National Apprenticeship Week – from Monday 6 February to Sunday 12 February – ends today and the NCTJ (National Council for the Training of Journalists) is proud to support the campaign. Throughout the week, we have been sharing first-hand accounts from current and former apprentices, as well as employers, to demonstrate the benefits of journalism apprenticeships.
Felice Southwell, 24, is a community reporter for Brighton and Hove News. As part of the Community News Project, her role aims to support quality local journalism by reporting on underserved communities. Her particular remit is to connect with people with disabilities and those from minority groups and to focus on seven deprived parts of Brighton and Hove.
Felice opted to train for her NCTJ diploma as a journalism apprentice after studying politics at university. Here, she tells us about why she chose a journalism apprenticeship and how she is finding her role as a community reporter.
What attracted you to a journalism apprenticeship?
I have always wanted to be a journalist and I have wanted to go into political journalism since the age of 16. I studied politics at the University of Surrey, got involved in the student newspaper and I rose to the role of editor by the time I left university. Then I went to Goldsmiths, University of London, to do an MA in political communication. So, I have gone down the unusual route of specialising in politics first and then doing the NCTJ.
I have always been priced out of doing the NCTJ so the fact that I could do this apprenticeship was a way that I could afford to do the qualification. I found the apprenticeship when I was looking for jobs in the Brighton and Hove area. I was working as a sub-editor for a magazine at the time but I knew I wanted to go into reporting.
I am excited to get the training under my belt and to know that other people can be confident of me as a reporter. I am training remotely with Darlington College once a week and I can tell that the tutors are really going to support me throughout the NCTJ. Having already had some time in the job, I can already tell shorthand is going to be so useful.
Tell us about the connections you have made with the communities in Brighton and Hove.
The communities have been really welcoming. I am disabled as I have a fibromyalgia – a chronic pain condition – and connecting with the disabled communities has been really eye-opening.
There are a lot of concerns in the community about accessibility issues, and covering these topics as a disabled person is something you don’t always get to do. Being part of that community myself, it’s another way of amplifying stories that don’t always get heard. I cover areas of social and economic deprivation too.
Tell us about any stories you are particularly proud of.
One story I know had quite an impact within the community was about a quadriplegic man who was at risk of losing his specially adapted home as he was renting it. He wanted to buy the house and then he was given an eviction notice as the landlords were planning to sell the house (to someone else).
The council did step in and by raising awareness about the issue, they co-signed the mortgage. Now that family owns the property and won’t be at risk of being evicted anymore. The community really got behind this story and didn’t want to see this happening.
What do you aim to achieve during your journalism apprenticeship?
I hope to build more solid bonds with the community and try to make sure they feel represented in the media and they can trust journalists more. I want them to feel confident that their stories will be told in a responsible, fair and accurate way. Some of these communities don’t historically have a good relationship with the media and I would like to change that.
This interview first appeared on the NCTJ website.
Interesting article especially to read that the quadriplegic resolved the problem
Yes indeed, but why has B&H News left readers in the dark until now without this oblique news of the salvation of the Cowie family’s housing crisis?
Some readers will also wish to know the details of BHCC’s reported “co-signing” of the mortgage by which (apparently) the family were able to purchase the Hove house?
And particularly to what extent BHCC might have used, or lent, taxpayers money to facilitate this transaction?
In no way to probe into the personal issues of Dr Cowie and his family, but mainly in the context of BHCC behaving brutally towards other City residents facing eviction, or having actually become roofless, and the principle of public bodies having a duty to treat every citizen fairly and equally (which our City Council fails all too frequently to do!).
And from the same time-period last summer many B&H News readers are probably still waiting to hear about what in reality has actually happened to the group of residents so brutally and cruelly evicted from BHCC’s Knoll House property – apparently on the flimsiest grounds of not enough extinguishers for fire safety, which BHCC could and should have remedied within a day, surely?
But more likely that unwarranted eviction was a covert cut, to avoid further spending on the Guardianship contract for the premises?
Which begs the question of why the once Gold-Standard Knoll House care home has been left empty, whilst rivers of taxpayers money flow to landlords and operational contractors for accommodating homeless rough sleepers in private-sector facilities?
Or, given the great need that the NHS has to move patients from hospital into Intermediate Care, why hasn’t Knoll House been restored to its former glory as one of the finest units of step-down Intermediate Care in Sussex?
And what City Councillors, if any, are actively pursuing this clear waste of public assets?
Yes, Knoll House has Planning Permission for replacement by a rehabilitation centre for ABI (acquired brain injury) – in itself a desirable facility, but one that perhaps could be built up at Brighton General Hospital?
Which said also reminds us of the buildings empty for years up at the Brighton General, rather than providing emergency accommodation for the homeless (or for Intermediate Care for those needing to be discharged from hospital)!
So why this Kafka-esque situation? Apparently because the NHS has permitted the empty buildings to become so neglected and vandalised that neither the NHS nor BHCC can agree on what funding can be allocated to make the buildings habitable again?
Apparently because neither the NHS nor BHCC can, or will, agree on what funding to allocate to make the empty buildings habitable again!
So yet another example of the bureaucrats and local politicians wasting taxpayers resources AND increasing human suffering by failing to implement a money-saving win-win set of best value solutions to pressing and immediate problems!
Inexcusable, surely?