Introduction to Journalism

Course description

This free online Journalism course will introduce you to the elements that make a journalistic piece effective - methodology, style, audience, best practice and legal issues. Do you want to become a journalist? What do journalists do from day to day? What constitutes a newsworthy story? This course tackles these questions and more. Check out this short course today, to bring your journalistic skills to the next level.

In this course, you will study the elements that contribute to effective journalism. You will learn about news pegs, the beat system, assignment sheets and files. You will review the importance of nurturing sources and maintaining relationships, and study what's involved in the three stages of the interview process. The course shows you how to structure a feature story and the criteria for creating a newsworthy story, including idea generation and source gathering. You will study how to identify and apply key points for the news angle and how to sequence, conclude and review stories.

The course then introduces you to the functions of editorials and compare them with other journalistic forms. You will learn why objectivity and impartiality is important for the audience and how the title, lead, body and conclusion is structured. Also in this course, you will study the ethical responsibilities of journalists - integrity, fairness, avoiding conflicts and the difference between opinions and facts. You will review legal issues involved in Freedom of Information, libel, plagiarism and fabricating news and images. Finally, you will examine the roles of different news editors (input, output, planning and interactive) and production teams and compare different news story weightings.

This free course aims to make it easy to learn how to write editorials and feature news stories using idea generation, objectivity, angles, key points, and structure. These lessons will be of great benefit to media professionals, and to any student who would like to learn more about the skills required for working as a professional journalist. So, check out the course today, and bring your journalistic skills to the next level.