In a previous post I outlined seven habits often associated with good journalism that are often talked about (wrongly) as ‘innate’ or ‘unteachable’. In this second post I look at scepticism: why it’s so important in journalism, and how it can be taught.

On its own the first habit of a successful journalist — curiosity — can only take us so far as a journalist: as we ask questions of our sources, we cannot merely report what people tell us — especially if two different sources say contrasting things.

Scepticism is important in journalism because it moves us from merely…

This post was first published on the Online Journalism Blog.

Are good reporters born — or made? Can you teach the curiosity that all good journalists possess? The persistence of the best reporting? The creativity of the most compelling stories? Every so often I hear a journalist say that you can’t — that those quaities are ‘innate’ or “can’t be taught”…

This line of thought — a line which lacks the very curiosity and persistence that journalists are expected to aspire to — bothers me.

And it’s bothered me for some time.

Over the last year I’ve been thinking about…

S-Town is a podcast from the makers of This American Life. It’s a great piece of storytelling — so it’s a perfect subject for applying some narrative concepts in order to understand how those can help professional storytellers and media workers to engage their audiences.

Mode, audience and genre

Let’s start with the basics. S-Town is multimodal: although it’s a podcast (audio), there’s also a website with both visual and textual components including transcripts (text), an About page (text) and a Music section (text with embedded music player). And there are social media accounts too, on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. …

This post was first published in the Online Journalism Blog.

A few weeks ago I was invited to talk at an online mini-fest about a ‘big idea’ for the future of online learning. I decided to talk about what I called ergodic education — how concepts from interactivity can be used to inform teaching as learners move online. In this post I talk about some of those concepts and how they can be adopted to a lockdown-era classroom.

Why ergodic education? The shovelware problem

Back in 2011 in the first edition of the Online Journalism Handbook, I created a simple diagram: the journalist, reader, and another…

It’s that time of year when new journalism graduates start to apply for jobs. Having seen a lot of these over the years, I thought I’d put together a list of the mistakes I see most often — and what to do about them.

1. Talking about the activities that you‘ve done rather than the skills that you built

You might have work experience in the media with obvious relevance to the job you’re applying for, but what about other experience?

Remember that bar work, volunteering, manual labour, etc. will all have helped you develop skills that are useful as a journalist.

So when listing your employment history, don’t focus on what you did (“Working…

tl;dr: saving lives is more important than being positive

If you’re in a WhatsApp group or following social media right now, chances are that you’ve seen someone complaining about journalists “missing the mood” in the country.

As someone who teaches journalism students and trains journalists I thought I’d break down one typical message*—forwarded to a WhatsApp group I’m in — and address each issue.

“We do not want or need blame. We do not want constant criticism of our Government who are doing their very best in a very difficult and unprecedented global emergency.”

Have you ever had a boss who tried hard— but still made mistakes?

Did someone tell them that they’d made a mistake?

Did the boss have to explain to others why he or she made those…

This post was first published on the Online Journalism Blog — read the original for updates.

A couple weeks ago I published a guide to cognitive biases for journalists. I saved perhaps the biggest one of all — confirmation bias — for a post all of its own. It might be one of the best-known biases, but for that very reason it can be easy to underestimate. Here, then, is what you need to know — and what to do to reduce it.

What is confirmation bias — and how does it affect journalism?

Confirmation bias is the tendency to seek out — or more easily believe or recall — information…

This post was first published on the Online Journalism Blog. Please read it there if you can!

For the last few years I’ve been teaching my journalism students a dedicated class on cognitive bias — common ways of thinking that lead journalists (and audiences and sources) to make avoidable mistakes.

Journalism is particularly vulnerable to cognitive bias: we regularly make decisions at speed; we have to deal with too much information — or extract meaning where there isn’t enough of it. …