Kurt Barling

Kurt Barling has been Professor of Journalism at Middlesex University since 2012. He is the Theme Director for Inclusive Socio-economic Development and Enriching Lives through Culture, and a member of the Academic Board. His role is to creatively bring great ideas and people together to stimulate innovation to inform a diverse enterprise culture.

Over 25 years Kurt became a BBC award-winning investigative journalist and film-maker, working across news and current affairs programmes including Assignment, Newsnight, The Money Programme, Today, Black Britain and BBC News. He was BBC Special Correspondent in London from 2001-2014. Amongst his numerous journalism awards, Kurt is particularly proud of the five national RIMA awards for his reporting of diverse communities in Britain, the Caribbean, Africa and the USA, more than any other British journalist.

Kurt is author and editor of four books including the internationally successful Darkness over Germany (2017 edition), an investigation into terrorism Abu Hamza: Guilty and the polemic The R Word: Racism. He is responsible for the Investigation of the Lakanal House Fire website. His more recent academic publications include a chapter on the local reporting of the fire in Media, Journalism and Disaster Communities (2020), chapters in Breaking the News which accompanies the current ground-breaking British Library exhibition (2022) and Putting the Black in Britain back on the BBC (2022). Publication of current research on AI in local journalism is due this year, as is a book chapter on persistent racial inequity in the UK economy.

Kurt is on the board of Park Theatre (Finsbury Park) which produces theatre to talk about and was until recently an adviser to Californian Silicon Valley start-up Knowhere News which was successfully acquired by A16z in June 2022.

Kurt gained a first-class degree in Languages & Politics before graduating with a MSc and PhD from the London School of Economics (& Paris Institut d’Etudes Politiques). He was on LSE staff in International Relations from 1986-89.