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by danso 2557 days ago
Just imho: I’ve found journalism awkward to teach because at its heart, it’s all very much just skills you use as an everyday human, with an extra emphasis on being unafraid to ask questions. My high school journalism teacher told me that if I wanted to learn journalism, the best way was to just do it. And not to go to j-school but to just work for the college paper. And I think that still applies to any working adults today. Besides doing it, being an avid news consumer is great preparation.

(disclosure: I am a former j-school professor)
1 comments
Angostura 2557 days ago
As a former journalist, yes and no. When I first started, my company treated me to a 1 week internal course, that was very good. As I recall, there was a day on story structure - news leads v feature, pyramid, delayed drop etc. A day on the basics of law for journalism - libel and the like. A day on interviewing and keeping transcripts. A day on ethics,, on the record, off the record, non-attributable. There was also a dy on what subs do - headline writing and the like. All in in all a good, very useful grounding.
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reaperducer 2557 days ago
This feels strange to me. These are all things I learned in J-school, and instead of a day on each of these topics, we got an entire semester.

Were you doing journalism for a web site?

/Degrees in journalism and communications (not to be confused with a communication degree)

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Angostura 2556 days ago
No. This was in the mid to early 1980s in the UK, for a large B2B computer magazine publisher (VNU). Journalism school really wasn't 'a thing' to nearly the same degree then. Instead you were trained on the job. My degree was biology, but I had worked a lot on the student newspaper.

I don't think this kind of induction training was typical - it was just put on by that particular company at that particular period. But it was very good. Shout out to the trainer who I still remember 30 years later. You were excellent Tim https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-ring-33b7233

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danso 2557 days ago
Yeah I interned and worked at 2 large regional papers and I never got trained in writing or story structure, just on how to use the CMS, LexisNexis, and occasionally the in-house lawyer would come in to do off-the-record q&a’s about legal issues
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