The Evening Press in York will soon be welcoming a new reporter into its newsroom - after recruiting them through a contest to win a job in journalism.

It launched the Write Stuff competition earlier this year to find the best new journalistic talent in the area.

And it is currently in the process of whittling down seven finalists who are being put through their paces with a series of exercises testing their spelling, local general knowledge and their ability to go out and find a story on the streets of York.

They have also had to unravel the intricacies of a mock press conference following a fictitious crime - and the winner will become a trainee reporter with the paper after taking up a place on a Newsquest training course.

All the finalists had to submit a genuine, unpublished local news story of less than 400 words, written in a newspaper style.

Assistant editor Bill Hearld has been impressed with the standard of the finalists.

He said: "Our finalists this year were of a very high calibre and showed some real journalistic skills, even at this early stage.

"We are looking for someone who is the right stuff to be a journalist - someone with aptitude, enthusiasm and local knowledge, and we have a very good field to choose from."

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