blogging and the inner workings of Gmail. Latterly, his writing has moved onto foreign news and multimedia reporting techniques. Between 2004 and 2006, he designed, built, and maintained the weblogs of The Guardian, including Comment is free. He is attributed with the first warchalking in the wild, on a street corner in Kensington, London in June 2002, where he ran one of the first wireless community network in London. Hammersley also regularly contributes to congresses and conferences, such as the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention and the Global Investigative Journalism Conference. In May 2008, he hosted and co-organised the geeKyoto conference in London.

He coined the term podcasting, in an article for The Guardian. It was later the New Oxford American Dictionary word of the year for 2005. Hammersley also built, and currently runs, the website for the Serpentine Gallery in London. He also works on digital strategy for the Frontline Club, of which he is a founder member.

Ben has spoken at many conferences and events including the following:

The Confederation of Danish Industry, Copenhagen
Mindshare, London
Central Saint Martins, London
Royal College of Art, London
GRID Stockholm (Bonnier Media Group), Stockholm
The Do Lectures, Cardigan
Reboot, Copenhagen
Web 2.0, Berlin
Picnic, Amsterdam
Emerging Tech, Santa Clara
Open Source Con, Portland Oregon
Les Blogs, Paris
Le Web, Paris
Guardian Changing Media Summit, London
Nordic Media Summit, Bergen
Fundamentos Web, Spain
Nokia, Helsinki
News Standards Summit, Philadelphia

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