Community Journalism Training Course

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Course Detail

Press Pass is not high-level academic curriculum. It’s a training course to prepare community journalists to best serve their local newspapers without a formal degree.

Course Features

  • Interviewing Skills
  • Associated Press Style
  • Covering a Meeting
  • News Writing
  • Journalism Ethics
  • Much, much more

Lindsey Young

Instructor

Lindsey Young spent a decade as a teacher before transitioning full time into community journalism and working for several award-winning weekly newspapers.

Course Content

8 lessons • 30+ topics • Go at your own pace

Being able to conduct a good interview is one of the most important skills any reporter can have. This lesson will explain the steps to preparing for and managing an interview as well as how to take effective notes and get useful information from your sources.

Reporters are asked to write in a universal style from the Associated Press, which publishes a regular style guide. Using the same style in all newspapers helps to create uniformity for readers and journalists. There are some tricky rules to get used to, but this lesson will prepare you with the most common rules and some good tricks and tips to Associated Press style.

Community newspapers are made up of a variety of content, from hard and breaking news stories to meeting coverage, local events and lighthearted features. This lesson will cover those types of stories and give some tips for how to write and organize them. We will also discuss how to determine if something is news worthy.

In this section, we’ll look at some ways to elevate your writing style with some interesting techniques for leads, quotes and more. Newspaper writing is a bit different than the way you were likely taught to write in school, so this will give you ideas on how to make your stories shine.

Just like any profession, newspapers have their own set of specialized terms. This lesson will teach you terminology you will likely hear in the news room and provide you with good cheat sheets for your desk, too.

Freedom of the press, as guaranteed in the First Amendment, gives you access to information as well as the right to print certain information. But journalism also comes with its own set of ethics and standards. This lesson will address both the black and white issues of press rights as well as the often gray area of journalism ethics.

Editing all content that goes into your community newspaper is incredibly important. Typos and misinformation cause the public to lose faith in a publication very quickly. This lesson will focus on helping you effectively edit all of your stories.

Community journalists wear many hats, and unlike at larger metro-dailies, there isn’t a staff photographer to add color to your stories. Instead, you’ll have to do that on your own, acting as reporter and photographer at a variety of events and for a variety of stories. We’ll explore the best techniques for shooting news photos as well as editing them for publication.

It’s time to earn your press pass and start on your journey.

Reach out to get more information on how to get started.

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