This week NLA media access gave the Journalism Diversity Fund a further £100,000 donation, helping to fund the bursary scheme over the next year.
The Journalism Diversity Fund, which supports the training of journalists from ethnically and socially diverse backgrounds, is an excellent initiative and one the NLA has been pleased to support since launch. It has led to over 150 bursaries being awarded to talented young journalists since inception.
The latest donation brings the NLA's total support to £880,000 since the JDF's launch in 2005. As with our royalty payments to publishers, the donation is funded from NLA licence fees. NLA licence fees support the equivalent of 1,000 jobs for journalists, many at hard pressed regional publishers.
You can get a flavour of how this scheme is helping the careers of young journalists by reading their own blogs on the JDF website. We also spoke to one of the recipients ourselves recently, Victoria Bull, who appeared in the NLA annual review earlier this year.
So, good luck to this year's bursary recipients, we hope to see their by-lines in a newspaper in the not too distant future.
David Pugh