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Portugal – (C8) Professional training

Score in short:

Very little importance is given to journalists’ training, except for technical skills attached to the new ‘convergence’ efforts.

Score in detail:

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 use more and more new technologies, and several of them are involved in multimedia projects, they need to update their staff to meet the new industrial requirements. Sometimes they organize internal sessions for this training; sometimes they hire specialized training companies or universities provide a course.

Continuous training sessions for journalists sometimes are organized by entities outside the media companies, as happens with the Centre for Training of Journalists (Cenjor) or the Journalists’ Union. Courses on legal matters, on war coverage, on education subjects, for example, have already taken place in recent years. But they do not occur on a regular basis or depend on the direct commitment of the news media themselves. In this field, the situation is rather poor – with the single exception of training of the new skills required to use new technologies or by the ‘convergence’ trend occurring in most media outlets.