Meet Matthew Broadbent, Shaun Daly and Robyn Cowen, three of this year's BBC Kick Off trainee sports reporters - new to the BBC and new to sports journalism. They have been given eight weeks over the summer to discover how it feels to be a reporter at the BBC.

I caught up with them half way through the scheme. Matthew (first below) is based at BBC Gloucestershire. "I had always wanted to link my background in Paralympic sport and coaching with an interest in the media," he said. "The scheme has given me a better opportunity to learn and become involved in day-to-day aspects of life at BBC Radio Gloucestershire than I ever believed possible."

Shaun, 22, a qualified physical education teacher and University of Birmingham graduate, is based in BBC Northampton. 

"BBC Kick Off has finally given my life some direction," he said. "As a person who loves sport, what better way is there to get involved than be a part of the experience live?

"I applied to be a Kick Off sports reporter to learn more about how the various types of media are put together." said Robyn, now based at BBC Oxford. "I'm an avid sports fan and have been a fan of the BBC Sports website for some time."

The scheme is a placement at the BBC that gives people with a passion for sport the chance to learn reporting skills. It has been recycled from the late BBC Blast which closed in 2010. The scheme was rebranded as BBC Kick Off by Charles Runcie, Head of Sport in England.

"I've always been interested in finding out where the next generation of BBC sports broadcasting talent is coming from and giving them as much help as possible to realise their ambition," said Charles. "There's no excuse why the BBC shouldn't be making every effort to discover the sports presenters and producers of the future. The BBC Kick Off trainee sports reporter scheme is part of that process."

I have helped produce the scheme since 2008 and have seen its success, as most of the reporters go on to develop careers in the industry.  Some are working for BBC Radio 1, Radio 5 Live and across a number of BBC Local radio stations and the BBC Sport website as reporters, broadcast assistants or producers.

As a scheme mentor, BBC Bristol's Sports Editor, Geoff Twentyman, has taken a reporter each year: "I am a huge fan of the scheme - which is fantastic in that it provides bright people with a valuable insight and hands-on experience as to what the BBC is about and what we do. Historically, BBC Bristol has had some great Kick Off reporters, some of whom have gone on to secure work in the media either in the BBC or elsewhere. Long may it continue."

Reporters start their placement after two days training at the BBC College of Journalism, where they have a crash course in reporting and interviewing skills alongside BBC procedures, health and safety and editorial guidelines. They then begin at their chosen location, currently 23 BBC offices across England. What they get up to next is entirely up them.

Shaun (right) explained how he co-produced radio shows, made radio items and created website content while on the scheme: "I have been lucky enough to meet famous sports people such as ex-England goalkeeper Tim Flowers, Olympic silver medallist Daniel Keatings and football manager Gary Johnson. The real enjoyment, however, is making raw stories and new features - things that are a creation of yours that the BBC has decided are a great idea."

Equally inspired by the scheme, Matthew explained how he's had opportunities to interview world-class sportspeople both in and out of competition, while recording news reports and writing online articles. "Amongst the projects still in the pipeline are radio diaries focusing on the experience of disabled fans and following myself as an official at an international sports event in Belfast. And there are still a few weeks to go!"

Robyn (left) was surprised by the responsibility she has been given, interviewing local sportspeople, editing audio for sports bulletins and writing stories for the BBC Sport website. "I gave live updates throughout the day of football and cricket matches. This was most enjoyable because of the buzz of being on live radio and sharing the experience with the listeners. Kick Off has been one of the most absorbing and rewarding experiences in my life."

During the training I told the reporters that we were looking for their passion for sport rather than their ability as a journalist. I explained that, working with their mentors, we can teach them reporting skills but we can't teach them passion. This, in my opinion, is why the scheme works in finding new, fresh and, above all, good talent.

The Kick Off Reporters' Facebook group. 

