Craft of Journalism

Build Your Craft.

Through a diverse roster of award-winning faculty and experts, Poynter excels at teaching core skills like writing, reporting and editing. Our guidance is meant for anyone interested in improving communication and sharpening skills. From helping young journalists learn the secrets to powerful storytelling to coaching new editors on improving their team’s efforts, our commitment to teaching the craft of journalism has been unparalleled for nearly 50 years.

What We Offer

Poynter offers free and tuition-based self-directed courses that are available immediately online. If you require more specialization, Poynter can design a program specifically for your newsroom or organization. While our workshop offerings are always evolving, we primarily offer programming in three key areas:

Writing, Reporting and Storytelling: Poynter offers dozens of programs to help you tell more powerful stories by strengthening grammar, punctuation, structure, word choice, tone, style and more, including:

  • Writing and Storytelling: Learn writing, storytelling, character development and story shape across different platforms.
  • Making Hard Facts Easy Reading: Identify your own writing process and gain new skills to constantly improve.
  • Narrative Storytelling to Improve News Writing: Learn how to mine for details and use a three-act storytelling structure to improve your news writing skills.
  • Writing Compelling Feature Stories: From lead to closing, learn the elements that make a compelling feature story.
  • Story Structures: Woven Narratives and Chaptering: Structure strong and successful stories.
  • Is THIS a Story?: Learn the roots and mechanics of the story generation process.
  • The Power of Ideas: Finding Your Story’s Potential: Discover brainstorming techniques to identify fresh, creative ways to write and report stories.
  • Beat Development and Sourcing: Embrace strategies to identify and build relationships with the best sources for stories.
  • The Art of the Interview: Turning Story Subjects into Storytellers: Get the information you need from an interview while ensuring professional ethics.
  • Critical Thinking and Sensemaking: Go beyond the “what happened” of the story to improve your reporting.

Editing: Poynter can help you take your editing to the next level to become a more valuable editor and manager. Sharpen your skills to edit strategically for context and content:

  • Three-Read Editing: A layered and efficient process for effectively editing and identifying issues in draft copy.
  • Editing Habits: Systematically approach and question a story as an editor.
  • The Writing Process and You: Improve communication with your writers.
  • How to Coach Writers: Coach and consult writers to help them improve their work.

Audience Engagement: To help you learn the best strategies and tactics to reach your audiences and transform your organization’s digital operations and culture, Poynter offers the following workshops and resources that can be customized to meet your needs:

  • Audience-First Thinking: Create an audience funnel, adopt an agile operating model and other strategies to focus on new audiences and audience engagement.
  • Audience Consumption Habits: Learn what news and information your audience wants on a digital platform and how you can best deliver it.
  • Storytelling with Newsletters: Understand how to use A/B testing, reader surveys and alternate formats to connect with readers.
  • Your Bias May Be Showing: Learn best practices for evaluating your social media presence.
  • How to Hook Digital Users and Keep Them Scrolling: Write engaging copy for online platforms, including the fundamentals of writing short articles and headlines with SEO in mind.

“Such a great day of learning for our team,” said Altice USA vice president of digital Chris R. Vaccaro, who sought Poynter’s expertise to establish workflows for broadcast journalists and their new digital colleagues. “We will undoubtedly turn much of what [Poynter managing editor Ren LaForme] offered into useful action for the sake of our local news coverage. Ren’s delivery was smooth, on point, engaging and he obviously puts a ton of time into preparing for these visits and educational sessions.”