BRIEFING

Trainees celebrate course success

The first Press Association foundation course to be staged at the newly acquired Newcastle centre ended with the popping of champagne corks.

Editors from the Chronicle and Journal traditionally hand out bottles of fizz for trainees who manage to get a lead story in one of their titles.

The spring course brought in a hat-trick of front page leads for the two daily titles as well as 45 other page leads, 17 features, 15 reviews, a dozen support stories, 13 picture led leads, 20 vox pops and several page leads for the Journal’s arts magazine.

TV and the national newspapers picked several of the trainees’ stories up.

Paul Jones, head of foundation course training, said: “The opportunity to get stories published in two of the UK’s biggest regional newspapers is a unique element of the course.

"This group were particularly successful at producing some great stories which the news editors of the papers were delighted with."

Four of the 19 reporters on the 16-week course had paid their own way through and were looking for jobs.

Three of them were offered posts before the course ended and will shortly be joining papers in Trinity Mirror, Archant and in a first for the centre, the Welsh language magazine Golwg.

The fourth trainee is now waiting for the results of interviews he has attended.

PA's Head of Foundation Course Training, Paul Jones, said: "We had a tremendous four months and were delighted with the results achieved by the trainees.