How I became an award-winning teenage journalist at 17 — and you can too
I started working here, at Highland News and Media, when I was 16 — with zero experience in journalism.
883 days later, I’m a fully-qualified award-winning journalist.
People often ask me if it was always my dream to be a journalist — and it always feels like a mediocre answer to say that it was all really by chance.
I was in S5, and struggling to choose what subjects I wanted to take for the upcoming academic year — and having gone to a small school, I found there were limited courses that interested me. Then I came across a job advert, for a Trainee Community Reporter covering the north-west Highland coast, for the Ross-shire Journal and Northern Times.
Feeling stuck with my options at high school, I decided to apply — mostly for the sake of gaining experience in writing a cover letter.
To my shock, I found myself being invited to visit the Inverness Highland News and Media newsroom as the final interview. I still wasn’t entirely sure if this job was right for me, or if it was something I could actually do. But as soon as I stepped into the newsroom, everything changed.
Something about the buzz of a newsroom, made me realise this is was where I wanted to be.
It would be a lie to say that it’s been easy — the phrase I heard the most during my first year here was “thrown into the deep end”.
I’ve lost count of all the mistakes I’ve made — and I wouldn’t have it any other way... in my opinion, it’s the best way to learn. The day I got my first splash, at age 16, I had to look up the definition of splash (it’s the main front page story, I soon found out).
What really helped was the fact that I was covering stories from my home patch of Wester Ross, where as a local, I was already clued into the latest news.
It’s still so surreal to me how such a rare, random, yet perfect opportunity this job was, which has changed my life in ways that I could have never imagined.
In my eyes, an opportunity like Community News Project is so special, yet so rare since entry-level jobs in journalism don’t come up often — without it, there’s a fair chance I would have never become a journalist, never mind winning awards too.
If you’re an aspiring journalist, or if you simply want to try something new — don’t miss this opportunity to learn on-the-job at The Inverness Courier or the Northern Scot in Elgin, because chances like these don’t come up often.
You can apply on www.nctj.com/find-a-job/community-news-project-applications and selecting The Inverness Courier or the Northern Scot.
