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Jim Brown, executive chairman of Newsquest, knows that the training his company offers is so thorough that other sectors of the industry are more than happy to poach the successful end product.

He said: “We regard the training procedure as the start of a career.

“We are spending huge sums of money training journalists and we are doing a lot of research on that and getting very good feedback.

“It involves us sending them off to training college at Darlington and while there we pay their salary, costs and so on.

“They are far from being the complete article when they come back and we would not expect them to be that. Their salary goes up in stages and we think we’re paying them pretty well.

“One thing I get annoyed with is that in the newspaper industry we are training the rest of the industry. The nationals’ training is at best token, and the same would apply to TV, radio and PR, who all continually poach off the regional press.”

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