A good journalist will have many different skills. We take a look at some of the lesser-known but vital skills that you’ll need to learn along the way.
Managing Contacts
This incorporates both finding and retaining contacts. These might be representatives of certain organisation or even dedicated press officers. Sometimes members of the public serve as excellent contacts, especially those who like to make it their business to know things!
SEO
Gaining an understanding of SEO is essential for journalists. This is about learning how search engines will decide if your article is relevant to a user’s search. You’ll need to learn how to incorporate relevant keywords and phrases into your articles so they can reach a greater readership.
Data and Stats Literacy
Understanding data and statistics is key to good journalism, because numbers are not always what they seem. You need to teach yourself how to know when a statistic is newsworthy, how to flip between percentages and fractions, and how to sift through numerical data to find exactly what you need.
Data Scraping
Often you’ll find the data you need is located across multiple platforms instead of in one handy place. When this happens you’ll need to ‘scrape’ sources to find what you need. Luckily there are several web scraping tools at your disposal.
Data Visualisation
Once you’ve sourced and understood the data, you need to be able to communicate it. Picking up skills in data visualisation is an invaluable way to do this. For instance, learning how to create eye-catching and easily comprehensible info-graphics is a skill that will always serve you well in journalism,
Shorthand
Many journalism courses, including those at the schoolofjournalism.co.uk/, will introduce you to the basics of shorthand. However, you’ll need to develop your own personalized shorthand as you go. This means you might want to experiment with different ways of writing things down to find what suits you best.
Although journalism courses will give you an introduction to many of these skills, you’ll need to develop your skills and enhance your understanding on the job.
