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.

Sun Editor Rebekah Wade made headlines herself this week when she moved from the newsroom to the boardroom to become the Chief Executive of Rupert Murdoch’s News International.

It has taken Ms Wade, 41, twenty years to rise from a researcher on the News of the World magazine to become a powerful media mover-and-shaker with close contacts in Westminster and Show Business.

It’s perhaps surprising that the queen of Britain’s red tops has a degree in French from La Sorbonne when you’d imagine that most tabloid editors would assume Ile De La Cite was a fancy pie and mash shop for East End barrow boys.

But there are many linguists on Up To Speed’s list of 75 well-known journalists.

It may seem obvious that if you hope to become a foreign correspondent an ability to speak the language will help. Thomson Reuters has traditionally recruited many of the country’s brightest language graduates to use those skills. The Oxford-educated BBC Diplomatic Correspondent Bridget Kendall must have found her fluent Russian handy when she worked as a Moscow Correspondent. However, if you look at other people on the BBC’s extensive list of high-profile foreign correspondents, you’ll also find that knowledge of the native tongue is regarded as less important than an ability to report from anywhere and to tell a story compellingly. Kate Adie’s degree in Scandinavian Studies from Newcastle has never limited the scope of her reporting to peaceful democracies fringing the Baltic.

Indeed, many language graduates are not ostensibly using their skills at all in their day-to-day jobs. Before they read the news, Fiona Bruce read French and Italian at Oxford and Huw Edwards read French at Cardiff. Their boss at BBC News, Kevin Bakhurst read French and German at Cambridge. BBC presenters Sophie Raworth and Joanna Gosling read Modern Languages at Manchester and Birmingham respectively, Dani Sinha read French and Latin at Bristol.

Channel 4 News’ Brigid Nzekwu took a language degree in London.  

In the field, two of the BBC’s front-line reporters will have found their knowledge of Arabic and Islam invaluable. The former Baghdad Correspondent Caroline Hawley read Arabic at Oxford, while the Security Correspondent Frank Gardner studied it at Exeter.

And while they may not have found it possible to apply their linguistic skills in the modern world, Boris Johnson and Radio 4 Presenter Martha Kearney have clearly put to good use the four years they spent studying Classics on the Greats course at Oxford.

So, languages can be useful in journalism. Quod erat demonstrandum. Tomorrow, we look at journalists who’ve studied zoology, physics and journalism.