About

This site is a landing page and portfolio for James Ball and his various projects. It's also a base for Techtris, his occasional newsletter on tech, policy and politics, for which you can sign up below. If you want to email him directly, try jrball1 [AT] gmail (you know the rest).

James' career (the long version)

James has been a working journalist since 2008, though his bylines go back further. His first staff job was on the trade magazine The Grocer (2008-2010), where he covered food manufacturers, supermarket pricing, and commodities.

He was a founding staffer of The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) in 2010, where he contributed to the Bureau's coverage of Chelsea Manning's Iraq War Files – which resulted in a documentary for Channel 4 Dispatches and a series of films for Al Jazeera.

James left TBIJ to work directly with WikiLeaks as a freelancer, in order to work on the publication of 251,000 US State Department cables with a coalition of media outlets around the world. He was there for a short but tumultuous time, which included the publication of the cables, Julian Assange's arrest and detention, the banking blockade of WikiLeaks by Visa and Mastercard, and more. James' account of why he left WikiLeaks is here (WikiLeaks has its own very different version of events).

James spent most of the next five years at The Guardian, in roles including data journalist, its first data editor, then special projects editor, first for the USA and then for the paper as a whole. Coverage in this time included the publication of the Guantanamo Files, a retrospective pull-out on how Margaret Thatcher changed Britain (following her death), as well as the offshore leaks, HSBC Files, Reading the Riots and Keep it in the Ground projects. 

He was on the core reporting team of the Guardian's reporting of the NSA and GCHQ leaks from whistleblower Edward Snowden – which due to UK government pressure, required him to move to the USA for a time (he had previously lived there for six months for the Laurence Stern Fellowship).

Following his time at the Guardian, James joined BuzzFeed UK's newsroom as special correspondent from 2015 to 2017 – departing to focus on his first reported book before the sad demise of the award-winning UK newsroom as a result of its parent company's woes. He then returned to TBIJ as its first global editor, establishing its international reporting teams on global health, big tech, business and the environment.

Today, James is the political editor of The New European and a freelance writer for outlets across the world. His journalism appears in The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Telegraph, The Spectator, New Statesman, The Atlantic, POLITICO, Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, the Columbia Journalism Review, MIT Tech Review and many more outlets.

James has extensive broadcast experience in the UK and internationally, having appeared on BBC News and the News Channel, Sky News, Radio 4 Today, Radio 2's breakfast and drivetime shows, Radio 5 Live, Times Radio, LBC and TalkRadio (plus many local stations). He has guested on BBC HARDTalk, Radio 4's Start The Week and The Long View (during which he was given dispensation to say "bullshit" in a cathedral).

He has appeared on numerous international news shows (including Fox News, RT, and CGTN, at various times for various reasons), and was a featured subject in documentaries including Alex Gibney's "We Steal Secrets" and NBC's "The Circus". He has presented episode of Radio 4's Analysis and Tortoise's Slow News podcast, and was the co-host (alongside Jolyon Rubinstein) of The New Conspiracist.

James' public speaking experience includes the main stage opening night at Web Summit (to an audience of 15,000), Wilderness Festival, Blue Dot, and multiple book festivals. He has spoken at conferences across the world, including the International Journalism Festival at Perugia, America's Investigative Reporters and Editors conference, and has addressed the Institute for Government, Battle of Ideas, MozFest and many others.

James has a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from the University of Oxford, a postgraduate diploma in Magazine / Investigative Journalism from City St George's, University of London, and an LLM in Law and New Technologies from Birkbeck, University of London.

He lives in London with two cats, and yes, he does mostly use this page for when he needs to find a link to something in a hurry.