Television companies have long been accused of choosing female presenters for their looks — and with her striking blond hair Carol Barnes was an attractive presence. But more than that she was also good at the job; a broadcaster who was calm, authoritative and able to find the right tone.

For more than 20 years Barnes was a face familiar to millions of television viewers as one of the stalwarts of news coverage on ITV. She began with ITN as a reporter but became best known as a regular anchor on News at Ten during two lengthy stints in the 1980s and 1990s.

She was named Newscaster of the Year in 1994. But in addition to her nightly news stints she was on duty for general elections, Budgets and the big state occasions. Her most memorable assignment was covering the aftermath of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997.

Rushing up to the ITN London office from her home in Brighton early that Sunday, she hardly had time to draw breath before she was on air, and she stayed in front of the cameras, on and off, for the next 16 hours.

In 2004 she made the news headlines herself when her 24-year-old daughter, Clare, from her relationship with Denis MacShane, a fellow journalist and later a Labour MP and Foreign Office minister, died in a skydiving accident in Australia. Both Clare’s parachutes failed to open as she was attempting a jump from 14,000ft (4,270m), something she had done many times before.

A few months later Barnes was convicted of drink-driving after being stopped by police on the seafront at Brighton and she lost her licence. Her disqualification meant that she could no longer serve as a magistrate, although Lord Falconer of Thoroton, the Lord Chancellor, accepted that she had been under great stress after her daughter’s death.

Barnes was reluctant to use the bereavement as an excuse for her conviction but she had been suffering from depression, and more than a year after the tragedy she admitted that she had trouble accepting her daughter’s death. “There were times when I’d wake up and I didn’t want to get out of bed,” she said.

Carol Lesley Barnes was born in Norwich in 1944 and grew up in South London. She left school at 16 to train as a fashion buyer at Harrods, but then took A levels at a polytechnic and went on to Sheffield University where she read for a degree in English, French and Spanish.

She subsequently gained a postgraduate certificate in education at Birmingham University and worked as a supply teacher. But the work was not to her liking, and she took a series of other jobs, including a stint as public relations officer at the Royal Court Theatre in Chelsea and as a sub-editor on the magazine Time Out.

In the early 1970s she joined Independent Radio News as a scriptwriter, and when a newsreader failed to turn up one day she was pressed into service despite the station’s reservations about her plummy voice. She took to it at once. After a couple of years she moved briefly to The World at One on BBC Radio 4 and then to ITN as a reporter, and in 1982 became one of the team of newscasters, learning her craft with such veterans as Sandy Gall, Reginald Bosanquet and Alastair Burnet.

Sir David Nicholas, the former head of ITN, said that Barnes, one of the first women presenters, combined a sharp intelligence with guts and glamour. “I remember her covering the Brixton riots while she was still heavily pregnant,” he said.

“There was another occasion when the Ayatollah Khomeini was still in exile in France. Carol was one of the reporters who covered him at his place of exile. She was heavily pregnant then too. When the Ayatollah went back to Tehran after the overthrow of the Shah, in the wild manic scenes I sent a male reporter to cover it. Carol said, ‘It’s my story, I want to cover it.’ I couldn’t send a pregnant woman to the mad streets of Tehran but I enormously admired her for that. She was afraid of flying, obviously quite a problem for a foreign correspondent, and she learnt to become a private pilot, qualified as one and conquered her fear.”

Barnes was a self-styled “tough cookie” and retained a streak of ’68 radicalism from her days as an NUJ activist. She was with ITN until 1989, when she became a launch presenter of the daily news programme on Channel 4. She had a second spell at ITN from 1991 until 1998, when, to general surprise, she quit to go freelance. She was not away long, however, joining ITV’s 24-hour digital News Channel soon after its inception. But it struggled to compete with BBC News 24 and Sky News and had a short life.

Away from the news desks, Barnes presented Simply Money, a daily programme on personal finance, and Seven Days, a current affairs series for Londoners. She was a guest on shows such as Countdown and had a cameo role as herself in the spoof horror film Shaun of the Dead (2004).

Her most recent television appearance was in January this year when she presented Saving Ed Mitchell, a documentary about a former ITN colleague who had become a homeless alcoholic who was sleeping rough on the Hove seafront.

After ending her relationship with MacShane, Barnes married Nigel Thomson, an ITN cameraman and 12 years her junior, after a three-week courtship, and they had a son. But their jobs meant that they spent long periods apart, she working long hours at ITN and he often abroad covering the world’s troublespots, and they separated in 1998.

Barnes is survived by her son.

Carol Barnes, television journalist and newsreader, was born on September 13, 1944. She died after a stroke on March 8, 2008, aged 63