26 free (mostly one hour) Journalism courses

These short online courses and webinars will strengthen your journalism skills (and add a line to your resume). Most of the Poynter courses are one-hour in length or less.

Prompt Engineering for Journalists

Learn how to effectively use AI language models and automation tools to enhance your journalistic work while maintaining ethical standards and journalistic integrity. 

Shut out: How Pulitzer winners worked with reluctant sources to tell powerful stories

Writing Tight & Editing Tight

Designed for journalists, editors, students, and anyone looking to refine their writing, this course will teach you how to keep articles clear and compelling—without sacrificing essential details.

Journalism Fundamentals: Craft & Values

A five-hour, self-directed course that covers basics in five areas: newsgathering, interviewing, ethics, law and diversity. 

Telling Stories with Sound

Learn the fundamentals of audio reporting and editing in this self-directed course.  

How to Spot Misinformation Online

Learn simple digital literacy skills to outsmart algorithms, detect falsehoods and make decisions based on factual information 

Understanding Title IX

This course is designed to help journalists understand the applications of Title IX. 

Clear, Strong Writing for Broadcast Journalism

One-hour video tutorial  

Powerful Writing: Leverage Your Video and Sound

In this one-hour video tutorial, early-career journalists will learn how to seamlessly combine audio, video and copy in captivating news packages.  

Writing for the Ear

In this five-part course, you’ll learn everything you need to write more effective audio narratives.

Fact-Check It: Digital Tools to Verify Everything Online

News Sense: The Building Blocks of News

What makes an idea or event a news story? 

Cleaning Your Copy: Grammar, Style and More

Finding and fixing the most common style, grammar and punctuation errors.

The Writer’s Workbench: 50 Tools You Can Use 

Ethics of Journalism Build or refine your process for making ethical decisions 

Conducting Interviews that Matter   

Make Design More Inclusive: Defeat Unconscious Bias in Visuals

How Any Journalist Can Earn Trust

How Any Journalist Can Earn Trust (International Edition)

What news audiences in various parts of the world don’t understand about how journalism works  

Is This Legit? Digital Media Literacy 101

MediaWise’s Campus Correspondents explain the fact-checking tools and techniques that professionals use in their day-to-day work.  

Dignity and Precision in Language 

Research for the Newsroom: Practical tools for adding depth to breaking and enterprise stories

Covering Vulnerable Sources: A Mental Health Reporting Project Webinar

Presented through a collaboration between Poynter and The Carter Center.

Women and prisons: Covering the impact of incarceration 

Safeguarding your journalism against legal threats

AI & the Future of Fact-Checking: Building tools, ClaimReview, Sustainability and the IFCN Code