Rachael Smith is a broadcast journalist for BBC English Regions New Media in Birmingham. She has produced Kick Off and the former Blast reporter scheme since 2008, co-ordinating and providing advice to mentors and reporters. Rachael also manages and mentors for BBC News School Report and BBC Connect & Create.

Photographs by Martin Barber, SBJ, Norfolk

Have a look at your mobile phone. What do you use it for?

Calls - certainly. Texting - almost definitely. Browsing the internet - more and more likely, especially if you have a smartphone. What about taking photos? Recording video? Less likely, but perhaps. And what about recording audio? I reckon few of you will have done that with your phone.

But if you've done all three - photos, videos, audio - then congratulations: you've the potential to join the growing band of mobile journalists.

News organisations are fast coming round to the realisation that the high-spec mobile phones many of us have in our pockets can, to broadcast standard, perform many of the functions previously taken on by individual devices.

Smartphone ownership is rising rapidly, with the latest data showing they're in the pockets of around two of every five phone-owners in the UK; around one in three in the US; and, worldwide, roughly one in four. Ofcom have released a study into how people in Britain use various forms of media; their conclusion is that we're a nation addicted to our smartphones.

Most radio producers would accept that a Marantz PMD660, used with a BeyerDynamic M58 microphone, would give a better quality audio recording. And if you know in advance that you have a sit-down interview arranged with a senior politician, you'll give the interview that extra air of professionalism using kit like the Marantz (below):

It's a question that every BBC journalist is very accustomed to being asked. They probably all give different answers, based on their own experience or the perspective of their own area of operation. And of course there is no one definitive answer.

But as an organisation the BBC can offer some basic information, guidance and advice on how you might go about it.

The BBC employs several thousand journalists. At any point in time, people are arriving, changing jobs, or leaving. So opportunities arise regularly. The BBC is engaged in such a wide range of journalism - across different media and at local, national and international level - that it can be hard to know what's available, what you might be qualified for, and how to take advantage of those opportunities.

You can enter the organisation at every level: from work experience to full-time jobs on high-profile network news programmes. A good place to look when you're preparing for any approach or interview is the BBC College of Journalism website. This is a training area for BBC journalists that is freely available to all UK web users, and by subscription elsewhere. It covers a wide range of editorial subjects and issues, and multimedia craft skills.

The BBC College of Production also has a website that you might find helpful.

At whatever point you seek to join the BBC, you'll find that competition is fierce. There are always many times more applicants than there are posts. You need talent, of course - but you will also need tenacity, and an ability to distinguish yourself from other candidates.

Here's a rundown of the official entry points into BBC journalism at all levels. More information can be found on the BBC homepage.

Work experience

Applications for work experience come in to all parts of the BBC, all of the time. To ensure fairness, they are handled centrally. Go to the BBC Careers website for information on all employment opportunities at the BBC, including Work Experience.

Journalism Trainee Scheme (JTS)

From the BBC Careers website, you can go to Trainee Schemes and then Journalism to learn about the Journalism Trainee Scheme (JTS). Alternatively, go to the College of Journalism website's homepage, or directly.

The JTS scheme is for inexperienced journalists who can write well and have a nose for a story. It lasts a year, after which you should be in a position to apply for jobs as a qualified broadcast journalist. But please note that you are not guaranteed employment at the end of the scheme.

Follow the link for more information and details of how to apply. We offer 15 places a year, and choose candidates through a highly competitive appointments process.

Journalism Talent Pool (JTP)

On the homepage of the College of Journalism website, you'll also see a link to the JTP. This scheme is designed to help people who already have jobs in journalism and who might wish to move to the BBC.  

The JTP acts like a recruitment agency: putting trained and experienced journalists in touch with editors who have vacancies to fill. You can be in the pool while working for other organisations. As a member of the pool, you're able, for a set period, to apply for BBC jobs which might not be advertised externally; or might otherwise be restricted to internal BBC staff.

