With fast changing technologies allowing everyone to distribute content of any kind online, the role of the journalist has extended well beyond that of a storywriter to encompass the necessity and challenge to deliver credible and objective information to people. The journalist of the digital age is now required to demonstrate journalistic skills that are essential to various digital and conventional media platforms.
News is all around us and technology allows any amateur – the average citizen – to snap and record everything and anything that happens around them, then promote and distribute the content. However, such content may lack credibility and an audience may further promote unconfirmed or unreliable news without considering the consequences.
How to effectively, objectively and truthfully report and distribute news while maintaining audience loyalty involves indispensible skills that a professional journalist must possess.
Today, media organisations have the big challenge to keep their audience’s attention by delivering credible and trusted information on multiple media channels. Moreover, the professional journalist must be capable to distinguish between sources and sift through overwhelming information that is available online. As a professional, the journalist must also be able to navigate through multiple digital media platforms in order to inform the audience, maintain their loyalty, and overcome the risks that unidentified sources pose on the truth.
The Times of Malta together with Degree+ at the University of Malta are offering a course entitled Journalism for the Digital Age. This course, which starts this October, will allow students interested in the journalistic profession to develop journalistic and digital media skills, learn how to reach an audience, and also hear from the professionals in the industry on how they do their job as editors, journalists, videographers, and photographers.
The Journalism for the Digital Age course will further offer interested students the opportunity to practise their journalistic skills by assigning them to carry out interviews and run stories that, if approved by the editors, can be published on the timesofmalta.com website.
Learning how to create news, reports, written or audio-visual features for different audiences and on various subjects – from science and technology to arts – will form part of the theoretical aspect of the course. Professionals with different backgrounds will speak as guests during some of the lectures. This will allow students to get acquainted with the profession in practice.