Paul joined the BBC in 2001, making his first live appearance on the day of 9/11. He covered the corporate scandals that followed: Enron and Worldcom.
His groundbreaking reports on the rise of China as an economic power won him the Wincott Award in 2003. He has covered stories as diverse as Hurricane Katrina, gang violence on Merseyside, the social impact of mobile phones in Africa and the rise of Aymara nationalism in Bolivia.
Paul was one of the BBC’s first bloggers and has twice been nominated for the Orwell Prize.
He covered the collapse of Lehman Brothers live from outside its New York HQ and, “has hardly stopped for breath since then”, reporting on the social and economic impact of the global meltdown from the mean streets of Gary, Indiana to the elite salons of Davos.
Heis Newsnight's Economics Editor and broadcasts across the corporation, describing his brief as one that covers an agenda summed up as: "profit, people and planet".
Born in Leigh, Greater Manchester, in 1960 he studied music and politics at Sheffield University, switching to journalism in the early 1990s. He spent a total of nine years covering business in specialist magazines and newspapers before making the move into TV.
He was deputy editor of Computer Weekly, a campaigning magazine whose investigative team regularly creates waves across government and industry.
Prior to becoming a journalist Paul was a professional musician and lectured at Loughborough University of Technology.
He is the author of two books: Live Working or Die Fighting, How the working class went global; and Meltdown: The end of the age of greed.