This is taken from the Daily Telegraph:

JOANNA BUCHAN

Joanna Buchan, who has died of cancer aged 50, was the youngest-ever presenter of the Today programme on BBC Radio 4; a skilled interviewer, perceptive listener and an incisive journalist, her outstanding attribute was her exceptionally warm, rich voice.

As a young radio reporter in Scotland, she was sent to interview Alex Ferguson, then manager of Aberdeen; it was thought amusing that such a gruff and difficult character should be interviewed by someone who knew nothing about football. In the event he was charmed by her.

Later in her career she became Aids correspondent on the World Service; her interest in the subject dated from the death of her best friend, who died of Aids after being given contaminated blood in a French hospital.

When Joanna Buchan was covering an Aids conference in Durban in 2001, Nelson Mandela overheard her talking, recognised her voice and asked to be introduced to her. She was rewarded with an interview.

Joanna Helen Buchan was born in Glasgow on February 1 1957. She was educated at Sacred Heart Convent School and at Aberdeen High School for Girls, where she set a Scottish under-14s record for throwing the javelin which stood for 15 years.

After reading History and English at King's College, Aberdeen University, and a brief stint on a morning show with Northsound, the commercial radio station at Aberdeen, she joined BBC Scotland, where she became the youngest person ever to present Good Morning Scotland, the Scottish equivalent of Today.

Colleagues recognised her talents as soon as she began working for BBC Radio Aberdeen, and it was obvious that in the future she would be broadcasting to a much bigger and wider audience. Her voice - "like crushed velvet" in the words of one admiring editor - was arresting. One fellow journalist described it as "the warmest, richest broadcasting voice I've ever heard".

Broadcasting ran in the family: Joanna's father, James Francis Buchan, had also worked for BBC Television and ended up as Controller for Grampian TV.

In 1988 Joanna Buchan moved to London to work as a reporter on Today and was sometimes asked to present the programme, teaming up with Brian Redhead and John Humphrys.

At Today she was welcomed as a breath of fresh air on a programme noted for its titanic egos. She once breezed into the daily morning meeting - always a serious affair - with a huge smile and a funny story about her "nightmare journey" to work; her sense of humour and compassion always shone through, and she saw the irony in everything.

Just before the Berlin Wall fell, Joanna Buchan was the only member of the foreign media not to be expelled from East Germany. A fluent German speaker, she had travelled there on a tourist visa posing as a history teacher, and carried on reporting for Today until the wall came down.

Told that the Stasi wanted to know more about her, she hurriedly left Leipzig, arriving in Berlin that evening in time to make her way to Checkpoint Charlie, where she witnessed a momentous night of celebration as East and West Germany were united.

From 1990 until 1995 Joanna Buchan's interviewing skills were effectively deployed in Radio 4's award-winning Friday Lives, Tuesday Lives programme, in which she tackled an intriguing collection of guests; among them were a man who had been struck by lightning on three occasions, and a woman who had survived several plane crashes. At about the same time she volunteered to work for Steven Spielberg's Shoah foundation, set up to create a visual history of the Holocaust. She spent many weekends in her spare time interviewing survivors in London and in Scotland, applying her knowledge of history and her skill as an interviewer.

For BBC World Service radio, Joanna Buchan presented, edited, reported, produced and made documentaries. But to most people she was known as the network's authority on Aids, broadcasting her first story on the condition in 1983, only two years after it was identified. She knew everything about Aids, and met many people who suffered from it as well as leading experts; she was knowledgeable about treatment, and about the issues which caused controversy in scientific and political circles.

She played an important part in the World Service Aids season in 2003, which the United Nations acclaimed as "probably the biggest, boldest and most impactful broadcasting response ever to the global challenge of Aids".

But Joanna Buchan was more than a single-subject specialist. She was a voracious reader and a well-informed cinema- and theatre-goer.

During the past five years, despite undergoing debilitating operations and courses of therapy, she fully retained her sense of fun. She refused a funeral.

Joanna Buchan died on March 25, and is survived by her husband, Miro Imbrisevic, a sister and a brother.

This is taken from The Guardian:

Joanna Buchan
Raising the global Aids alert on the radio
by Maxwell Macleod
Monday May 7, 2007

Joanna Buchan, who has died of cancer at the age of 50, was a campaigning journalist who became an expert in HIV and Aids. Through numerous programmes and reports for the BBC World Service, she attempted to educate an often reluctant public about the scale of the illness. She was perhaps better known as the youngest ever presenter of Radio 4's Today programme, which she joined in the late 1980s.

Buchan was born in Glasgow, the daughter of another maverick broadcaster, James Buchan, who became controller of Grampian Television. His work took her to Aberdeen, where she studied at the girls' high school and became a Scottish record holder for under-14 javelin, a title she held for 15 years. She then read English and history at King's College, Aberdeen University.

Her graduation into radio journalism was perhaps inevitable. Born into a house that overflowed with journalists, she loved to talk, was unflappable, had an insatiable curiosity - and was blessed with a voice like crushed velvet. After training at the Aberdeen commercial radio station, Northsound, she was quickly lured to Edinburgh, where, at 26, she became the youngest ever presenter of the BBC's Good Morning Scotland radio show.

Buchan first became interested in reporting on Aids in Edinburgh. At the time the middle classes were in denial at the suggestion that their pristine city had become, in the early years of the disease, a centre where drug users were becoming infected.

In 1988 Buchan moved to London to join the Today team, where she is remembered as a breath of fresh air. Her most well-known report was made after she smuggled herself into East Germany posing as a Scottish history teacher. Sleeping rough on a hotel floor, she was soon arrested, but not before she had managed to report from Berlin as the wall fell. A short time later, she moved to Germany with her husband Miro Imbrieuic to report full time, but she missed Britain and soon returned.

Between 1990 and 1995, she presented the Friday Lives, and then Tuesday Lives, series for Radio 4 and became an active volunteer in Stephen Spielberg's project to record the stories of Holocaust survivors, before moving to the World Service.

There, her renewed concentration on Aids was prompted by her best friend's death from the disease in 1995 after being given a contaminated blood transfusion in a Paris hospital. While investigating the event, Buchan again found herself coming up against the prejudices that she had seen in Edinburgh - and her passion for the subject was rekindled. She attended all the major Aids conferences; in Durban, in 2001, Nelson Mandela thanked her personally for her endeavours.

Buchan contracted breast cancer in 2002 but continued to work. Her last five years were far from easy, and latterly she concentrated solely on Aids stories. She insisted there should be no funeral, only a party. She is survived by Miro and her brother and sister.

· Joanna Helen Buchan, broadcaster, born February 1 1957; died March 25 2007