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2026-06-08

Skimming journalism degree didn't teach me much

Disclaimer

• Quick note
• I'm sure there's some journalist out there who considers this a noob take. But here goes anyway.

Main

• I skimmed through online course material for journalism degree. Skimmed very briefly I mean, I did not properly study the material. I did not actually learn that much from this.
• There are difficult skills involved in journalism that I clearly lack as of 2026-06, and am not prioritising learning:
  • Writing skill - Ability to understand reader's desires, hook them, etc
  • Persuasion skill - Ability to actually change people's minds. Especially true because most mainstream media houses don't just report facts, they act as propaganda outlets for their owners
  • Interview skill - Ability to make people feel seen/heard/understood, cross-cultural communication
  • Ethics - Some journalists violate these ethics, once they graduate and join a mainstream media house
• The main skills I was interested in learning:
  • Research skill - Doing background fact-checking, searching legal databases, doing OSINT on social media, identifying potential (human) sources
  • Data visualisation - Especially valuable for larger datasets
• For the skills I was most interested in learning, I don't actually think most journalists know all that much, that good software developers don't know already. Journalists are using the same twitter and linkedin APIs as the rest of us, they're writing the same data viz scripts in python as the rest of us, they're using the same OSINT tools as the rest of us, and so on.

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