Sophia Smith Galer

Sophia Smith Galer is an award-winning journalist, writer, speaker, and content creator, credited for pioneering astute, engaging journalism on TikTok.

Recognised in British Vogue as one of the 25 most influential women in the UK and included in the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2022, Sophia was awarded a British Journalism award for ‘Innovation of the Year’ in 2021 for her drive and push for representation in newsrooms for younger audiences and the stories and platforms that matter to them.

In 2024, Sophia was named the winner of the Georgina Henry Award at the Women In Journalism 2024 Awards for Digital Innovation, joining a prestigious list of past winners and becoming an honorary Women in Journalism fellow. She was also nominated for Education Creator of the Year at the first ever TikTok's UK and Ireland Awards, sponsored by Sky.

 Sophia began her career reporting across the BBC World Service, BBC Radio 4 and BBC World News and building Webby-winning BBC social media channels before joining VICE News as a senior reporter, where she was until February 2024. Her multilingual reporting across Spanish, Arabic and Italian has helped her get to the story first in English-language media several times, including her reporting on a catcalling episode in Madrid that won over 25 million TikTok and Instagram views.

 From hour long radio documentaries to viral short-form video, Sophia has produced and presented content on the BBC and VICE News across television, radio and digital platforms. She is a regular commentator across Sky News’ Breakfast Show and Friday Night With Niall Patterson, and other recent broadcasting credits include BBC Radio 4’s The Today Programme, The Blindboy Podcast, and BBC’s Woman’s Hour.

In March 2024, her podcast, Where To Be A Woman, for BBC Outlook and Sounds, launched. Alongside co-host Scaachi Koul, the show pushes past the latest wellness fads to search the globe for the best wellbeing ideas and ultimately asks, where can women live their best lives?

A regular columnist for iNews, she has recently announced her second book, How To Kill A Language, acquired by William Collins, about linguicide and language loss, which will be a passionate, persuasive rally cry for language diversity, offering hope that a multilingual, and future, is possible.

Her exclusive reporting across health and technology has led to platform changes everywhere from TikTok to the NHS website, and her journalism around sexual and reproductive health has led to the exposure of British anti-abortion funding as well as the UK government’s secret withdrawal of millions of pounds of sex education funding. She was the first journalist to report the misuse of political ads on TikTok during the 2020 US election, which was broadcast in her first television documentary The TikTok Election.

Sophia frequently appears as an expert on media innovation, sexual health reporting and TikTok across British news media. She is the only reporter in the UK to be both HEFAT trained to handle hostile environments and accredited via acet UK to deliver sex education, following the publication of her book Losing It: Dispelling the Sex Myths that Rule Our Lives. It was published by Harper Collins in 2022 to critical acclaim and was a No.1 Amazon bestseller in its category. She became a Visiting Fellow in 2023 for Brown University’s Information Futures Lab where she has developed resources for combating misinformation and misogyny in British schools that she delivers personally.

An experienced and engaging speaker, covering innovation and disruption, generational communication, gender equality, how to navigate mis-and-dis information, and the state of influencer culture & its ethics, Sophia first spoke internationally about her work when she was invited to give a speech in Arabic at the United Nations Headquarters in New York aged just 22.

Over the last few years, she has delivered talks from the Royal Festival Hall to Google. She also chairs panels across the year, including at the Cheltenham festivals and the Web Summit, and has hosted Q&As with everybody from the CEO of Only Fans to trainspotter Francis Bourgeois.