All the editors interviewed for this report assign “a great importance” to journalism training, which does not necessarily mean that activities devoted to journalism training are part of the companies’ routines. Most of the training offered to journalists has to do more with skills than with knowledge. Because these media outlets use new technologies more and more, and several of them are involved in multimedia projects, they need to update their staff to meet the new industry requirements. Sometimes they organise internal sessions for this training or else they hire specialised training companies or universities to provide a course. In recent years, special attention is being given to big data and ways to manage and publish it in engaging ways. For example, interactive infographics are one of the most developed techniques.
Continuous training sessions for journalists are sometimes organised by entities outside media companies, as with the Centre for Training of Journalists or the Journalists’ Union. For example, courses on legal matters, war coverage, education, have already taken place in recent years. However, they do not occur regularly or depend on the direct commitment of the news media themselves. In this field, the situation is rather poor, with the single exception of new skills training required to use new technologies or by the convergence trend occurring in most media outlets.
RTP, the public service television operator, has a permanent training centre with a very regular and diverse set of practical courses.
Although the companies don’t offer as many training opportunities as they would like, many journalists invest in their own training, either in specific areas they want to improve their expertise or in university courses with many applying to master’s or doctoral courses in the communications. In the survey referred to above (Crespo at al., 2017), 60 per cent of the respondents said that in the last five years they had been involved in some training activity, either by their initiative (40%) or by the initiative of the company they work for (15.3%). The Centre for Training of Journalists and the universities are the institutions most often referred to as training institutions.
