Journalism programmes (college and university level) are available all across Canada. Up slightly from 2006 (with about 2,300 students), there were 2,700 students enrolled in journalism programmes at Canadian universities in 2016. In addition to formal university education, most journalists talk about on-the-job training as well. A number of journalists reported taking short courses at conferences hosted by CAJ or RTDNA. Newsroom leaders stressed that they want their journalists to participate in ongoing education and training.
Despite the overall professionalism of Canadian journalists, the current economic realities of the news industry have affected the quality of reporting. This is supported by a Canadian authority interviewed for this study:
When they lay people off or cut back on staff and get rid of and do buyouts, you end up with less experience, less knowledge in newsrooms, fewer people doing editing, journalists being asked to do more things. It’s not a great environment in which to work at the moment, in the midst of all the cutbacks and changes. What we’ve seen is a pretty significant move away from, in most cases, journalists that had any degree of specialisation and turning more and more people into general assignment reporters: generalists who are doing a bit of everything. And when you when you have those sorts of jobs, it’s very difficult to develop any expertise or any knowledge in some complicated fields. So the quality journalism we get isn’t that great.
Essentially, training – many journalists and newsroom leaders told us – depends on budgets.
