A #MeToo and PTSD surivor, Hannah Storm knows that compassion and connection can help companies create cultures where everyone feels safe and where individuals and institutions can go from surviving to thriving. By sharing her journey as a journalist, she shows how she was conditioned by a culture that left her exposed to sexual violence and how she converted the complex traumas of her career into compassion. In offering her experiences, she explains how coded language and cultures continue to create blind spots for well-meaning workplaces. Her own powerful story helps normalise much-needed conversations around mental health, highlighting that vulnerability is a strength.

Hannah Storm is a journalist, media consultant, keynote speaker, and sought-after moderator, specialising in authentic leadership and creating safer work cultures.

The founder and co-director of Headlines Network, Hannah set up the company to normalise conversations around mental health in journalism, after her own experiences of power abuses, sexual violence and trauma left her feeling alone and ashamed.

The former CEO of the International News Safety Institute, Hannah has facilitated conversations among some of the world’s leading news organisations, focussed on ensuring the safety of their journalists in conflict, disaster and online. As the director of the Ethical Journalism Network, she has supported journalists under attack from autocratic regimes and attacks on their profession, and advocated for greater accountability, accuracy and humanity in media practice, in underscoring press freedom and democracy.

Hannah has worked with some of the world’s leading news organisations in dozens of countries, helping leaders build holistic, but flexible strategies to keep people and organisations well and recognise safety means different things depending on people’s history and identity. Her natural empathy, compassion, and ability to speak several languages, help her facilitate conversations and create inclusive spaces where everyone feels safe, if they choose, to share their experiences of mental health.

In her role at INSI, Hannah co-authored the first study into moral injury and the media for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, which also published ‘The Kidnapping of Journalists’ which she co-wrote. She came up with the idea for, and co-edited, ‘No Woman’s Land: On the Frontlines with Female Reporters’, the first book dedicated to the safety of women journalists.’ Hannah has written and been interviewed extensively at the intersection of gender, mental health, physical and online safety, leadership and empathy. For the past several years, she has served as a jury member for the Royal Television Society Awards.  

Hannah began her career at Reuters, as a graduate trainee, before working for The Times, and ITV News. She spent several years as a freelance journalist in Latin America and Haiti, mainly working for the BBC. She has also worked for Channel 4 News, and Oxfam, specialising for the latter in communications and logistics around disaster and the climate crisis, and has worked as a consultant, trainer and speech-writer for the United Nations.  

Most recently, Hannah has authored a book for Routledge: a practical guide for journalists on mental health, to be published in early 2024. 

Outside her media and mental health work, Hannah is an award-winning author of flash fiction, and her debut collection, ‘The Thin Line Between Everything and Nothing’ was published in 2021. Her memoir ‘Aftershocks’ was shortlisted in the Mslexia writing prize, and she occasionally offers writing workshops.

Hannah is also an accomplished marathon runner. In 2023, she started to compete in duathlon, and in her first year at the multi-sport event, she qualified to represent Great Britain for her age group at the World Championships in Australia in 2024.