Sally Jones (journalist)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sally Jones (born 1954) is a British journalist, television news and sports presenter. She is three-times a world champion at real tennis; once in the singles and twice in the doubles.[1]
Sally Jones was born in Coventry, Warwickshire, and educated at King Edward VI High School for Girls, Birmingham.[2] She read English at St Hugh's College, Oxford, where she won five blues and half blues for different sports including tennis, squash, netball, cricket and modern pentathlon.[citation needed] In 1976, she was Oxford University rock n'roll champion (Oxford Rock Soc) and began tap-dancing with the Oxcentrics jazz band as well as gaining notoriety via a student prank, successfully dressing up as a man to stand for membership of the all-male Gridiron Club.[citation needed]
Sport
Jones was Warwickshire county and British schoolgirls tennis champion (Lawn Tennis Association)[3] and a finalist in the British Under 21 doubles championship (LTA).[4] She played county tennis, squash (Warwickshire, Devon and South Wales squash associations), and netball (Birmingham Schools and Midlands First teams), captaining the Warwickshire senior tennis team for ten years, leading them to the County Championship in July 1997.[citation needed] She won the Sunday Telegraph Travel Writing Prize for an account of a tennis tour of Ireland and two Catherine Pakenham awards for women journalists.[5]
Broadcasting and writing career
During her career, Jones has been a BBC news trainee, a TV reporter at Westward TV, and a TV presenter/reporter for HTV (Wales) where she also made several documentaries, and Central TV in Birmingham where she co-presented Central News and reported on the politics show Central Lobby.[6] She has also reported for ITN and Channel 4 News and has written columns for the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mirror and Today newspapers. In 1986, she became the BBC's first woman sports presenter on BBC Breakfast News and presented for BBC Sport during the 1988 Seoul summer Olympics and for BBC World during the 1992 Barcelona summer Olympics.[7]
She has presented other TV and radio programmes, including several series of On the Line, the daytime show The Garden Party, real tennis documentaries for Channel 4, coverage of women's British Open golf, international tennis, women's rugby and NBA basketball (BBC TV), Transworld Sport (Channel 4) and international gymnastics (ITV). She regularly presented Woman's Hour from Birmingham (BBC Radio 4) and was a member of the BBC Radio 5 Live Wimbledon tennis commentary team during the 1990s. In 2010, she set up Sally Jones Features Ltd, a media consultancy. She has also written several books on local folklore, including Legends of Cornwall (1980), Legends of Devon (1981) and Legends of Somerset (1983).[8]