Crash course in journalism: What we are going to learn

Note: this post is a part of a crash course in journalism. If this is the first post from the series you encountered, it is highly recommended to start the course from the beginning.

Links to previous lessons:
Lesson number one: Buy a notebook

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First of all, a small technicality. I opened #journalism-crashcourse . I will tag all the course lessons with this tag, and please also tag with it, relevant posts that you want to be reviewed by myself and your peers.

And now, while you are still shopping for that notebook, I’d like to give you a sneak peak at the kind of journalistic writing, this course will focus on.

Journalistic writing covers many kinds of text, from a single paragraph news flash to the lengthy articles in the weekend magazines. In this course though, we will focus on the kind of text that is the most fit for today's cyberculture, in which people are constantly bombarded with information on one hand and have a very short attention span on the other hand. You will learn how to write short posts, of around 400 words, that convey a single idea. As you will see, although short and very focused, these posts can still cover almost the entire spectrum of journalistic writing, from event coverage to opinion articles and even portrait articles.

So now it's a good time to start thinking about the ideas you want to convey in your writing. What interests you? What stands behind your desire to be a journalist? Because let me tell you this: Journalism is a lousy profession. It doesn't pay very well and it may often get you into troubles. So unless you are very focused and aware to what drives you, you will not be able to do it right.

In the next lesson, we will start to do some real work, and in the end of it, you will get your first assignment.