Jack Gwilym Roberts Email & Phone Number

Greater London, England, United Kingdom

I manage publishing, brand and narrative operations for prestige film company RWF World.In 2014, RWF World sought to deliver all content for Kurdistan Museum, a national institution proposed for Erbil in Kurdistan, Iraq. I was appointed to build the museum's film storytelling platform, KurdistanMemoryProgramme.com, manage the company's digital media division and develop brand identities.The Kurds are the world’s largest ethnic population without a nation-state. They have suffered centuries of persecution and seen their history aggressively suppressed and erased by hostile neighbours. Kurdistan Museum's goal was to conclusively reverse this situation by documenting the Kurdish story for the global heritage. The project launched in 2016 at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco where Daniel Libeskind, architect of the Jewish Museum in Berlin and World Trade Center Master Plan in New York City, revealed a highly innovative building design. It was later selected as one of the outstanding museum projects of the 21st century in a prestigious exhibition at the Musee d‘Art et d’Histoire in Geneva.Plugging into groundbreaking work by world class build partners, I overhauled RWF World’s reservoir of 500+ original documentary films, producing an immersive storytelling hub that definitively visualised the Kurdish national story, incorporating 300,000+ words of professional editorial and a vast image archive. Our work dovetailed with that of Studio Libeskind and exhibition designers Haley-Sharpe Design. It was unveiled at the 2019 public launch of the Kurdistan Memory Programme at BAFTA in London, an event I managed and hosted. Rising to a company leadership role and travelling frequently to the Middle East and the United States, I presented budgets and project goals to the Kurdish government on behalf of RWF World, also taking a central role in the company's public appeal to the President of the United Nations Security Council in New York.

Greater London, England, United Kingdom

I managed the production and distribution of a mass market paperback published by Future Human, a UK imprint devoted to popular science fiction.Our launch title was the epic speculative novel ‘The Wrath of the Blob’. I personally managed all editorial, design and print production duties, delivering mass market distribution in the UK, as well as professional marketing and promotion services. I managed the production of an ebook edition of the same title also. Distributed by Gardners, the UK’s largest books wholesaler, the book has launched universally to wide acclaim, and is currently available in-store at numerous mass retailers including Waterstones, W.H. Smith, Amazon and a wide network of independent booksellers. Elsewhere, the ebook edition is available via Apple Books, Amazon Kindle, Rakuten Kobo and Google Play.

London

I founded Future Human®, a multi-platform media brand sharing intelligence about the radical ideas, people and companies turning our world inside out. Reinventing magazine storytelling as limited, digitally mediated live experiences, Future Human ran 40+ sold out talk events at The Book Club and Google Campus in Shoreditch. Presented by myself and guest hosts, these generated passionate conversation, trending topics and column inches, attracting a plugged-in audience of media creatives, tech executives and startup founders. The Sunday Times commended our groundbreaking participative events as ‘a deeply cool blend of intimacy, anarchy and intellectual nourishment’, while Time Out branded us as ‘hip and intellectual.' Meanwhile, the influential blog Le Cool commended our 'theatre of innovation' for offering ‘a rhapsodic mental tune up for future events’.Each FH event addressed a disruptive idea, pattern or technology, from social media psycho-economics ('Social Animals') to the mobile Internet's impact on the art market ('Instant Art'). A personal favourite was ‘Transparent Life’, investigating the capabilities of emerging visual data technologies such as AR to merge our digital and physical worlds – a full decade before the launch of the Vision Pro.Guest alumni included advertising industry legend Cindy Gallop, solar entrepreneur Jeremy Leggett, authors Naomi Alderman and Cory Doctorow, and the musician Matthew Herbert. We launched a popular podcast on SoundCloud, ‘The Future Human Podcast’, whose audio journalism further explored topics such as data journalism and industrial 'gamification'.We also debuted ‘Match’ at Google Campus. Match was a social creativity game inviting players to ‘meet new people and change the world’, connecting intelligent strangers to solve existential problems facing legacy industries.Future Human continues to produce 'white label' projects, with clients incl. RWF World, Anheuser–Busch InBev and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK).

