Night of triumph as noSWeaters scoop top accolades

Lucinda Dunn (centre) with course leader Andrew Kelly and mum Parivash Dunn. Admin officer Alan Dickerson on the right.

High achieving noSWeaters stepped forward to pick up their gongs at a Gala Dinner celebrating noSWeat´s tenth year of journalism training held in a central London hotel a short walk from Parliament. Former home secretary the Rt Hon Charles Clarke MP and president of the London Press Club and former Observer editor, Donald Trelford, presented the trophies on behalf of the training centre.

In a speech earlier in the evening Mr Clarke had praised noSWeat for being in the forefront of training tomorrow´s ´seekers after truth´.

And Mr Trelford held his audience spellbound with tales of his fascinating journalistic exploits in Africa in the 1970s.

STUDENT OF THE DECADE
Paul Bignell – Independent on Sunday

Paul has been a reporter on the Independent on Sunday news desk for roughly two–and–a–half years, with a brief stint on the Independent foreign desk.

He started about six months after he graduated from noSWeat.

He is a general reporter with a specialism in arts news reporting.

He´s proud of an exclusive he broke after finding two guys who had a set of Jimi Hendrix recordings that had never been heard before – by anyone but them. Hendrix had recorded the songs in his own apartment and given them away nearly 40 years ago. Like all good reporters Paul also covers hard news and spent two days covering a fire at a block of flats in Camberwell, south London, that killed six people.

OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN NEWSPAPERS
Alice Johnson – Gulf News
(accepted in her absence by sister Rachel)

Alice beat off stiff competition from local paper reporters, chief reporters and news editors.

She has just been promoted to deputy editor of the UAE pages of Gulf News (considered the leading English daily in the Middle East) after working in daily news journalism for only one year. She jumped from reporter over senior and chief reporters, so she was very pleased!

Gulf News was the first to break the Palmers/Acors sex–on–the–beach story. She said:´We published on the same day as the Sun in the UK. It was my exclusive story and a colleague expanded the coverage for a package.´

OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN MAGAZINES
Edmund West – Freelance Journalist

Competition for this award included former students working on the Sun features desk, British Vogue editing business–to–business titles. But the winner first came to our attention when he attended a seminar we hold at a number of universities in the London area. He asked awkward and probing questions and I thought that guy should be a journalist! A couple of months later he applied for and got accepted on to our magazine full–time course and hasn´t stopped since. He interviewed Julie Birchill recently and counts her as one of his top contacts. He also writes features with an historical slant and has written a short essay on autism.

STAR SCOOP
Andrew Woodman – Thanet News

After leaving college one evening this student just couldn´t switch off.

Like the well–trained journalist he is he went snooping around the aftermath of the G20 protests in the city.

He turned out to be in the right place at the right time when the widow of the one victim of the demonstrations started ranting and raving about the loss of her husband who ´shouldn´t have died´.

Minutes later he was selling the story and a picture to The Sun.

A day or two after that The Guardian splashed with it.

It was covered by almost every national; and lead most television and radio news bulletin for weeks and prompted an official enquiry.

BEST ENTREPRENEUR
Chris Gaynor – Twisted Politics

The winner of this category was a well–trained noSWeater. For one course wasn´t enough for him, he had to do two.

After churning through the magazine course he plunged straight into the newspaper one excelling in both.

Now he runs his own website and encourages noSWeaters and others to write for him on everything from politics to food.

He beat off stiff competition from former students who have set up their own magazines, are heading up production departments of major London publications and writing for tube station freebies.

BEST TRAVEL/LIFESTYLE ARTICLE
Lucinda Dunn – writer; The Times

The winner of this category has soared into the stratosphere of journalistic achievement just months after her course finished.

She has taken travel writing into a whole new dimension. We can´t go into too much detail here in order to protect her contacts.

She is currently working with the Times on breaking news relating to Iran.

Her seventh published piece was the lead foreign story in The Times recently.

It generated a lot of public interest and was immediately translated into farsi and circulated around the Iranian news websites.

She was told that it was the first briefing on President Ahmadinejad's table that morning.

CNN called her for an interview but she had to decline on grounds of her anonymity (she had to use a pseudonym).

´It has been a risky piece and arrests in Iran have been made in connection to it,´ she said.

BEST NEWS ARTICLE
Hayley O´Keeffe – Bedfordshire Times&Citizen

The competition for this award is usually very stiff. You can see for yourselves the type of hard news our trainees cover with efficiency and ease.

Not for them the fluff and puff of the back pages. Planning corruption worthy of the Washington Post; and terror bombings are their bread and butter. The winner, currently working for a thriving home counties newspaper group, wrote a piece on honour killings which was published in The Sun.

She said: ´I think the best award I could ever have got is my job at the newspaper and that's all thanks to NoSWeat!!´ Then she added revealingly: ´See you at the dinner, my boyfriend is going to wear a tux, I'm very excited!

BEST FEATURE ARTICLE
Sarah Crickmer – Small/Media&Large

Based where we are, in central London, we are prone to the London disease, i.e. everything north of Watford is a foreign country.

But we have to admit it, there´s plenty news outside the capital, and, what´s more there are plenty of people who aren´t interested in what London has to offer.

It´s a fact that a number of our former students find jobs in other parts of the UK.

The winner of this award is not listed on the programme which went to press too early to include her name. You have already seen a sample of her work and contacts on your tables.

She has married into a northern journalistic family and is making the most of her talents ´north of Watford´.

BEST FINANCIAL JOURNALIST
Hyung Young – Dow Jones

The winner of this award is a pioneer. When she left us she landed a job with a financial wire service with an international reputation for breaking news. Now others have followed in her footsteps and also found a rewarding and satisfying career in the financial wires. She herself is working at her employers´ New York bureau, but her boss comes back time and time again looking for more talent in noSWeat classrooms. It´s fitting that because she can´t be here today he´s here to collect the award on her behalf.

BEST SPORTS ARTICLE
Kay Murray – Real Madrid TV

When this winner joined us her heart was firmly set on sports reporting. Her work experience focused on these genre of reporting and she turned all her talents from day one to achieving her ambition. She left noSWeat to take up a coveted post as the in–house reporter for one of the best teams in the world with an unbeatable reputation for excellence and achievement, a bit like our former student herself.

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