Alan Saunby

Alan Saunby is a former broadcast journalist for STV Central's regional news programme, Scotland Today, specialising in business.

Saunby began his broadcasting career as News Editor for the Scottish Highlands' independent local radio station Moray Firth Radio in Inverness and was one of the team that launched the station on 23 February 1982.

Saunby worked at Scottish Television as the station's Business correspondent between 1989 and April 2006 when he took voluntary redundancy along with several other Scotland Today journalists during a round of mass redundancies in STV's news division.

During his time Alan has seen a huge amount of change. He says: "I've seen the Scottish economy transformed from a dependency on mechanical engineering and manufacturing into one driven by electronics and its related service industries.The rest - Ravenscraig, Kvaerner, Motorola, Hyundai, United Distillers, Ferranti, etc - you'll know.

"There has been a complete change in the industrial relations environment. When I began, business and industrial reporters seemed to spend most of their times covering strikes."

Alan began working as a journalist at a university radio station, and he became friendly with people who worked in the real thing. His first job, he says: "Came from being in the right place at the right time and accepting a low salary.

"Most of the people I know got into the news business, and after a while couldn't imagine doing anything else. Broadcast journalists are called upon to cover everything under the sun, and the closer you are to a renaissance figure the better; I studied politics, economics and business studies in a broad liberal university education, so I was ready for the challenge."

Alan is endlessly enthusiastic about the challenges of his work. He says: "The most important stories are what's going on in your area, your wallet, the availability of petrol, your company being taken over, your union, your job, your rights, etc. Business news needs to go beyond the surface facts into the background, history, causes and effects, and that can be difficult in a medium dominated by the visual image.

"The challenge is to make important news attractive. To take big issues like the economy and translate them into terms that effect people's lives."

Although his work focuses on Scotland, Alan says some of the best assignments he's been on have been abroad, to Russia and the Soviet Union, as well as the USA and South Africa, jobs he describes as "hard work but fun". He's met some interesting people, including Bishop Desmond Tutu of Cape Town - "A man who kept faith with himself and his people at a time of change in a wonderful country" - and the late Nobel Prize winner, George Stigler, -whom he describes as, "A charming expert on the founder of economics, Adam Smith"

He'd like to interview General Colin Powell, the next US Secretary of State and former Chief of Staff. He says: "Powell is the son of a former Jamaican immigrant who has spent recent years working with hard-pressed communities to bring the excluded aboard. What has he learned from founding his own organisation about involving business in the community? What can reinforce the process? Which ideas work?"

Despite his years of experience, Alan remembers one particularly awkward moment when he went on air.

"Journalists were waiting for a senior politician," he says. "As the door opened your intrepid reporter rushed to head of the waiting hacks and blurted out, 'Mr Rifkind could you...' "Unfortunately, I was talking to Neil Kinnock at the time!"