About PJ Coë
PJ Coë is an author and speaker coach, following a career spent interviewing, reporting and working with those at the forefront of change.
PJ’s latest book, Brits Who Shaped America, was published on Amazon for e-book readers in September 2024, and it’s now available on Amazon as an audio book and in paperback.
And you can also read PJ’s take on contemporary America through the prism of history by signing up here for his weekly newsletter, Seen from America.
From the early 1990s to the early 2000s, PJ (short for Peter John) was a principal anchor for the BBC’s national and international TV news channels:
BBC World TV and BBC News 24.
In that time, as well as speaking to prime ministers, ambassadors and social activists, he interviewed key players, witnesses and commentators on all the major world events; from the war in the Balkans to the Rwandan genocide, the 9/11 attacks on America and the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq.
PJ also anchored BBC World Television’s daily business show, World Business Report (WBR).
He covered a variety of developing stories for WBR, from the widening recognition of the climate crisis to the emergence of the internet and subsequent dot-com bust, increasing airline competition, currency meltdowns, and the creation of the World Trade Organization.
PJ’s first screen role was as Finance Editor and host of Money Matters, the first daily business and markets report on British television.
His award-winning reports were screened on Good Morning Britain, the nation’s most popular breakfast show.
PJ went on to become the morning show’s chief studio commentator on finance and economic stories of the day, while also reporting from across Europe and North America. Later, he combined this role with a spell as Business Correspondent and studio anchor for Sky News (UK).
PJ has now combined his experience and insights gleaned from his newspaper, radio and television journalism with a fascination in modern history to pen his new book Brits Who Shaped America.
The book charts the gradual closening of diplomatic and cultural relations between Britain and America from the end of the Revolutionary War to the eve of the First World War. It’s told through the transatlantic interplay of a rich array of characters.
They include the radical English entrepreneur and pacifist Richard Cobbett; the actress Fanny Kemble; the novelist and champion of social reform, Charles Dickens; apostle of the aesthetic movement, Oscar Wilde; Rudyard Kipling; and one of the 19th century’s most influential tabloid journalists, William Stead.
Now based in Philadelphia, PJ’s first visit to the great state of Pennsylvania was in 1988 to report on a series of British takeovers of American firms.
Like many American cities, his report from Pittsburgh came towards the end of decades of economic decline and the loss of over 100,000 manufacturing jobs in the city. Yet, he remembers the prospect of another British takeover there was not entirely welcome.