The story so far...

So this past month I’ve made TFL a fortune travelling back and forth from my Uni in Surrey, my home in East London and training at the Catch22 academy in Seven Sisters. Although I absolutely despise paying ridiculous amounts for a travel card, the experience and what I’m learning is invaluable. The journey began on a warm March afternoon, 15 budding journos all nervously sat in one room looking on as the big man Toks gave his speech about what the academy was and how important our role is to the process. To put it simply: we rep the academy and hard work and pushing yourself creatively will lead to your success, failure to do so and you'll be left behind in this media rat race. Daunting and feeling like this was going be a tougher experience than giving birth, I left feeling like I had to focus and get my head straight; nothing more enticing then bagging myself a placement with one of Catch's media partners.

Some highlights have been the talk with BBC news journalist Warren Nettleford, court reporting, presenting our ideas to the group if we were editor of Catch and the infamous evening session of pitching our ideas for our magazine feature to the panel of judges i.e. the Catch tutors fronted by the ever authoritative Toks. I won't go into too much detail but think Dragon's Den for journos...okay maybe not as extreme but near enough!

I guess my not so favourite task, which had me on the verge of ripping my hair out in ultimate frustration was the task we were set of finding a news story in the area which we would later pitch to the Haringey Independent. I stumbled onto the Wards Corner Latin American market and approached a small 50 something Colombian named Luiz and asked him about the demolition plans from the market to which he instead went on to tell me his life story. Me being me, fascinated with South America, I ended up spending a good 20 minutes speaking to him about his homeland and how beautiful Medellin was; a very poor attempt at finding a new story.

The more I desperately tried to find something worthy of pitching the more harsh the response was, a worker at a Cuban restaurant ferociously asking me what my interest was, and certainly did not see any humour in me telling him I was a journalist. I don't know how but I managed to sort myself out something worthy enough of pitching within the second part of the day, again not one of my better days but something to learn from!

So that's bit of insight into the story so far, and well nothing much has changed since day one, our tutors work their hardest to get the best out of us, morning feature meetings frequently hear the words: 'so what!' 'What's new about your idea?' The cohorts continue to build our small family unit; Areeb with his 101 questions, Rick with his animal loving features and Jack humouring us with his Owl persona on twitter. Let the good times roll!

-Here's what previous cohort Jimmy Nsubuga had to say about how Catch helped him get funding for the NCTJ course, the Journalism Diversity Fund a great scheme for people who simply cannot afford the course fee.  Something which I will look into doing after the Catch 22 academy.

*Websites that I've found useful during the experience:

-The Daily What- Great inspiration for weird and quirky news stories

-Ideas Tap- Every writer should join this, great competitions, jobs, opportunities and a way to network with creative talent!

-Twitter- Great to find out what's happening NOW. On that note follow me here!

-Careers in the media- Does as it says

Look out for my next post spilling the beans on what goes on behind the scenes at the Catch academy in and out of office hours!  But before I go I'll leave you with this, a little video to illustrate the FEAR of getting this response from the tutors after attempting to pitch an idea at our feature meetings, ENJOY!