The BBC’s Jane Hill has come out on top in Up To Speed’s own popularity poll of British female newsreaders, with 18% of our blog’s readers voting her the best presenter.

BBC's Jane Hill Voted Your Favourite Female Newsreader

We started the poll when BBC bosses were being accused of ageism by female newsreaders who felt they were dropped sooner than their male counterparts.
The results of the poll show our readers aren’t necessarily most impressed by the most highly paid or prominent women who read the news.

Hot on Jane’s heels was Susanna Reid, of BBC Breakfast, with 16% of the vote.

Katie Derham of ITV News came third with 9%.

In fourth place was Fiona Bruce, who is perhaps Britain’s most high profile news and programme presenter. Fiona received 7% of the votes cast by readers of the Up To Speed blog.

Two of Susanna Reid’s co-presenters on Breakfast, Kate Silverton and Sian Williams share 5= with 6% of the votes each.

Coming up just behind them in seventh place is another face from  the BBC and one of Jane Hill’s colleagues on rolling news, Joanna Gosling.

No fewer than five female anchors share the next slot with 4% of the vote each. So, in equal 8th place we have Mary Nightingale of ITV along with her colleague Nina Hossain, up against Natsaha Kaplinsky of Five and two more BBC presenters Mishal Hosain and Dani Sinha.

Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis is holding her own against a brace of GMTV stars – Kate Garraway and Emma Crosby – for fourteenth equal place in the poll.

Kirsty Wark of Newsnight, ITV’s Julie Etchingham and Charlotte Hawkins of Sky each received 1% of the vote and shared 17th place.

A BBC newsreader has announced she is leaving Britain for China, because she feels there is a “culture of ageism” at the corporation, according to the Daily Telegraph.

Susan Osman, 51, has worked on the BBC News Channel, BBC World and on Points West, the regional news programme for the south-west.

Her decision comes two months after reports that the BBC was actively seeking to recruit a female presenter over the age of 50.

Earlier this year, Up To Speed gave details of the university backgrounds of many of the women who front the news as evidence that female British newsreaders certanly don’t deserve to be dismissed as so-called “auto-cuties”.

Today we’ve added to that research by giving the ages of 20 of the most successful female newsreaders. The average age is just over 40.  The authority, gravitas and appeal of newsreaders can have an important impact on the ratings used to judge the success of the programmes they present. And so, we thought it would also thought it would be interesting to run a poll of the twenty people on our list to see who you think is Britain’s Best Female Newsreader.

Oxford comes out top in Up To Speed’s look at the educational backgrounds of 75 leading journalists and one course at the university stands out.

No fewer than eleven people on our list have a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics and ten of them are BBC names. You’ll have seen them on the Six O’Clock News, the Ten O’clock News, BBC4, Newsnight, Question Time and Dragon’s Den.

They are: Zeinab Badawi, Ben Brown, Michael Crick, Evan Davis, David Dimbleby, Guto Harri, Robert Peston, James Robbins, Nick Robinson and Peter Sissons. And over on Channel 4 News you can also find another PPE graduate, Krishnan Guru-Murthy.

In a year that has been dominated by the credit crunch and revelations about MPs’ expenses, it is not difficult to see why editors are keen to snap up people who understand finance and who took the same degree as David Cameron and many of Gordon Brown’s ministers and former ministers.

But once again, many of the people on the list found time at Oxford to make a mark for themselves in other ways. David Dimbleby edited the university magazine Isis, while Peter Sissons, Evan Davis and Michael Crick edited the student newspaper Cherwell. It was in this capacity that Crick gave Nick Robinson a Pushy Fresher Award. Crick was clearly no push-over himself as he later became President of the Oxford Union.

Channel 4 News Presenter Krishnan Guru-Murthy might also have been a contender for a Pushy Fresher Award when he arrived at Oxford as he’d already made a name for himself during his Gap Year. Guru-Murthy had presented Open To Question, part of the Def II strand of Youth Television pioneered by Jane Street-Porter, and went straight into a presenter’s job on Newsround when he graduated.

But a degree in PPE and a father who presented the news on ITN didn’t do the trick for the BBC’s Ben Brown. He was turned down for a traineeship with both ITN and the BBC and claims his first break with Radio Clyde in Glasgow was down to a mix-up with a preferred candidate, also called Ben Brown.

The PPE degree at Oxford does not have an absolute newsroom monopoly. ITV News presenter Katie Derham read Economics at Cambridge. Channel 4 News Presenter and reporter Carl Dinnen was also at Cambridge, where he read Social and Political Science. The BBC’s Justin Webb read Economics at the London School of Economics and Will Lewis, Editor of the Daily Telegraph, read Politics and Economics at Bristol. Former Channel 4 News Ecomonics Correspondent Liam Halligan read Economics at Warwick before taking an MA at Oxford while Sky’s Jeff Randall took an Economics degree at Nottingham. George Alagiah read Politics at Durham and his fellow BBC presenter Jane Hill took the same subject in London.

Although Philosophy may seem like the poor relation when it comes to practical knowledge in journalism, it may have helped Oxford graduate Will Self and NME editor Conor McNicholas, who studied in Manchester, to challenge their readers’ perceptions of the world around them.

With the recession showing few signs of abating and a general election in the offing, there’s little chance that PPE is going to lose its attraction for editors in the near future.