Earlier today, the death of journalist and broadcaster Steve Hewlett was announced by Eddie Mair on Radio 4. He was 58.

Since September last year, when Hewlett had announced he had cancer, he’d been giving Mair a series of interviews describing his various treatments, struggles and trials. The interviews ran fairly regularly on Monday editions of PM, and were very revealing. Hewlett also penned a series of Cancer Diaries for The Observer.

I think I first came across Hewlett in The Guardian. He’d been writing media columns for paper’s Monday media supplement, and he’d appeared regularly as a guest on the Media Guardian Podcast with Matt Wells and John Plunkett. In 2008 he was “poached” by Radio 4 when then controller Mark Damazer started a specific media radio programme. Since then The Media Show became an unmissable appointment for anyone who wanted to follow what was going on in the UK media – from broadcast to print and digital. Hewlett covered it all in his stride, returning to stories when they needed ongoing coverage. For example, he gave regular voice to colleagues of the Al Jazeera journalists held and detained in Egypt, staying with the story until their eventual release. And of course he stayed closely on top of the repercussions of the hacking scandal and the Levison Inquiry, right through to the mess that is IPSO and Impress today.

He always got the best out of his guests, getting to the point and asking the important questions. He explained the issues for a wider audience, but never over-simplified things. The Media Show is mostly live, meaning that although he’d worked behind the camera in the past including famously as an editor of Panorama, he was having to learn the skills of a live production from a presenter’s perspective. Famously, he’d ask final questions to interviewees urging them to respond “Briefly…”

I didn’t know Steve myself. I once got in a lift with him at a hotel in Salford, coming down to breakfast at a Radio Festival. He had a producer in tow, since he was later going to be presenting an episode of The Media Show live from the Festival. I think he probably chaired a session as well. I think I made a poor joke and he smiled.

Yet I know I’m going to miss his insightfulness, his professionalism, his presentational style and his general demeanour.

If you’ve not already, do listen to today’s PM tribute. There were lots of tributes to Hewlett on Twitter, and Nic Robinson, himself a cancer survivor wrote this on his Facebook page.

Broadcasting and journalism are a lesser place without him.

RIP Steve.