It’s not me that wants to see the money, you understand, but a benefit cheat from Wythenshawe who arrived at her court hearing wearing socks emblazoned with the phrase and dollar signs.

If you read The Daily Express you found out about this yesterday, if you read the Manchester Evening News you found out about it on Monday but if you were chatting to the photographer who snapped the shot the you’d have known last Thursday.

The photographer, Paul Simpson, was at the launch of Gary Keedy’s Benefit Year (our latest client win) last Thursday night in Hale to take some pictures of the event, Gary and new Lancashire coach Peter Moores. Ever ready to expand my journalist contact book, we got chatting and he told me about the great shot he’d got earlier that day.

When I met the team at the MEN last month Sarah Hartley was keen to impress on me the importance of syndication from a regional news point of view – and back in the office, Jennifer was keen to impress the same message from a PR point of view.

As I continue my role as an apprentice, I realise I’ve been blinkered to many of the ways journalism works. Something that I’d have previously thought of as a coincidence (the Express covering a story that had run in the MEN), is actually part of a well oiled machine that serves to catapult regional news to a national audience.