Production Trainee Scheme (PTS)

If you're interested in programme-making more generally, as opposed to journalism, you might wish to consider the PTS. It aims to develop the programme-makers and commissioners of the future through on-the-job training. We offer trainees a mixture of face-to-face training, online learning and work placements, as well as mentoring by a senior BBC manager. Full details of the PTS.

Full-time or part-time jobs in BBC journalism

Many jobs in BBC journalism are not advertised externally. There could be a number of reasons for this - expense, for example, or a recruitment freeze which means vacant posts are offered in the first instance to existing staff.

Jobs open to external applicants will usually be advertised in the Guardian. But you can keep up to date with everything that's available by visiting the BBC Careers website. Be aware that many jobs are not permanent vacancies but short-term contracts - covering maternity leave, for example.

Note that we have added new content to the CoJo website on how to become a BBC journalist and restructured our content about face-to-face journalism training at the BBC.  

Jonathan Baker is Head of the BBC College of Journalism.

Producing and directing a documentary is a bit like conducting an orchestra or being a circus ringmaster, says Martin Small: you don't necessarily do much yourself but "your job is to get the best out of the people you're working with".

Small is currently producing a programme for a forthcoming Money Programme series about manufacturing in Britain. His previous work includes films with Mary Portas for BBC2 and Martin Clunes for ITV, as well as Panorama.

In the film above, he talks about his job - about the difference between producing and directing, how he approaches turning an initial idea into a story, and the importance of structuring a film before a single frame is shot.

In a second film to be posted here shortly, we follow Small into his cutting room as he describes the editing process which transforms his rushes into a finished film.

You can read a fuller transcript of his interview here.

This film is the latest in our 'Inside BBC Journalism' series offering a behind-the-scenes glimpse of what BBC journalists do and how they feel about their work. Previous films in the series have featured:

News presenter Fiona Bruce

User-generated content specialist Trushar Barot

News graphics producer Rob Shergold

Entertainment news presenter Tasmin Lucia Khan

Television news output producer James Cann

Online sports reporter Damian Derrick

Radio breakfast show producer Sophie Woodcock.

Journalism took a back seat while he booked and mixed with the rock aristocracy as entertainments secretary of Leeds University Union. His book is full of tales of cash-in-hand deals, unreasonable demands from bands and Bob Geldof ripping down posters in Leeds advertising The Clash as "the greatest rock n roll band in the world".

The Geldof/Kershaw froideur was to last several decades, through Live Aid in 1985 - which Kershaw fronted for the BBC - to Live 8 in 2005 where pressure from Kershaw and others led to Geldof setting up a special stage for African musicians at the Eden Project in Cornwall. "He might as well have put up a sign saying grateful Darkies this way," as Kershaw sarcastically put it.

The passion for journalism re-awakened at the height of his success at Radio 1 as the heir presumptive to the great John Peel. They shared an office with their legendary producer John Walters. "A radio station within a radio station," Kershaw labelled it.

His most hilarious incident was with the controversialist Christopher Hitchens in a museum full of gifts given by other countries to Kim Il Sung. One room had a stuffed alligator standing on one leg, holding a drinks tray and with a huge smile on its face. Hitchens and Kershaw could not resist finding the Venezuelan Gift - "Maracas from Caracas," as Hitchens labelled it.

Kershaw's nose for a story and eye for detail mark him out as a true hack.

He has had his good and bad times in recent years, including two spells in an Isle of Man prison for breaking a restraining order obtained by his former partner. He used the time inside to read books - so much so that the prison officers threatened to burn them.

Feedback on CoJo's Essentials of BBC Journalism DVD has been arriving from all over the world. And there are already practical results to show for it. Training based on the DVD has been offered by BBC World Service instructors in India, Nigeria, Syria and Lebanon. 

In Lebanon, the trainer Maha Taki used the DVD in a session on the art of storytelling and film-making. "We used a short film by Ramaa Sharma," says Maha. "The film gives the basic information on how to shoot a film on a small Flip camera or mobile phone and the workshop participants, who have had very little or virtually no previous filming experience, learned a lot."

