Lily Evans learned to shoot video on a borrowed DSLR, edit on a laptop that crashed every forty-five minutes, and write scripts in the back seat of a moving car. Ten years later, at thirty-four, she is a Multimedia Reporter whose work spans print, video, audio, and interactive graphics — often within a single story. She does not call herself a one-woman band, but she could produce a week’s worth of coverage from a disaster zone without a single producer, cameraperson, or sound engineer. Her colleagues marvel at her. Her editors rely on her. Her batteries are always dying.
Evans earned her bachelor’s degree in Broadcast Journalism from the University of Leeds, where she spent most of her time in the student television studio rather than the library. She later completed a master’s degree in Digital Storytelling at the University of Copenhagen, a programme that emphasised experimental formats and cross-platform narrative design. During her studies, she produced a short documentary about migrant fishermen in the North Sea that won a student BAFTA and was screened at three small festivals — enough attention to land her first real job.
That job was at a regional news website covering the northeast of England. Evans was hired as a junior reporter but quickly became the unofficial video person because no one else knew how to operate the camera. She drove to breaking news scenes alone, filmed interviews, recorded voiceovers on her phone, and edited on hotel room floors. Her coverage of a devastating coastal flood — combining drone footage, survivor interviews, and animated maps she taught herself to build — was picked up by the national press and viewed over two million times.
At twenty-seven, Evans moved to a national digital outlet as a multimedia reporter. Her assignments took her to refugee camps in northern France, fishing villages in Iceland, and former mining towns in southern Poland. She produced a six-part video series on the hidden costs of fast fashion that involved embedding in a garment factory in Bangladesh, interviewing former factory workers in Leicester, and tracing discarded clothing to a beach in Ghana. The series was shortlisted for the European Press Prize and earned her a nomination for Young Journalist of the Year.
Now, at thirty-four, Evans is known within her newsroom as the person who can do anything. She shoots, edits, writes, narrates, and builds simple data visualisations. She also trains newer reporters in multimedia skills, running informal weekend workshops on lighting, audio capture, and the art of interviewing while holding a camera steady. Her rule for trainees is simple: “If you cannot fix it in the field, you cannot fix it in post.”
Evans has spoken at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, the Online News Association conference in Philadelphia, and the Video Journalism Summit in London. She served as a mentor for the Rory Peck Trust’s freelance safety programme, teaching independent journalists how to back up files in hostile environments. Her work has been featured in two textbooks on multimedia reporting, and she contributed a case study on ethical drone use to the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma.
Colleagues describe Evans as relentlessly practical and eerily calm under pressure. She once filed a three-minute video package from a ferry terminal bathroom stall, using the hand dryer as a makeshift sound dampener. Another time, she edited an entire investigation on a mobile phone after her laptop was stolen from a rental car. She does not complain about these things. She simply solves the problem and moves on.
At thirty-four, Lily Evans represents a new kind of journalist: not a specialist in one medium but a fluent speaker of all of them. She is not chasing a desk job or a management title. She wants to be where the story is, with the tools to tell it properly, regardless of format. And when the story ends, she packs her gear, charges her batteries, and waits for the next call.
