New Tools for Training News Reporters

Training inexperienced journalists and teaching journalists in universities may be made easier and more effective by two online tools suggested in this book. The first tool is a system to assess the quality of news writing. It is the news text assessment system (NTA), a comprehensive and effective online scoring rubric, i.e. a matrix describing different levels of competency in several dimensions of the assessed performance. The second tool is the scoring e-textbook (SET), an asynchronous news writing training tool. The SET is built around the NTA as its core element and contains hundreds of self-learning modules including exercises, examples, instructional texts, and quizzes to be used in a non-linear fashion according to the specific needs of trainees. The two tools assist the instructor to identify and address journalists' weak and absent competencies in news writing and consistently upgrade the learning modules when needed. They help trainees to monitor their progress and to learn from their own mistakes in the short periods of spare time they have at work or in other time they can spare for the training.