25 free (mostly one hour) Journalism courses

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Free short online courses to strengthen your skills and add a line to your resume. Most of these Poynter courses are one-hour in length or less.

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.

Avoiding Plagiarism and Fabrication - For authors, editors, educators, journalists, journalism students, news producers and news consumers. 

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 

Online Media Law: The Basics for Bloggers and Other Publishers - Three important areas of media law that specifically relate to gathering information and publishing online: defamation, privacy and copyright.

Freedom of Information and Your Right to Know - How to use the Freedom of Information Act, Public Records Laws and Open Meetings Laws to uphold your right to know the government’s actions.

Journalism and Trauma - How traumatic stress affects victims and how to interview trauma victims with compassion and respect. 

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.

The On-Ramp to Media Literacy - Center for Media Literacy  

How Any Journalist Can Earn Trust

Dignity and Precision in Language

How to Avoid Being Sued: Defamation Law in the 21st Century

Conducting Interviews That Matter

10 Articles Worth Reading about AI's Use by Colleges

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Justified Anger

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To be “angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way -that is, not within everybody's power and is not easy.” The Greek philosopher Aristotle offered that observation more than 2000 years ago.

Justified anger revolves around boundary violations, but sometimes, a proper boundary is never put into place or maintained. In their book Boundaries, Henry Cloud and John Townsend write about how a person’s skin is the first boundary. People who are sexually abused as children are often confused about maintaining that boundary, not realizing that it is appropriate for them to claim ownership.

There are other psychological boundaries we fail to set. Regular violations of that psychological marker make it hard to see things for what they are.

One way to gain clarity is to think about your children. If a boyfriend, boss, etc, treated our child the way they treat us, how would we respond? This is when anger is justified.

Seeing a situation from a different angle—putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes—helps us to work around our distorted boundaries and more clearly see the situation for what it really is.

Stephen Goforth

8 Articles about How Companies are using AI

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What it Takes

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Why do certain people put themselves through the years of intensive daily work that eventually makes them world-class great? The answers depend on your response to two basic questions: What do you really want? And what do you really believe?

What you want - really, deeply want - is fundamental because deliberate practice is an investment: The costs come now, the benefits later. The more you want something, the easier it will be for you to sustain the needed effort until the payoff starts to arrive. But if you're pursuing something that you don't truly want and are competing against others whose desire is deep, you can guess the outcome.

The evidence offers no easy assurances. It shows that the price of top-level achievement is extraordinarily high. Maybe it's inevitable that not many people will choose to pay it. But the evidence shows also that by understanding how a few become great, all can become better.

Geoff Colvin, Talent is Overrated

A learning strategy that has shown clear results

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Retrieval practice sometimes (shows) effects some 50 percent more than other forms of learning. In one study, one group of subjects read a passage four times. A second group read the passage just one time, but then the same group practiced recalling the passage three times.

But when the researchers followed up with both groups a few days later, the group that had practiced recalling the passage learned significantly more. In other words, subjects who tried to recall the information instead of rereading it showed far more expertise.

What’s important about retrieval practice is that people take steps to recall what they know. They ask themselves questions about their knowledge, making sure that it can be produced.

More concretely, retrieval practice isn’t like a multiple-choice test, which has people choose from a few answers, or even a Scrabble game, where you hunt in your memory for a high-point word. Retrieval practice is more like writing a five-sentence essay in your head: You’re recalling the idea and summarizing it in a way that makes sense.

As psychologist Bob Bjork told me, “The act of retrieving information from our memories is a powerful learning event.”

Ulrich Boser, Learn Better