The Richard Beeston Bursary 2014

Applications are invited for the Richard Beeston Bursary 2014, offered in association with The Times.

The award of £6,000 is for an aspiring foreign correspondent to spend six weeks abroad, researching and reporting on a foreign news story for The Times.

A further award of £6,000 is available to a journalist who has experience of working in Lebanon, the occupied West Bank, or Israel to undertake a six-week fellowship on The Times foreign desk in London.

This is an ideal position for an ambitious individual at the beginning of their career and they should have a professional command of English.

Applications must be submitted by 9am on September 29, 2014.

The announcement of the winners of the 2014 Richard Beeston bursaries will be made in association with The Frontline Awards on October 23, 2014. The winners will need to undertake the travel or fellowship between November 2014 and September 2015. Each award will be made in two payments. The Times foreign desk will host the incoming fellow and mentor the travelling foreign correspondent.

Richard Beeston, the distinguished and much-loved foreign editor ofThe Times, died of cancer in May 2013, aged 50.

When he was just 21, “Rick” moved to Beirut at the height of the civil war in 1984 to work forThe Daily Star. His life-long fascination with Lebanon, and the Middle East began.

Forced back to London by the spate of kidnappings of foreign journalists, Rick joined The Times in 1986 and was to work for the paper for the rest of his life.

As the so-called fireman on the foreign desk, or the reporter sent at short notice to war zones or areas of natural disasters, Rick carried his passport — bristling with visas for the world’s most dangerous places — with him at all times.

He was one of the first reporters into Halabja, in Kurdistan, in 1988 after Saddam Hussein’s gas attack and he covered wars, invasions, revolutions, natural and man-made disasters in the 27 years which followed. He was posted to Jerusalem as Middle East Correspondent of The Times in 1991, and became the Moscow Bureau Chief in 1994 during the Chechen War. His return to London shortly preceded the terror attacks of 9/11 and a decade of reporting from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was to follow.

Richard was made foreign editor of The Times in 2008, just after receiving a diagnosis of cancer. He travelled to Afghanistan, Israel and Italy in the months leading up to his death. When he died, he still had a valid visa to go back to Afghanistan.

The bursary being set up in his name is designed to address Richard’s passionate belief that good journalists are not forged in the classroom or the newsroom, but in the field. He loved to mentor aspiring young foreign correspondents and to give them the opportunity to develop their reporting and writing skills by working on a fast-breaking news story. He cared deeply about the Middle East, and the fact that the Iraqi and Israeli ambassadors sat side by side at his memorial service is testament to the even-handed nature of his reporting.

Applications should include:

• A detailed outline of the proposed destination of travel and the broad nature of the story on which you are intending to report and write

• Or an explanation of why you would benefit from this fellowship, which seeks to encourage dialogue between journalists in Britain and the Middle East

• A brief CV

• A journalistic referee

• Five samples of published press journalism, excluding blogs.

Applications should be made by email attachment for the attention of Natasha Fairweather at richardbeestonbursary@gmail.com

The judges reserve the right to request further information at a later stage of the application.