London

As co-architect of the ‘Entrepreneurial Journalism’ module for MA Journalism students, I delivered a new interdisciplinary pathway for students to combine journalism, business, design and technology knowledge sets.In 2011 Dr Barbara Rowlands and Dr Tim Meldrum, respectively programme directors within the postgraduate Journalism and Business schools at City, introduced a plan for an ambitious new pilot programme. Their concept was to merge the commercial expertise of City's Business school with the publishing and broadcasting know-how of its world-renowned journalism department. Initially myself and the BBC’s Elinor Shields, former editor of the Huffington Post, were recruited to enhance City’s offer by integrating ideas and methodologies from contemporary multimedia publishing, transferring ‘out-of-discipline’ knowledge and tools to MA students. The plan was to equip them with new tools and skills to bootstrap media startups.By 2012 my role had grown more fundamental. As a visiting lecturer working part time and in close collaboration with faculty, I was commissioned to write, launch and then teach the new 'EJ' module to more than 200 postgrad students, completing the work over a 3 year period. Architecting course content and evaluations, I booked leaders in the business, media, design and technology industries to mentor students as they developed business plans for media companies. These ventures were informally pitched at the end of the course and evaluated by industry judges, with an ultimate vision to create funding pathways via small stakes equity investment and initiatives with future technology partners. The innovation of the 'EJ' concept attracted national press interest, with the Independent newspaper stating the interdisciplinary brand of education we instituted could potentially ‘change the very nature of journalism’.

I was commissioned by the V&A to produce a limited run podcast interviewing futurological thinkers entitled, 'Visionaries'. Working with partner institutions Z33 Belgium, The Wellcome Collection and The Arts and Humanities Research Council, I curated a 12 episode podcast run featuring interviews with nanotechnologists, synthetic biologists, roboticists, brand strategists and urban architects. In a weekly format running throughout 2014, myself and co-host Ben Beaumont-Thomas presented a show exploring topics such as artificial consciousness, autonomous mobility, biomimetics, and the future of the museum as a ‘post-institutional’ construct.

Greater London, England, United Kingdom

I founded and helmed creative media publishing company Good Publishing Ltd. for five years. Good Publishing connected ABC1 audiences with compelling narrative experiences. The company produced projects across multiple media and production fields, from digital multimedia to print and events, combining self-initiated ventures with full service creative agency work. We also offered consultancy services for clients seeking to implement innovation strategies in the field of creative media. Clients included the V&A, Red Bull, Channel 4, French Connection, Filemaker (Apple), Festival Republic, Hendrick's Gin, Diesel and Lee Jeans, amongst others.Good Publishing was perhaps best known for publishing the cult magazine Bad Idea, which ran from 2006 to 2009 and was lauded in The Observer for ‘hacking itself a niche as a Granta for the MySpace Generation’. The Guardian found Bad Idea 'eye-opening', while Tom Hodgkinson, founder of The Idler, described it as 'shocking, beautiful and fascinating'. In 2008 Good Publishing assisted the production of the critically acclaimed paperback 'Bad Idea: The Anthology' and was in the same year awarded the prestigious D&AD pencil for its exceptional art and design output. Good Publishing projects received coverage in several major newspapers, magazines and websites. A small sample can be viewed below via a desktop browser.

London

I conceived and founded Bad Idea magazine, taking it from a pub conversation in 2004 to a fully funded professional concern between 2006 and 2009. I worked as editor and publisher of the globally distributed print magazine, assisted by my co-collaborator Daniel Stacey. Billed as the home of 'modern storytelling', our publication reinvigorated literary journalism by documenting the shifting currents of fame, money and power shaping the lives of Gen X and Millennial professionals. Reflecting on Bad Idea in 2009, The Spectator magazine concluded it was 'a damn sight more lively than most of the dreary material pumped out by the mainstream press as it stumbles into oblivion.'The magazine was inspired by the pioneering editor and publisher Clay Felker, a personal friend and mentor who transformed the American magazine landscape in the 1960s and 1970s by nurturing the 'New Journalism' movement. Another inspiration was Nick Logan, founder of The Face. While preparing a funding pitch, we consulted Logan who gave valuable advice but said launching a print publication in 2006 was insanity. From early meetings with industry leaders we came away with a title, 'Bad Idea', which readers found baffling yet memorable. It stuck.Over the years Bad Idea featured contributions from a number of top class authors, journalists, photographers and artists. These included Sarah M. Broom, Patrick Neate, Mil Millington, Nikesh Shukla, Nicholas Royle, Niven Govinden, Sam Jordison, Rose George, Jean Hannah Edelstein, Ed Hogan, John Rapley, Laura Barton, Lauren Gard, Alyssa McDonald, Simon Wheatley, Jonas Bendiksen, Sebastian Meyer, Chris Bianchi, Bill Bragg, and Neal Fox. Alongside the established names, many new talents were published for the first time in our pages. Publishing milestones included raising angel funding, Arts Council funding, and distributing 22,000+ copies to the UK, Europe, North America and Australasia via Comag, Disticor, Selectair, and direct to retail deals.

