Students of Journalism begin to form with the scholarships Caixa-Agencia EFE

Eighteen students of the last course of university studies in Journalism have begun to form during year and a half in the EFE Agency thanks to the thirteenth edition of the program of scholarships that he has with the "la Caixa" Banking Foundation, which was inaugurated today.

Madrid, November 8 (EFE) .- Eighteen students of the last course of university studies in Journalism have begun to form for a year and a half in the EFE Agency thanks to the thirteenth edition of the scholarship program that he has with the "la Caixa" Banking Foundation, which was inaugurated today.

In a first phase, they will have nine months of internships between November 2017 and July 2018 in different information areas of the EFE headquarters in Madrid (8 scholars) and the delegations of Barcelona (7), Valencia (1), Valladolid (1) and Zaragoza (1).

Afterwards, they will complete the training for another nine months in international delegations of the agency in Europe, Ibero-American countries, North America, Africa and Asia, from November 2018.

"Getting here has not been easy, today you fulfill a dream: to access the best journalism scholarships in the teaching landscape by duration, geographical implantation and endowment ", said the director of the EFE Training School, Rosario Pons, at the welcoming ceremony.

Some scholarships that seek excellence and talent and that is why they will "demand a lot, but you will also receive a lot", the main thing is a way of doing "responsible journalism and committed to current affairs, truthfulness and objectivity", has Specified Pons.

The director of media relations at the "la Caixa" Banking Foundation, Elianne Ros, has encouraged the new scholarship recipients because "we need more (Xavier) Aldekoas, more Ignacios Escolar and more Pepas Bueno ", in reference to some of the professionals that the new students have mentioned among their references.

It has encouraged them to become journalists" they do their work with honesty and they put rigor and ethics before sensationalism, "although he warned them that" it is not an easy task in the era of social networks, of the 'fake news', post-truth and gossip. "

Ros has indicated that they are facing a huge challenge in which not only skills and professionalism, but also values, count and has underlined that they are part of "a community that has excellence by objective" and that it is identified with the principles of the Obra Social La Caixa.

Each scholarship has an economic endowment more than 18,000 euros, in addition to covering the enrollment in the Master's Degree in Transmedia Journalism of the UNED and the EFE Agency.

The director of Informative Coordination of EFE, Emilio Crespo, has highlighted that this scholarship program "has given very good results" and allows students to develop under conditions that do not have any other than those offered at the university Spanish.

"I encourage you to enjoy this experience and that from the first day you feel like agency journalists", added Crespo, who has assured them that in EFE they will teach to "deal with information".

The sponsor of this promotion has been the data journalist of El Confidencial Adrián Blanco, who was part of the ninth edition of these scholarships, and that he has stressed that they are "in the best journalism house in this country."

"This scholarship is not an end, it is a learning passport to be real journalists," Blanco said. who has remembered that in his two years in the agency he learned to "write very fast, brief and simple", but that he also learned to "fail" and urged them to throw themselves into the pool "because there is always someone who watches over their work. "

The Banking Foundation has dedicated 5.4 million euros to the granting of 261 scholarships during the thirteen years of the" la Caixa "program -Agency EFE.