Reporter Naomi Dymond is set for a television career – at 19.
She leaves the North Devon Journal on Friday and starts work as a junior journalist with Carlton on July 3.
Naomi has yet to complete her NCTJ training but applied for a job with the station after hearing that a friend was leaving.
“I knew I wasn’t really qualified for the job technically but I applied anyway and they invited me for an interview and said they would create this role for me, so I was really lucky,” she said.
Naomi hails from Barnstable and will be based in the town after training in Plymouth.
She got her break in journalism through doing work experience at the Journal. Initially taken on as an editorial assistant for three months, she was offered a trainee reporter’s job when a vacancy arose and has been at the paper for about 18 months.
Her first front-page lead was about a hunt that had chased a stag into a school playground in a sleepy village.
“Being quite inexperienced, I didn’t know what to do, so I told my news editor and he sent me out there with a camera and a car and a phone.”
She showed the kind of initiative that should serve her well on television with a column called Challenge Naomi, in which readers were invited to challenge her to do weird and wonderful things. Assignments included spending time with an RAF search-and-rescue team, a lifeboat crew and the Canine Defence League.
“I’m quite adept at going out and making a bit of an idiot of myself to get stories and pictures!”
Naomi thanked her colleagues at the Journal for their support and said she had received a great grounding in journalism. But she added: “I’ve always wanted to get into TV and openings like this don’t come along every day.”
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