Announcement | Announcement
Announcement | Announcement
Wyoming Press Association (WPA) is excited to announce that member newspapers will have access to the “Earn Your Press Pass” course developed recently by Kansas Publishing Ventures (KPV) in conjunction with the Kansas Press Association.
“Earn Your Press Pass” is a self-paced, online training course designed to help prospective and new employees of WPA member newspapers get their feet on the ground more quickly. Darcie Hoffland, WPA executive director, said, “Publishers can think of it like a journalism crash course for rookies or it can even be used as a refresher tool for anyone that’s interested.”
The hope for the program is that it may allow newsrooms to recruit and train people who already live in their communities, who are passionate about their local newspaper, and who don’t have journalism education or experience.
“The labor shortage is real, and finding former journalists or recent journalism school graduates to move to smaller communities is nearly impossible,” KPV majority owner Joey Young said. “The purpose of the course is to give the basics to a solid candidate who just needs a little bit of training to make for a good reporter candidate.”
The course instructor is Lindsey Young, a practicing journalist and co-owner of Kansas Publishing Ventures. A former high school journalism and public speaking teacher of ten years, she has been immersed in community newspapering since she and her husband Joey Young purchased their first newspaper, The Clarion, in 2014.
“I wanted to create something that feels more like a conversation with a well-informed friend than a traditional class,” Lindsey said. “There aren’t any homework assignments or quizzes. Instead, the ‘test’ for Earn Your Press Pass users will be becoming a part of their community newspaper and writing about local issues.”
The course outlines basics like newspaper jargon, interviewing skills, covering meetings and sports, editing, simple photography, etc. There are 48 modules in total. Some course examples are:
- Avoiding libel
- Journalism ethics
- Writing Techniques
- Associated Press (AP) Style
There are no quizzes or homework, no timeframe in which to complete modules, and users can take any course in the order that they see fit at their convenience. Publishers can decide if they want their employees to complete all the training levels or only take a few of the classes. If a user completes all the training courses they will be awarded with a certificate stating they have earned their press pass.
Learn more on the online self-guided lessons go to: https://earnyourpresspass.com/
Earn Your Press Pass will be exclusively available to WPA members, and the entirety of the program has been funded by the Wyoming Press Association Foundation (WPAF). The Foundation voted to fund the program for the association during their annual meeting at the 2023 WPA convention. WPAF is dedicated to supporting and ensuring the highest degree of professionalism among journalists through journalism education. In the coming days publishers will receive instructions via email on how to set their newspapers up on the application and get new or existing employees signed up, and members have enrolled their papers the WPA will host a Q&A webinar with the instructor Lindsey Young.
“I am so excited for the membership to have access to this online community journalism training program, and would like to extend a heartfelt thank you to the WPA Foundation for the funding to get it up and running for the newspapers,” said Hoffland.
Original source can be found here.
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