Lessons

Our free day-long lessons provide comprehensive, in-depth training on specific journalism topics. Each structured lesson includes theoretical foundations, practical exercises, real-world examples, and assessment tools, offering complete teaching packages for trainers or intensive self-study for journalists. All our material is free to download, adapt and use. Scroll down our site map for all the content in this and other sections.

Graphic for a Media Helping Media Lesson Plan

Lesson: Covering climate change

Lesson: Pitching a news story to an editor

Lesson: Interviewing ‘off the record’

Lesson: Clichés, journalese, and jargon

This lesson plan is designed to enable journalism trainers to teach students the importance of avoiding clichés, journalese, and jargon in their writing.

Lesson: Investigating Documents

Investigative journalists need to learn how to interrogate official documents in order to find essential facts and then inform the audience.

Lesson: Interviewing ‘off the record’

This lesson plan is designed to help journalists understand the purpose, the benefits, and the risks of ‘off the record’ interviews.

Lesson: How to develop a story

This lesson plan is designed to teach students how to find and assess important news angles for a breaking news story.

Lesson: The active and passive voices in news

A lesson plan to help journalism students understand the difference between the active and the passive voices in news

Lesson: The use of adjectives and adverbs in journalism

When it comes to writing news stories adjectives and adverbs should be avoided wherever possible.

Lesson: Interviewing for journalists

This free day-long lesson plan is designed to equip students with the knowledge, skills, and ethical framework necessary to become a confident and competent interviewer.

Lesson: Systems thinking for journalists

This lesson plan is designed to help journalism students understand how to apply systems thinking to their news stories in order to develop more comprehensive reports.