I commissioned and wrote a series of business innovation profile features for Esquire magazine, working intermittently over a 12 month period from Manchester and London in the UK, and New York and California in the United States.Published features included in-depth interviews with the Nobel winning economist Paul Krugman, historian Niall Ferguson, British cycling performance director Sir Dave Brailsford, 'The 48 Laws of Power' author Robert Greene, and entrepreneur Richard Branson.Following its publication in Esquire, the Independent newspaper serialised the profiles in a sequence entitled 'Rebooting Britain'.

After five editions of Bad Idea, I signed a deal to publish a mass market paperback anthology with Pavilion Books, then known as Anova Books.The speed at which we received a commercial book deal for an anthology remains a record in the UK magazine industry. I commissioned and edited the book's contents, and contributed a 6,000 word narrative feature on the extraordinary life of German undercover journalist Günter Wallraff, who I interviewed in Cologne. The title launched in May 2008 with a public event at the V&A museum in South Kensington and was reviewed widely. 'The discerning anarchy of editors Jack Roberts and Daniel Stacey has seen Bad Idea magazine hack itself a niche as a Granta for the MySpace generation.'– The Observer, 1/6/2008'From Patrick Neate's thoughts on why cricket is such a great source of metaphor and Laura Barton's notes on the murky operations of a coroner's court, this is a great selection of work.'– The Independent on Sunday, 15/6/2008 'Roberts and Stacey pull real red meat, and much tasty junk food, from their London-based endeavour... Lauren Gard chronicles her career transition from journalist to private detective in "The Honeytrapper" while Sarah M. Broom's "New Orleans Lost and Found" looks at her family's attempts to adjust post-Katrina... This showcase for a new generation of writers makes compulsive reading.'– Publishers Weekly (USA), 1/9/2008

I worked as a producer on the Emmy Award winning PBS Frontline World documentary 'Saddam's Road to Hell', working from London with British company RW Films. Comedian Jon Stewart handed the film its Emmy award for Investigative Journalism at a 2007 ceremony in New York, and I personally received a plaque from the American National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences recognising outstanding production work. Production saw me travel to northern Iraq for extended periods, which I reached by road via the land border with Turkey. The film itself followed a road trip across the most dangerous parts of Iraq at the height of the insurgency, and attempted to reveal what had happened to the 8,000 missing Barzani Kurds who had been abducted by Ba'ath party in 1983 – a significant precursor to Saddam Hussein's 'Anfal' campaign of genocide against the Kurdish people. The documentary was the first to uncover Kurdish mass graves in Sunni controlled districts of southern Iraq, using oral testimony and documents obtained from secret service archives in Baghad, Mosul and Erbil. Research conducted by our team was later included as evidence in the trial of Saddam Hussein for crimes against humanity.

London, England, United Kingdom

I wrote longform journalism features for the Telegraph Media Group.These covered business, media, technology and the arts, and saw me interview a number of public figures, ranging from Lemmy from Motörhead to the entrepreneur Peter Jones. The job alternated between full-time and part-time employment at The Sunday Telegraph, with my work for the Daily Telegraph generally conducted on a freelance basis. My initial appointment was as an editorial assistant in the Property section before working my way up to the features desk. I also occasionally stepped in for the newspaper's film critic Catherine Shoard to share film reviewing duties with novelist Zadie Smith. Aside from reporting, editorial work and features programming, I was frequently tasked with booking cover interviewees for the Sunday Telegraph's culture magazine, and attended executive meetings under the Dominic Lawson and Sarah Sands editorships.

London, England, United Kingdom

Bachelor Of Arts, First Class Honours, American Literature

4.0. Gpa

Study Abroad Programme.