As journalism evolves, so must journalism training organisations.

“There is the need to be nimble, to be working on a variety of strands in order to meet the desire for learning,” said Stephen Buckley, a former international correspondent who presently serves as interim dean of the Poynter Institute.

Indeed, as working reporters and editors scramble to expand their professional proficiencies – learning to create content for smart phones, for example – training organisations are trying to meet their needs.

The Fifth Estate, a growing group of attention workers who are not professional journalists, also clamours for training. They are people like the owner of Captain Al’s, who came to Poynter to discover ways he can use online publishing to improve his business.

“Journalism skills and values are the core that people have come to know and expect from us,” said Karen Dunlap, president of the Poynter Institute.

“Increasingly we’re hearing from folks who may or may not be not interested in traditional journalism skills and values but do want to know how to discover the power a blog can bring to a business or how to ask more effective questions.”

Need help? NewsU here for you

Both groups are served with NewsU, an e-learning platform offering skill-specific training to journalists and Fifth Estate attention workers.

Howard Finberg, who worked as a newsroom manager, lecturer and independent consultant in Chicago and San Francisco before joining Poynter, launched NewsU in 2005.

As it exists today, NewsU affords any journalist anywhere a chance to improve her skill sets, provided she is proficient in the English language. But Poynter is working with the ICFJ to translate some of these into Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Chinese. Its first non-English courses will be in Persian and geared to Iranian reporters.

Accessibility of the e-learning modules is good; nothing needs to be downloaded. Rather, the modules are hosted at NewsU and streamed on-demand.

NewsU offers five types of courses: self-directed courses, seminar snapshots, technology training (for software programs like Flash, Dreamweaver and Illustrater), Tutorials (for Internet applications and tools), and Webinars, the live seminars led by a moderator and various trainers.

Participating in live Webinars is genuinely evocative of enjoying a live presentation; slides flash automatically across a full screen virtual classroom as a lecturer speaks just as he would at an in-person seminar. A moderator takes questions from participants in a chat window similar to that of Cover It Live. The moderator also occasionally polls the audience to gauge opinion on topics related to the lecture.

Most of the 65 self-directed courses take one or two hours to complete. Practical skills are the focus:

• Reporting with video: basics for print journalists;
• Typography for News Design
• The Science of Search: Guiding Online Readers to Your Content;
• 10 Things you can do for free on your website;
• Writing for the Ear

Courses range in price from free to $250 (183 euro) for a weeklong learning experience. Some are even more expensive.

Many courses cover the basics: storytelling in need of finesse, writing that could be more polished, interviews that could be more deft, management that needs clearer vision, decision-making that could be more ethical.
Then there’s learning how to use Flash. To produce a video for the web. To optimise a blog for search engines. To create applications for mobile phones.

Improving these skills requires a longer-term commitment and enrollment in NewsU Tech. The Tech section gives users up to a year to access and complete a series of tutorials.

So far, about 15 percent of the 140,000 users of NewsU are based outside the US. Many are students whose professors use NewsU as a supplement to traditional classroom learning, Finberg said.

Poynter in person

A nonprofit based in St. Petersburg, Florida, since 1975, the Ponter Center has been an on-the-ground, English-language resource for working journalists for 35 years. It hosts seminars as well as faculty members who research, write and teach.

Poynter has traditionally been utilised by working journalists around the United States. It is presently expanding its domestic and international audiences.

“Real-life” seminars at Poynter are increasingly attended by Fifth Estate parties concerned with improving their media skills and literacy. Poynter dedicated the opening pages of its most recent annual report to these groups:

“New to our participant list this year will be journalism programmers, entrepreneurs, business-side executives, journalists-turned-educators and the expanding number of citizen journalists who want a role in creating an informed citizenry. ….

We call the initiative ‘Sense-Making’, and it’s aimed at helping the public evaluate the myriad sources of news and information now available to them.”

Looking out

In addition to looking to serve the needs of groups other than traditional newsroom journalists, Poynter has also begun looking outside the borders of the US.

In 2009, it taught the third Danish Summer School programme in Copenhagen. Course leaders travelled to Johannesburg, Delhi, Vienna, London and Hamberg to instruct seminars. And Poynter signed a training agreement with the Egyptian Supreme Press Council.

“This is a change in the way Poynter sees itself, now long more out at the world,” Dunlap said.

The main portal for reaching English-speaking journalists around the world has been Poynter Online.  Launched in 1995; it has given English-speaking journalists around the world a chance to interact with the very practical Poynter Center.

The website hosts feature stories, career advice columns, industry information (in its popular Romenesko column) and daily collections of story ideas (a compendium known as Al’s Morning Meeting). The site attempts to reflect the evolution in journalism; its relatively new Mobile Media blog is concerned with iPhone apps and smart phone user habits.

“I think this is a really good example of the new Poynter,” Buckley said.

Published: March 9, 2010