Learn Key Journalism Practices and Procedures With This Free Online Course

Learn key journalism practices and procedures with the free online course “Introduction to Journalism” from ALISON. This journalism course looks at how to identify a newsworthy story, how to research a story and how to conduct interviews in order to elicit the information you need to prepare a fair and balanced news report. You will learn how to write an engaging feature story and how to avoid conflicts of interest.

Introduction to Journalism Course Content

The course includes the following topics:

Identifying what is and what is not newsworthy;
How to identify stories which are new, unusual or significant;
How to distinguish between a big news story and a small one;
Organizing and writing the feature story itself;
The basic processes and approaches involved in getting the required information for a feature story and putting it into an easily understood form;
The four parts of an editorial, the different approaches to editorial titles and the three types of conclusions most commonly used in editorial writing;
The different roles and responsibilities in a newsroom;
How to use story weighting to assess a story’s value and newsworthiness;
Ethical issues which might arise during the course of journalistic activities with people, businesses and institutions;
How journalists must live up to the highest standards of integrity such as truth, fairness and sincerity;
Why journalists must avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest.

This course will be of great interest to professionals who work in the areas of communications and reportage and who want to learn how to tell stories in a way that will inform people in society. It will also be of great interest to all learners who would like to learn more about the key practices and procedures in journalism and who may want to pursue a career in journalism.