FIRST a confession. There is nothing to sharpen one's professional senses like redundancy. The temporary closure of Press Gazette last year forced a rethink of my career plan. A couple of months doing shifts online for national newspapers made it clear that while the future of journalism may be online, spending nine hours a day repurposing PA and Reuters copy was not the reason why I signed up.

With newspapers seeking to cut costs by reducing staff levels, and consumers expecting their news to be delivered at increasingly faster speeds, I decided one of the few areas in which newspapers would justify the cash and time cost of allowing their journalists to gather news firsthand would be video. The real pull was the opportunity to tell stories in a language still in its infancy. Who knew if videojournalism would turn out to be the journalistic equivalent of Esperanto but what was there to lose?

The expense of PA's videojournalism course is enough to put most freelances off jumping on the VJ bandwagon on a whim. The course would have set me back three months' wages, and that was before I'd paid for travel to and from Yorkshire, accommodation and living expenses. However, the tailored approach PA offered, combined with the attraction of getting a diploma from an organisation known throughout the industry, was a real draw. Plus, I had no previous broadcasting experience and being a slow learner, the ‘remedial' option of an intensive residential course seemed the best bet.