Sky News has selected six graduates to spend a year as trainees at the 24-hour news channel.
Jack Garland, Tim Gatt, Robert Owers, Henry Ridgwell, Emma Storey and Hannah Thomas-Peter will start the scheme next month. They will complete training in autumn 2005 and will then be able to apply for any job within Sky News – from reporting to producing.
Sky News’s Graduate Trainee Scheme, which launched this summer, is the first in the news channel’s 15-year history.
The trainees will spend the next year learning about every aspect of Sky News – from running a busy newsdesk and producing programmes under pressure to working on location and writing for television news.
Owers said: “It will be great to be trained by some of the best people in the industry and even spend time in one of Sky News’s foreign bureaux.
Watching Sky News’s coverage of the Beslan school siege in my old newsroom, everyone was saying it would be good to get the chance to cover a story like that. Hopefully I’ll have those opportunities.”
The trainees will attend a series of master-classes from senior Sky News journalists, covering newsgathering, the channel’s look, production techniques and reporting.
In 2005, the trainees will embark on a series of attachments in planning, the home and foreign desks, all the production teams, including Five News, political editor Adam Boulton’s team at Westminster, operations on the road, and with Sky Active, the Sky News Online team and Sky News Radio.
In October 2005, they will be attached to a UK bureau, and to either the Brussels, Jerusalem or Washington bureau. Rob Kirk, Sky News’s editorial development manager, said: “We had some top-notch applications and have selected the very best. We are pleased to be investing in the next generation of rising stars, who we hope will form a key part of the channel’s future.”
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