After the workshop, the students went on to use their new filmmaking skills. The result is a series of short films about being a domestic worker in Lebanon.

One example is this film by Abbas Ahmad (below) shot on a mobile phone. It shows the plight of a Sudanese worker in Lebanon. 

It's been exhausting: I have been watching seven hours, maybe 70 items, of television news pieces from last year, varying from half a minute to five. Not just for fun: I was doing some judging.

It led me to think about the qualities that make a great television reporter - and there were some in my seven-hour tellython.

My eight top tips ...

- 1. Be a reporter. Observe, ask questions and tell a story or two. It helps if you have done 'real' journalism on a local or a national paper (where the subs will have hopefully taken the wrinkles out), but it is not a necessary condition.

You've gotta have curiosity and a tinge of mischief to make a good journalist - on any platform, in any field. Plus the usual qualities of respect for facts, truth and speed.

- 2. Use your journalistic skills to their fullest. Remember that television and TV news is Mickey Mouse - it looks, and should be, simple; but getting it to that state is a complicated process.

Do some research, even it is on the flight to the earthquake or flood. There is never an excuse for researching on air or on tape. There's simply too much out there in the global library of the internet for you not to have sampled it. Plan your interviews and pieces as much as possible - but change that plan if the story does not fit your template.

- 3. Make sure you are in the right place at the right time. And with the right people. Much TV journalism involves 'fixing' - making sure the people are there and the story is too when you turn up. Beg, cajole or bribe your way to pole position, but avoid the herd instinct.

The great reporters are often mavericks who will plough a lonely furrow away from the pack. It often pays dividends. Look beyond the bar of the hacks' hotel and the bleeding obvious.

But also remember that good journalism is not just about fixing. Too many times the reporter, having swum through treacle and months of negotiations to get to a story, forgets the basic story-telling skills. They think they've done it by getting there, and they tell you that. Wrong.

- 4. Remember that if you work in television the operative word is vision. Every picture is worth a thousand words, but some are worth ten thousand. You usually have two minutes tops to get the story across, mainly in sequences and sync. Stunning shots do so much of the heavy lifting for you. Your words are there to enhance the pictures, not to fight them or turn the piece into an illustrated essay. The great reporters use just the right phrase to lift the pictures: "Like the sun, the death toll rises every day" in one piece I watched.

- 5. Know when to talk and when to shut up. Economy of words is all. The great reporters allow the silences or the natural sync - real people talking - or, better, the pictures to do the talking/story-telling for them. Write a script but then see how you can cut it down. Wall-to-wall commentary ruins too many pieces.

- 6. Put the package together for maximum impact. Is the best stuff first? Have you got the running order right? Not true of some of the pieces I have been judging. If you have time before transmission, you can throw it all in the air and into a different order (thanks to non-linear editing).

- 7. The piece-to-camera shows you were there and have the cred to tell the story. Think carefully about where it goes in the piece, and what it will say to the viewer. Make it stand out as well as stand up.

I still remember, from two decades ago, Jeremy Paxman in the van of a Sandinista march in Nicaragua; and Charles Wheeler lending gravitas and quality to a so-so Newsnight story about police violence in Notting Hill with a piece-to-camera coming out of the public loo where it was alleged to have taken place. It made me pay attention.

- 8. Sell it within the news organisation to make sure your gem gets an audience. Sell it on the programme, trail it and give it a 'sexy' studio intro. Entice people to watch it.

Otherwise all your thousands of miles in that uncomfortable military cargo plane, time on patrol dodging bullets, fixing, cajoling, shooting, writing and packaging will have come to nought. Your piece will drift past the audience ... and past award judges like me.

Greatness needs both hard work and hype - but you know it when you see it.

Picture: BBC World Service reporter David Eades preparing for a satellite link-up in Paris.

John Mair is a senior lecturer in journalism at Coventry University. In a previous life, he was a producer of factual programmes at the BBC, ITV and Channel 4.

