Prepare journalism students for the new age

The Hindu

a day ago

With higher education seeing four-year undergraduate programmes, major and minor pathways and multi-disciplinary courses, there is a need to also bring in skill-based learning. In the case of journalism courses, the following steps must be implemented to ensure that students acquire the skill sets required in the newsrooms of today.
Content Creation: Creating news content, data journalism, recording podcasts and making short videos will help UG students develop a new-age outlook. This will also help them learn how to use social media tools to promote posts related to news. Journalists from the digital media can conduct workshops to guide students.
Going to the grassroots: Students can be asked to analyse hyper-local news or identify trending stories about their areas. These can then be further classified for in-depth reporting, light stories to engage the community, interviews of community leaders and local authorities for podcasts and videos.
Fact checking: The soul of journalism is truth and verified facts. Accuracy and authenticity should be ensured in every aspects of reporting, writing and content creation. Apart from cultivating observation skills, students must also be taught how to fact check, detect fake news and disinformation and deep fakes and use the relevant tools to do so.
Shared network: Once the stories are ready, the next step is to share them with a large network of people. Students must learn how to segregate stories on the basis of timeline and importance. Next comes the uploading, tagging and publishing online and then use social media to amplify the reach.
Community outreach: Student teams can visit the local communities, involve local leaders and opinion makers and create content on a wide variety of changes such as climate change, education, health, transport, art, literature, music and so on focusing on that particular area.
The writer is a Kozhikode-based digital journalist who also teaches journalism.