Basics

To cover parliament, a journalist needs to know local laws, understand parliamentary procedure, know about the politicians and the political parties involved, and have a solid knowledge of history.

Good stories about any topic generally have some things in common. Here are 12 points to keep in mind when you are planning, researching and producing a news story.

There is a fine art to interviewing politicians. You need to understand their motivation, realise they will have a script, not allow them to complicate matters, refuse to be sidetracked, and retain an open mind.

Journalism often involves referring to material produced by others. This module looks at how journalists should provide attribution and avoid plagiarism.

A journalist needs to have a broad interested in the world around them and want to find things out and share their discoveries with their readers or listeners. They must have a love of language, written or spoken, understand the meaning and flow of words and take delight in using them. 

How do we know what is “news”? There are millions of things going on in the world all the time and only some of them become news stories.

Women make up just 24% of those heard, read about or seen in news output. And only one in five experts interviewed by journalists are women.

This training module from The News Manual looks at language and style in news writing. It offers guidance on how to write sentences for maximum understanding, and examines why care over language is important.