JUST THREE YEARS after graduation from London College of Communication’s Postgraduate Diploma in Broadcast Journalism (PG Dip Broadcast Journalism), Rose de Larrabeiti is a nominee for a Radio Academy Award.

The Academy, which is noted by UK media as the radio industry’s most powerful body, asked Rose to explain what she had done to deserve her recommendation for Best Newcomer by Whistledown , a leading independent contractor for BBC radio.

“I wrote about the reaction to my first fully independent production, Jules Verne’s Volcano.  It got a great review in The Guardian. 

“I have also been working on some of Whistledown’s most ambitious productions.   One was a programme about geometrical shapes and how they appear in our daily lives.  That was a real challenge for radio,” Rose says.

Rose was a photographer before her broadcasting career started.

“I always had an interest in storytelling, and I began to realise that, when I was taking photos, I was actually more interested what people were saying,” Rose says.

After a slot on Edinburgh’s Leith FM community radio station during the 2007 Fringe Festival, Rose made the move to London to start on LCC’s broadcast journalism course. 

She then worked for a year at Jack FM in Oxford, but knew that her heart was in feature-making.  She began freelancing for Whistledown.

Although she found LCC’s course more geared towards news journalism than feature-making, Rose says that she relies on what she learned at LCC every day.

“LCC gave me the confidence that comes with knowing that you have skills.  It gave me a kind of radio vocabulary, and taught me how radio worked.   I felt more confident in saying that I could do it,” Rose says.

Bela Shah, who graduated this year from the same course as Rose, is another radio convert.  She was a corporate lawyer before catching the broadcasting bug.

She told The Guardian in an interview about the future of professional training in journalism that just a week after finishing the LCC course, she had landed a job at Time 106.6FM.

Her next move will be a transfer to Time 106.6FM’s sister station, Sunrise Radio.

“There’s an opportunity to present news at Sunrise and I’m interviewing all kinds of people – local football managers and business and community leaders – as part of my job. My diploma was excellent preparation for what is expected of you in the newsroom,” Bela said in her Guardian interview.