Najiba Kasraee talks about the Essentials of BBC Journalism DVD, at the launch event at Bush House in London.

Core components of the DVD have been translated into no fewer than 21 languages, ranging from Arabic to Vietnamese.

Click here for a taster.

The DVD will be distributed to staff in the coming weeks.

Some of the key content of the DVD has been translated into 21 languages including Arabic, Farsi, Chinese, Russian and Swahili. The aim is that every new recruit to the BBC, wherever they are working, will have this essential guide to BBC journalism from day one.

The DVD mirrors the College of Journalism website in many ways. You can find a selection of films and guides from the website as well as content developed for international reporters.

In close collaboration with the language services of Global News, the DVD is tailored to cater for the specific learning needs of different services. For instance, it includes advice for reporters and stringers on the emotional trauma of being personally affected by a story in their locality. 

The DVD also concentrates on handling relationships with commissioning editors, who are often thousands of miles away. 

Essentials of BBC Journalism has a special section on English for broadcasting - a series of interactive films and quizzes to help reporters improve their English pronunciation.

The DVD will be distributed to BBC staff in the coming weeks. 

Readers of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's influential book The Black Swan (2007) might at least have taken such surprises in their stride. Taleb's thesis is that unpredictable events are a much more regular and important part of life than most of us believe. 

But we are only too ready to try to rationalise the unpredictable in retrospect: "Our minds are wonderful explanation machines, capable of making sense out of almost anything, capable of mounting explanations for all manner of phenomena, and generally incapable of accepting the idea of unpredictability."

He called the phenomenon - "the highly improbable consequential event" - a Black Swan after the way the discovery of the first black swan in Australia overturned instantly and forever the existing Old World orthodoxy that all swans are white.

As writers of 'the first draft of history', journalists' reactions to Black Swans are similar to those of historians. As Taleb puts it: "These kinds of discontinuities in the chronology of events did not make the historian's profession too easy: the studious examination of the past in the greatest of detail does not teach you much about the mind of History: it only gives you the illusion of understanding it."

The volcano story is a classic example of what Taleb is talking about: a massive event coming from nowhere with huge and diverse consequences. 

Looking backwards in covering the story is a fruitless journalistic task: there's nobody to blame and no apparent trail of causes, human or scientific, to explain it. But, if Taleb is right, explanations - spurious or otherwise - will eventually emerge. (Look at the financial crisis: with all the explanations since assembled, it is now hard to remember nobody saw it coming.) 

So what about journalistic efforts to capture other aspects of the volcano story? There's been much detail about what happens when jet engines are coated with dust; what it's like to be stuck in an airport; and whether a gap in the dust is in prospect.

More lateral or forward-looking reports took a while to emerge last week. On Friday's Any Questions on BBC Radio 4, someone asked what the most important consequences of the volcano would be, but the panellists mostly just took that as a chance to support the decision to close airports and to offer their condolences to those who are affected. Radio 4's PM had an interesting piece with the owner of a fruit-importing business who talked about the dire effects on African farmers. 

The most imaginative response I heard came from Alain de Botton on Saturday's Today programme: he read a delightful essay in which he had future generations questioning our contemporaries about the bizarre world of air travel which was by then just a piece of history.

Any Black Swan should be a great opportunity for journalists - a chance to lead public discussion about a wholly new situation. The possibilities are endless: in this case, for instance, what does it mean for national defence, language schools, high-tech exporters, the film industry, the insurance business, the price of oil, climate change, airport expansion protesters, passenger ships? What about the thousands of individual human stories that must be playing out already - missed weddings, funerals, holidays, job interviews, performances. And what good things are emerging from the unexpected situations people have found themselves in?

Perhaps there has been a hesitation to go down these routes because of a possibility that the story could be over by tomorrow. But, even if it is, the uncertainty about a recurrence will surely remain, and itself have consequences. This is a Black Swan that journalists can afford to embrace wholeheartedly.  

