Patrice John
"The training gave me all the skills I needed to be a real reporter."
Patrice John is now a Senior Reporter at the Birmingham Mail.
History & Experience
The Press Association acquired the Newcastle training centre from Trinity Mirror in January 2006.
PA became the third proud owners of the centre, following on from its founders Thomson Regional Newspapers and second owners Trinity Mirror plc.
The course itself was founded in 1969 by TRN who felt the industry needed a more vocational entry route to journalism than that provided by the Higher Education courses.
They owned the centre until 1996 when they took the decision to sell their UK regional publishing businesses to Trinity plc. Trinity also acquired the training operation at the same time and continued to develop the course into the leading in-company training scheme in the country.
When it was acquired by PA, Trinity Mirror gave an undertaking to continue to use the centre for five years and they remain the largest client of the foundation course.
The culture of the course has always been about equipping trainees with the skills they need to operate successfully as journalists. For the first 38 years of its existence, the focus was only on newspapers.
Now, as the digital revolution gains pace, more and more elements of the course are about story telling in a multi-media environment. Writing online is as important to the course as writing for print, and video is now a key element.
But the core skills remain: Story gathering, shorthand, law government, writing, interviewing skills and understanding the business remain as the key modules on the course.