If a bricklayer works, a cook cooks and an educator educates, what does a journalist do? It is not that easy to be a journalist because, strictly speaking, there is no clear job description and no uniform training.
But there is much more to the term “journalism” than the publication of magazine. The aim of journalism is to publish facts in order to inform and entertain society and to stimulate its own thinking.
Achieving this goal is your job as a journalist! To do this, you carry out extensive research, select reliable sources, systematically compile information and process it depending on the medium. As a journalist, you not only work with letters and punctuation marks, but also with images, colors, shapes, podcasts, audio files and video sequences.
Content of the training
A school education for journalists, you can attend, for example, at a journalism school a publisher. Such training usually replaces the voluntary work. Instead, you complete internships to gain important practical experience.
If you first complete a degree in journalism, you will gain practical experience through a practical semester and, if necessary, an additional semester abroad. Whichever form of training you choose – an interlocking of theory and practice is also essential in the journalist profession.
Theoretical content
Whether in the form of modules at the university or technical college or in the form of subjects at a journalism school – in journalism training there are some basics that you absolutely need for your profession. This includes research techniques, interview techniques, journalistic stylistic devices, journalistic forms of representation and their functions (e.g. essays, glosses, interviews, reports), media theory and press law.
You will acquire basic knowledge and skills in all areas of journalism, i.e. in the area of print, online, radio, television and photojournalism. Social science subjects such as history, politics and social sciences should not be missing in the journalist training, because as a journalist you need a solid general knowledge.
Company content (e.g. in internships or traineeships)
In the practical parts of your school education, you will learn, among other things, how to use programs such as text editors, image processing programs and content management systems (CMS). A CMS is software that can be used to organize and edit content in the form of texts, images, audio or video files more easily.
Depending on your journalistic orientation, you will practice editorial writing, working with graphic elements, in live reports in front of the camera and also in the technical handling of sound and image technology. In an internship at a weekly magazine, you might take on a thematic series and conduct interviews, take pictures and put together the articles. At a radio station, you are allowed to write the text for the local news.