But what about Nick Clegg? The journalistic machine is more ready to explore a political Black Swan. In fact, election coverage demands unpredictability for fear of simply providing unmediated airtime for the parties' messages. But the dilemma with this kind of unpredictability is whether to embrace with enthusiasm, like the Sunday Times, and risk over-hyping it, or more cautiously, and risk 'missing the story'? 

In making that kind of judgment, journalists are face to face with Taleb's realisation: that it will only be in years to come that apparently obvious signs will be pulled from the maelstrom of current events and be shown to point inexorably towards a conclusion that we, in our present ignorance of how things will unfold, are unable to predict. Is the Clegg story the start of something big, or just a little bit of nothing much? Because if we knew we'd treat it accordingly. 

No wonder so many journalistic enterprises admit defeat with the tired but honest sign off, 'only time will tell'. 

Presenters can bring any or all of the above. But it's easy to forget a more basic requirement - the ability to communicate with an audience. 

There was a bravura example of that when the first episode of David Dimbleby's new Seven Ages of Britain series reached 1066. 

Countless history series have had a go at the Battle of Hastings, usually requiring their presenters to stride excitedly across the fields at Battle in Sussex, intercut with blurry bits of slow shutter-speed reconstruction and sounds of horses neighing, swords clashing etc.

Dimbleby (or his director) decided they didn't need all that when they had the Bayeux Tapestry and Dimbleby's own ability to tell the story.  

Almost five straight minutes of a man with a 900-year-old piece of needlework for Sunday BBC1 primetime? With expert editing and use of music, for my money, nobody has brought the battle to life more vividly.

A cheap shot ... and possibly the programme was being ruthlessly authentic in that you might well find this in a real hospital.

But the question remains: to which Holby City consultant does the door pictured here belong?

Answer here.

As Michael Blastland teaches elsewhere on CoJo - beware of counting methods.

Before the postal workers' strike ballot, The London Review of Books carried an intriguing 'diary of a postman' - called Roy Mayall (beware of naming methods, too, perhaps).

It may or may not be the experiences of a single postie; it's certainly an account by someone who knows the business of sorting offices and rounds well.

But this is the thing that caught my attention. An account - I can't verify it - of the numbers underlying one of the central claims in the dispute. That the volume of mail is decreasing - the figure of 5.5% over the past year is cited and a 10% decrease predicted for the coming year.

Should a journalist take that figure on trust? Well, on the basis that no journalist should ever take any figure on trust, no. Of course not.

But take a look at this - 'Roy Mayall's account of how that decline is calculated:

"The truth is that the figures aren't down at all. We have proof of this. The Royal Mail have been fiddling the figures. This is how it is being done.

Mail is delivered to the offices in grey boxes. These are a standard size, big enough to carry a few hundred letters. The mail is sorted from these boxes, put into pigeon-holes representing the separate walks, and from there carried over to the frames. This is what is called 'internal sorting' and it is the job of the full-timers, who come into work early to do it. In the past, the volume of mail was estimated by weighing the boxes. These days it is done by averages. There is an estimate for the number of letters that each box contains, decided on by national agreement between the management and the union. That number is 208. This is how the volume of mail passing through each office is worked out: 208 letters per box times the number of boxes. However, within the last year Royal Mail has arbitrarily, and without consultation, reduced the estimate for the number of letters in each box. It was 208: now they say it is 150. This arbitrary reduction more than accounts for the 10% reduction that the Royal Mail claims is happening nationwide.

Doubting the accuracy of these numbers, the union ordered a random manual count to be undertaken over a two-week period in a number of offices across the region. Our office was one of them. On average, those boxes which the Royal Mail claims contain only 150 letters actually carry 267 items of mail. This, then, explains how the Royal Mail can say that the figures are down, although every postman knows that volume is up. The figures are down all right, but only because they have been manipulated."

Whether this account is true or not, it's an excellent illustration of what should be standard journalistic practice: when you're faced with a number, ask how it was arrived at.