Look at our success rate
The PMA course lasts just nine weeks, and many people (especially those running much longer courses) have questioned whether we can really teach anything worthwhile in such a short time.

Well, of course we would say "Yes." But a better guide is to look at our success rate, and what has happened to people from previous courses.

It’s commonplace to hear: "When I see that people have taken the PMA course, they automatically go on my shortlist." (After that, it’s up to you to shine and convince editors that you want the job!) In some cases, people secure jobs before the course even finishes.

But we reckon that what we teach, and the way we teach it, is at least equivalent to what 20-week courses or longer are offering. We work you hard: often, you’ll work Saturdays and Sundays. You’ll start early, stay late. We throw work back that isn’t up to standard. At first, this seems like everything you write. And we want it back, correct, in minutes rather than days. It means that when you start working for a magazine, you can handle the pace and pressure, and do anything they throw at you to a high standard.

What do you teach?
Writing is only one part of the editorial process. Our course covers news and feature writing, interviewing, sub-editing, headline writing, proof-reading, design and law. To reinforce all these skills, we help you to produce a magazine from scratch. This means finding news and features, then interviewing, writing stories and laying out the pages. Sometimes we do this for a charity.

More recently, we have produced magazines on London canals, markets, parks and the riverside, and transport and housing in London. Our latest course, in Winter 2009, rose the the challenge of producing a magazine called 'Canal Business'. There has also been some surprising feedback: the winter 2008 magazine "Community Retailer" was so welcome shopkeepers wanted to take out subscriptions, the summer 2002 course produced a magazine for the Islington area, which was so popular that it was repeated in winter 2003, with the Business Design Centre requesting extra copies; on the summer 2004 course, people tried to take to take out advertising and buy subscriptions!

Shorthand and more…
We teach Teeline, now the easiest-learnt shorthand for journalists. You will achieve a speed that makes note-taking far simpler. Part of gaining a certificate from the course involves reaching a minimum speed for shorthand. There’s a test on this in the final week. We expect everyone to achieve 80 words per minute, and several have managed a faultless 100 wpm. We also cover areas such as: Production; desktop publishing using Quark XPress, Adobe InDesign and Adobe Photoshop; writing for the web; surviving as a freelancer; producing video and audio for the web, and interviewing techniques. You'll also produce the magazine as a website with video clips and maintain a course blog.

Do we get lots of lectures?
No. The essence of this course is practical work. This is not a course where tutors talk at you and you scribble down notes. It bears very little resemblance to what you did at university. Journalism is essentially a practical skill, and that’s what we emphasise. There’s much more doing it than talking about it. You are in a small group of just 12 people. There’s no hiding place, no sitting at the back doing complicated doodles on bits of paper. Your work is monitored constantly.

We talk about a principle such as the use of quotes, and then we’ll use them, in news stories and features, to find out what works and what doesn’t.
London is the heart of the magazine industry and it’s also the place where most seminars and conferences are held. This means we can attend genuine press conferences and exhibitions, and interview interesting people — rather than interviewing a tutor pretending to be David Beckham or Tony Blair.

We write genuine stories, not pretend ones. If you find good stories, we’ll show you how to sell them to magazines and the National Press. So you can earn while you learn. One journalist who found a good story during the second week of the course earned £500 for selling it on to a national newspaper.

There are constant practical exercises and projects, often in evenings or at weekends. There are regular personal assessments with your course tutor, who will help you on areas where you are struggling (and berate you sometimes if you aren’t producing work of the quality we expect!).

Every tutor will talk through aspects of your work with you. They are all there to help you with advice and with job help.

There is a two-week work attachment on a magazine to use those skills you have acquired. Many delegates find themselves thrown in at the deep end, writing features or news from day one. But this is where you get to apply what you've learnt, while gaining the kind of experience that's invaluable when you land your first job.

The PMA Postgraduate Diploma in Magazine Journalism is the best way to kick-start your career if you're serious about becoming a journalist.