Linden Birns

Kenyon International specialises in disaster and crisis response, offering a range of services from forensic pathology and victim identification to crisis communications. It is on call to numerous governments, state agencies, airlines and corporates around the world. I am a member of its Crisis Communications team responsible for providing training and support to clients.

I run a small but focussed PR agency and am also responsible for managing our major accounts. Activities include media relations in South Africa and several sub-Saharan countries, strategic planning and execution, business intelligence and analysis.

I was the editor, co-publisher and author of five non-fiction coffee-table books on South African aviation & aerospace. I was also a co-producer and reporter for several TV actuality items and three AirReport TV programmes aired on M-Net (Southern Africa) in 1996. I closed the business after my AirReport partner (also the chief photographer and designer) was killed in a plane crash in Feb 1998.

I covered investigations into state-sponsored assassination hit-squads, the township wars around Johannesburg during 1990-92, extra-parliamentary politics (far-right to ultra left-wing) and later specialised in aerospace, air transport, defence and security. During this period I also provided news photographs for the paper. My pictures were published in several foreign papers, eg. LA Times and I was runner-up in the Illford photographer awards. I also spent considerable time as acting night news editor

Producer and Creative Director for a TV production company in Manchester, UK. Sepia specialised in corporate videos, commercials and instructional/training programmes. I left the company in 1990 to return to South Africa to work as a journalist.

Initially as a freelance radio presenter on Radio South West Africa anchoring weekend sport and evening music programmes. Subsequently joined the TV News department as a full-time reporter and on-screen presenter covering Sport and later also Business. Resigned in 1989 after disagreement with the Director-General of the corporation over the fact that we broadcast news of a bombing in downtown Windhoek. I subsequently moved to the UK to escape the censorship by the Apartheid securicrats.

General news and crime desk reporter on The Star (South African daily newspaper) and later Sunday Star (weekend edition). Worked on the paper in July 1985 and Nov/Dec '85. Later freelanced for the newspaper from Namibia.

Journalism, feature writing, radio journalism & actuality production, TV news and documentary production, film animation.